The military ain’t for everybody, but for those suited, the training and experiences veterans have picked up during their service is never put aside. TBB's sister publication Fleet Maintenance spoke with three veterans who, as commissioned officers, learned valuable lessons and behaviors they apply every day as leaders in various high-level roles working to develop the latest trucks and trailers the industry relies on. In addition to the profile below, the full story can be found here.
Brent Yeagy, President and CEO, Wabash
Military service: Ensign, United States Navy
Brent Yeagy was a chemical engineering major at Purdue University when the awesome power of America’s arsenal was unleashed on Iraq during Operation Desert Storm in response to the invasion of Kuwait.
“I watched the first Gulf War happen in my living room,” recalled Yeagy of the 42-day bombardment in early 1991. “And then I enlisted in June when second semester was over.”
The recruiter pushed Yeagy into becoming a nuclear reactor operator, who thought that “sounded awesome.”
“I tell people all the time it was the best decision I ever made in my life,” Yeagy asserted. “It gave me tremendous purpose that was lacking in my first couple years of Purdue, and really gave me an appreciation for leadership.”
His leadership skills truly evolved after he went into officer training following basic training and the Nuclear Power School, but the moment that sticks out most to Yeagy was failing to patch ruptured pipes in the damage control simulator at submarine school in Groton, Connecticut.
“I was bailing water up to my head, and I'm swimming in it, and people are screaming at me, and things are going off—and we failed,” Yeagy recalled.
Yeagy did not realize at the time no one really beats the terrestrial naval version of Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru, where the point is to make the students lose. Following the test, the senior chief running the exercise imparted some important words Yeagy never forgot: “You’ve got to learn how to fail.”
Those words after this “humbling experience” made more sense as Yeagy’s career advanced.
“You don't really understand that at the time, but then as your career moves on and you see different things, you start understanding what that means; how to manage the stress, how to manage the ambiguity, how to work through the uncertainty, how to trust the process, and see through the fog,” he explained.
Yeagy hurt his knee and spent his abbreviated sea duty as a line officer testing equipment during submarines’ sea trials and finished as an ensign. But that one lesson in failure, which he called “a little crucible,” continues to inform him as president and CEO of Wabash, one the largest trailer and truck body manufacturers.
In the past few years, Yeagy had to contend with a new unwinnable situation—the COVID-19 pandemic—and he appreciated those senior chief’s words even more as he had to lead his organization and its 6,000 employees through “ridiculous change” and places they may not have wanted to go.
“Because they’re living in that same world where you’ve got to fail a little bit, you’re going to have to be uncomfortable; you’re not going to know exactly how this is going to turn out,” Yeagy said. “You’ve got to trust that people around you see the bigger picture than you in the moment.”
Looking at that bigger picture, Wabash announced record record quarterly revenue and earnings per share.
Another lesson Yeagy shared came from a captain who taught him about the value of decentralized command and how it can help you as a leader.
“You’ve got to trust the talent,” Yeagy offered. “You’ve done the work to put in the right talent that’s highly trained with a common mission. And when you do that, you can roll through periods of ambiguity, and stress, and uncertainty, and still keep everything going in the same relative direction.”
Yeagy’s time in nuclear power school, and as an instructor right after, taught him that success is great, but repeated success is far more important. You can’t just succeed at powering the reactor up before the mooring lines are cast off—it needs to work several hundred feet underwater, thousands of miles away from port, and for possibly months at a time. And aircraft, ships, and other subs may be attacking you and there could be a fire. This is not likely, but subs drill for these events weekly to ensure repeated success is a reflex, not a conscious thought.
“Some people get enamored with what has been done, and they’ll make that 80% of what they see,” Yeagy said. “I’m 51% how you do it, and 49% what you did. I might even be more on the ‘how you did it’ because the ‘how’ tells me if it’s repeatable. Can I predict it will happen good again or not? Or, was it a random success? I want continued success.”
Yeagy offered one last point on managing people, learned from another senior chief while at prototype, the practical stage of nuke school: “Don’t order them; that doesn’t enable them. You need to coach them.”
“They’re going to have to trust you,” Yeagy recalled the chief imparting. “If they trust you, you’ll be able to tell them what to do when they need to do it. When the time comes, they will follow you.”