Lessons In Leadership (CONT’D FROM PAGE 24)
Murray remembers the repeated attempts as total- ly deflating. They went back to their bunks to sleep, but two hours in, they received new intel from the radio. They found the guy; they knew where he was. They needed Murray’s platoon. “I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to have to tell these guys we’ve got to go do this again.’ They’re going to go be- cause it’s an order, it’s the military, but like what am I going to tell them to be focused and do what they have to do when we go out,” Murray said. Seeing his hesitation, a highly respected combat staff sergeant stepped up to join him in delivering the order. “’New intel, right?’ I was like, ‘That’s right.’” And that was that. They were going to go on these mis- sions for as long as they received intel on the bomber’s possible whereabouts. With that, everybody responded
Erich Murray, Plant Manager at TPC Printing & Packaging.
with an affirmative ‘Hooah.’
In short, Murray said his platoon went back out and it was a grueling long mission again, but they captured the bomber and his weapons cache, and it was a complete success. “And that was one moment I had early in my military career that taught me if you could just keep going forward and just keep pushing for- ward and not give up, oftentimes that willpower is enough to get it done,” Murray said. “And we really emphasize that at our com- pany and our plant because we do a lot of chal- lenging work and it’s easy to get in that cycle of that’s as good as we can do on this and we really can’t do anything else, but at the end of the day, we’ve committed to our customers or we’ve committed to our company that we’re going to do certain things and we have to.” Preparation Is Everything Another lesson the Army taught Murray is the importance of preparation and planning. “I like saying that failing to plan is planning to fail,” Murray said. “I truly believe in it. I don’t have many times that I’ve been a part of some- thing that’s fallen on its face because we didn’t plan it out at all, we just kind of showed up and thought that we put the players on the field and just make it happen.” Murray said it is important to go through the planning process as a team and identify points of friction where things could go off the rails and talk about the contingencies of how to deal with them. Is there an upcoming customer visit, a big job or a new software integration on the hori- zon? Make plans for those things. “If we just let that kind of happen to us and we don’t step through that planning process the right way and identify the contingencies of CONTINUED ON PAGE 28
26
www.boardconvertingnews.com
November 7, 2022
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator