I left soldiering behind when I retired from the U.S. Army Reserve after 21 years, but the lessons and values stay with me, and they’re built into how ReDefine Digital operates today, including my agency partnerships.
For me, one tangible reminder of that standard was — and still is — the Army’s NCO Creed. I still turn to it, and I’ve found its values translate directly into the corporate world.
The Creed didn’t shape my values or make me a servant leader. It put into words many of the expectations I already had for myself and gave me something I could return to when I needed to ask a harder question:
Am I actually leading the way I say I believe leaders should lead?
It helped keep me honest with myself.
Was I maintaining my competence? Taking care of my people? Communicating clearly? Giving people credit for their work? Accepting responsibility? Supporting my peers? Respecting the people above me? Putting the mission ahead of my ego?
I was a citizen-soldier in the Army Reserve until November 2022, so those questions were swirling in my mind on Reserve duty as well as in my civilian job — not one after the other, but at the same time.
Soldiers and military missions became employees, customers, patients, executives, developers, marketers, agencies, consultants, technology vendors, digital platforms, and business transformations.
But many of the principles didn’t change at all.
In fact, the more time I’ve spent leading people, the more I see the similarities.
You can read the full Army NCO Creed.
Competence Is a Responsibility, Not a Claim of Omniscience
The NCO Creed begins with competence.
I still believe competence is one of a leader’s fundamental responsibilities.
But in digital transformation, competence cannot mean knowing everything.
No one does.
Technology changes too quickly. Privacy and security requirements evolve. Accessibility expectations change. AI creates new opportunities and risks. Platforms come and go. And complex organizations have subject-matter experts who understand parts of the business far more deeply than any consultant walking through the door ever could.
Competence means continuing to learn.
It also means knowing what you don’t know.
I’m not a developer. I’ve spent years leading digital platforms, working with developers and architects, managing technology partners, participating in integration and API work, and translating between technical and business teams. I understand enough to ask questions, challenge assumptions, troubleshoot, and help connect the pieces.
But if someone else at the table has deeper expertise in something, I want that person talking.
Leadership isn’t proving you’re the smartest person in the room.
Sometimes competence means recognizing who knows the most about the problem in front of you—and making sure everyone else listens.
That principle is reflected in how I operate ReDefine Digital today: one practitioner, senior throughout. The person who diagnoses the problem is also the person who stays engaged in the work.
Accomplish the Mission. Take Care of the People.
My core belief here is simple: if you take care of the people, the mission will always succeed. That’s what happens when people trust your judgment and feel supported.
One of the principles of NCO leadership that has stayed with me most strongly is the dual responsibility of accomplishing the mission and caring for the people responsible for accomplishing it.
I don’t see those as competing priorities.
Neither should businesses.
Revenue matters. Deadlines matter. Budgets matter. Customer experience matters. Operational efficiency matters. Compliance matters.
But people accomplish those things.
Good leadership isn’t choosing between results and people.
It’s creating the conditions that allow people to achieve the result.
Give them clarity.
Remove barriers.
Make decisions.
Get them the information they need.
Protect them from unnecessary organizational noise.
Hold them accountable when necessary.
Recognize them when they succeed.
And sometimes, get out of their way and let talented people do what they do best.
That last part matters to me.
Digital transformation is often discussed entirely from the customer’s perspective.
What does the patient see?
What does the customer experience?
Can they find what they need?
Can they schedule?
Can they transact?
Those things absolutely matter.
But someone inside the organization has to make all of that work.
A beautiful digital front door sitting on top of broken processes, disconnected data, unclear ownership, and exhausted employees isn’t transformation.
It’s a façade.
Leadership Often Means Influence Without Authority
Some of the most important teams I’ve led didn’t report to me.
That is normal in digital transformation.
Marketing owns one piece. Technology owns another. Operations owns something else. Legal, Privacy, Security, and Compliance have responsibilities. An agency owns the design. A development partner owns implementation. A platform vendor controls part of the technology.
And somehow all of those pieces need to behave like one experience for the person on the other side of the screen.
You cannot solve that with an org chart.
You have to build alignment.
I’ve aligned teams that didn’t report to me around a common source of truth by helping each group understand specifically what would break if we didn’t solve the problem together.
I’ve built processes around stakeholder input rather than asking people to accept a solution designed without them.
My work has repeatedly required translating technical tradeoffs into business consequences executives can act on while creating enough shared understanding that the teams responsible for execution are already bought in.
That’s why I believe something very strongly:
Alignment is part of the deliverable.
A brilliant roadmap that nobody believes in isn’t a brilliant roadmap.
If You’re Part of the Mission, You’re Part of the Team
This may be one of the clearest ways my leadership philosophy has carried into civilian work.
I’ve led projects involving internal employees, brand agencies, digital design agencies, developers, technology partners, consultants, vendors, and other specialists.
I never viewed the external partners as outsiders.
Their paycheck may have come from another company.
Their email address may have had another domain.
But if they were responsible for the same outcome I was, they were part of my team.
I treated them accordingly.
That meant giving partners context instead of handing them isolated tasks.
It meant bringing them into the right conversations.
It meant listening to their expertise.
It meant helping agencies communicate with one another rather than creating unnecessary client-controlled walls between them.
It meant breaking down the artificial divisions that can develop between “the client,” “the agency,” “IT,” “marketing,” “the vendor,” and everyone else.
Those distinctions matter for contracts, responsibilities, and accountability.
They shouldn’t prevent people from solving problems together.
Some of the strongest work I’ve experienced happened when people stopped protecting organizational territory and started acting like one team with one mission.
Have Your People’s Backs
Treating partners like members of the team means accepting responsibility for them, too.
I’ve been in situations where an external partner was blamed for something they didn’t cause.
I spoke up.
A vendor relationship shouldn’t make someone an easy target when something goes wrong.
If the facts don’t support the criticism, I believe leadership has a responsibility to say so.
And if a mistake actually happened?
Deal with it.
Understand what happened. Correct it. Figure out what needs to change. Learn from it. Move forward.
Accountability matters tremendously to me.
Blame is different.
If I’m leading the work, I’m accountable for the environment in which that work happens. I’m not going to stand back and allow someone else to take a hit simply because their company name makes them easier to blame.
And I’m not going to use the people working with me as a shield when things become uncomfortable.
Give Credit Where It Belongs
The reverse is equally important.
When my people do great work, I want their names in front of leadership.
Period.
I will not take credit for something I didn’t accomplish alone.
If a developer solved the problem, say their name.
If an agency partner came up with the idea, say so.
If an analyst found the issue, recognize them.
If someone challenged an assumption and changed the direction for the better, that contribution matters.
If ten people made the outcome possible, don’t turn it into one leader’s accomplishment.
A leadership title gives you responsibility for the work.
It doesn’t give you ownership of everyone else’s contribution to it.
Transparency Doesn’t Mean Sharing Everything. It Means Not Hoarding What Can Be Shared.
I believe deeply in transparency.
I also believe deeply in confidentiality.
Those aren’t contradictory.
Privacy matters. Security matters. NDAs matter. Client confidentiality matters. Legal and regulatory requirements matter.
Some information should be protected.
Protect it.
But information shouldn’t be withheld simply because possessing it creates power.
If something can legitimately be shared and will help another person understand the mission, make a better decision, solve a problem, develop a skill, or perform their job more effectively, I believe in sharing it.
I don’t need to be the only person who knows something to secure my position.
My value isn’t the information I hold.
My value is what I can do with it.
I can connect people and ideas.
I can translate between business, operations, and technology.
I can identify risks.
I can ask difficult questions.
I can find the operational problem hiding behind what looks like a website problem.
I can create structure where there isn’t any.
And I can help other people learn how to do those things.
Making someone else more capable doesn’t diminish my value.
To me, it demonstrates it.
Prepare People to Take Your Place
This principle follows naturally.
I document.
I teach.
I explain why a decision was made, not simply what the decision was.
I bring people into conversations so they understand the context.
I want people who work with me to be prepared to take on greater responsibility.
Including mine.
I’ve built processes so the reasoning behind the work was visible and teams could grow into owning those processes rather than simply following instructions.
That’s part of how I define servant leadership: put people where they’re strong, coach where they need development, and prepare them for the next role—not merely the one they have today.
If everything stops functioning when a leader leaves, I’m not sure that’s evidence of great leadership.
Leadership is temporary.
Eventually someone else will sit in the chair.
They should inherit something stronger than what was there before.
The Same Standard Applies When I’m the Consultant
This philosophy is now built into ReDefine Digital.
ReDefine Digital is intentionally a founder-led, one-person digital transformation practice.
When you hire ReDefine Digital, you get me.
The person guiding the discovery is the person guiding the implementation. There isn’t a senior consultant in the pitch followed by a handoff to a junior delivery team.
My work focuses on the layer above the build: strategy, governance, compliance, data, platform decisions, operational alignment, and the connections between what happens inside an organization and what customers or patients experience through its digital front door.
ReDefine Digital does not exist to take over website production, creative, media buying, or campaign execution.
The assessment is often only the beginning.
The deeper work happens after trust has been established: talking with stakeholders, understanding where operations actually break, identifying why systems or data disagree, getting people who don’t report to one another aligned around the problem, and creating a path forward they can actually execute.
I don’t want to hand over a deck and disappear.
But I also don’t want to make the client permanently dependent on me.
Consulting Should Create Capability, Not Dependency
I think there are two very different ways consultants can make themselves valuable.
One is to become the only person who understands how everything works.
The other is to make the organization better at understanding how everything works.
I choose the second.
Knowledge transfer is part of my work.
Documentation is part of it.
Governance is part of it.
Bringing internal employees into the process is part of it.
Explaining why decisions are being made is part of it.
Helping people understand what they will own after I’m gone is part of it.
Eventually, the engagement should end.
When it does, I want the organization to understand what was built, why decisions were made, who owns what, how success should be measured, and what should happen next.
I don’t measure the success of an engagement by how long a client needs me.
I measure it partly by how prepared they are when they no longer do.
If I leave and the people I’ve worked with can confidently say:
“We’ve got it from here.”
I’ve done what I came to do.
Direct Client or Agency Partner: The Relationship Changes. The Standard Doesn’t.
ReDefine Digital can enter a client relationship in different ways.
Sometimes an organization hires me directly.
Sometimes an agency brings me into its client’s work because it needs specialized digital strategy, accessibility, privacy, governance, or regulated-industry expertise it doesn’t maintain internally.
The contractual relationship changes.
My leadership standard doesn’t.
When a Client Hires Me Directly
I become an extension of the organization.
That doesn’t mean I arrive looking for things to take over.
I want to understand the ecosystem first.
Who already owns what?
Where does expertise exist?
Which agencies and technology partners are involved?
What’s working?
Where are responsibilities unclear?
Where are organizational boundaries preventing people from solving the problem?
Where is there actually a capability gap?
Then I work across those relationships.
My job isn’t to replace good people or good partners.
It’s to help the ecosystem work better.
When an Agency Trusts Me With Its Client
The responsibility is different, but equally important.
I’m there to make the agency stronger.
I’m not there to gain access to its client.
I’m not there to turn the agency’s relationship into my next sales opportunity.
I’m not there to compete for the creative, production, hosting, maintenance, or other recurring work the agency already provides.
The agency earned that relationship.
If it trusts me enough to bring me into it, I have a responsibility to protect that trust.
I take that seriously enough to put it in writing.
My agency-partner model allows me to work behind the scenes under the agency’s brand, as a named specialist supporting the agency, or through a referral relationship.
And when an agency brings me into its client relationship, I will not solicit, accept, or service that client directly during our engagement or for 12 months afterward without the agency’s written consent.
That’s more than a contract clause to me.
It’s how a partner should behave.
Loyalty Doesn’t Mean Silence
There is an important distinction here.
Being a good partner doesn’t mean agreeing with everything.
If I’m brought into an engagement because of my expertise, I have a responsibility to use it.
If I see a risk, I’ll raise it.
If I think an assumption needs to be challenged, I’ll challenge it.
If I see a better path, I’ll explain it.
If discovery proves one of my own assumptions wrong, I’ll change my recommendation.
And if someone else has the better answer, I’ll support it.
Loyalty doesn’t require silence.
Sometimes serving the mission means having the conversation nobody particularly wants to have.
The key is doing it in the right way, through the right relationships, with respect for the people involved.
The Mission Comes Before Ego—and Before the Sale
This may be where my military leadership philosophy and consulting philosophy intersect most clearly.
I don’t need my idea to win.
I need the problem to get solved.
If someone on the client’s team has the better idea, use it.
If an agency partner sees something I missed, I want to hear it.
If the organization already owns technology capable of solving the problem, I don’t need to recommend another platform.
If an agency already provides a capability well, I don’t need to compete for it.
In fact, my agency-partner philosophy is pretty simple:
You’re already serving the client. Let me help you deliver the capability they need.
That’s how I think partnership should work.
I don’t need to own the work to contribute to its success.
I don’t need to own the client to serve the client.
I don’t need to hold the knowledge to demonstrate my value.
And I don’t need an organization to depend on me forever to prove that my work mattered.
Audit. Architect. Accelerate. Then Make It Sustainable.
ReDefine Digital’s model is Audit. Architect. Accelerate.
Those words describe a process.
But the leadership philosophy underneath them matters just as much.
Audit means listening before prescribing.
Understand what exists. Talk to the people doing the work. Find the operational root behind the visible symptom. Don’t walk into an organization assuming you already know the answer.
Architect means solving the problem with the people who will have to live with the solution.
Connect business, operations, technology, governance, compliance, and customer experience. Bring the right expertise into the room. Create clarity around ownership. Design something the organization can actually sustain.
Accelerate means helping people move.
Remove barriers. Make decisions actionable. Translate strategy into execution. Transfer knowledge. Build capability.
Then make sure the organization can keep going.
The Uniform Is Gone. The Responsibility Remains.
I hung up my uniform when I retired from the U.S. Army Reserve after 21 years of service.
I didn’t retire the standard.
I still believe competence matters.
I still believe leaders take responsibility.
I still believe people deserve credit for their work.
I still believe you take care of your people.
I still believe peers and partners deserve respect.
I still believe knowledge should be shared when it can be shared and protected when it must be protected.
I still believe leaders should prepare other people to succeed without them.
I still believe the mission matters more than ego.
And I still believe one of the best measures of leadership is what remains after you leave.
Are the people stronger?
Is the organization more capable?
Are the relationships stronger?
Is ownership clearer?
Can the team continue the work?
If the answer is yes, you’ve accomplished more than a project.
You’ve served the mission.
The NCO Creed didn’t create those beliefs for me.
It gave me a tangible standard against which I could keep asking whether I was living up to them.
It helped keep me honest with myself then.
It still does today.
And those are the leadership principles I bring with me every time someone trusts ReDefine Digital with their organization, their team, their client, or their mission.
Audit. Architect. Accelerate.
Then leave the people and the organization stronger than you found them.
