Rod Sanders - Currahee! Leadership Lessons from "Band of Brothers"
Uncover the enduring wisdom of wartime leadership with our esteemed guest, Rod Sanders, a US Army veteran and corporate executive, as he draws from the harrowing yet inspiring tales of Easy Company in HBO’s "Band of Brothers." This episode promises to bridge the gap between historic military strategy and contemporary leadership practices, all through the lens of the 101st Airborne Division's storied legacy.
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The Bosshole® Chronicles
“Rod Sanders - Currahee! Leadership Lessons from ‘Band of Brothers’”
Original Publish Date: 6/4/2024
Host: John Broer
John Broer: A very warm welcome to all of our friends out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. This is your host, John Broer, welcoming you to a special installment of The Bosshole Chronicles, where we are going to be acknowledging and celebrating Memorial Day 2024. Now, Memorial Day was about a week ago and of course, that is the time here in the United States where we acknowledge, appreciate and reflect on the ultimate sacrifice made by our men and women in uniform in the armed forces ever since the beginning of our republic back in 1776. To do that, we're going to take an interesting perspective and look at the leadership lessons of Band of Brothers. Now, Band of Brothers was a program released about 20 years ago on HBO. It was directed and produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg that followed Easy Company. Easy Company was in the 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Inventory Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. If you've never seen Band of Brothers, quite frankly it ought to be required watching in all of our high school history classes, because it tells the story of Easy Company and how they came together, all the way through their journey, their sacrifice, their courage, to the surrender of Germany in the European theater. Now, to really understand this story even better.
I've invited a friend of mine to help me through these leadership lessons and let me introduce him to you now. In just a bit, you're going to get a chance to meet Rod Sanders, and currently Rod is the Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer of Marco's Franchising. Now I'm from Toledo, Ohio, and Marco's Pizza started in Toledo, Ohio, and that's where I first met Rod, and his work continues and, by the way, Marco's Pizza awesome pizza. If you haven't had it, you probably live near one. But we're going to be talking about Rod's background in military history and also his service.
He spent 25 years in the military intelligence branch of the US Army. Two weeks out of high school, he entered the service and retired back in 2013. He served in every leadership position available to enlisted soldiers, from squad leader to command sergeant major. He deployed as a part of multiple operations, including with the 101st Airborne Division, where Easy Company comes from, for an 18-month combat tour in Afghanistan. He went on to Haiti and then spent 15 years in Korea.
So today, Rod is bringing his considerable personal experience in the military and also his knowledge of military history to talk with me about the leadership lessons that we can draw from Easy Company and the story of Band of Brothers. So let's jump right in and give you a chance to meet this remarkable person, Rod Sanders. The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Well, Rod, it is so good to have you here on the Bosshole Chronicles. Welcome.
Rod Sanders: Good to be here, John. Happy to talk to you.
JB: It's nice to have you and our listeners know that you and I met a number of years ago when we started to do some work together. But since then I've considered our conversation. I mean, you're just a good friend and a colleague and a fascinating individual beyond work, based on not only your years of service in the Army, and thank you for that, but also I kind of consider you in my circle a military historian. I just love talking to you about that. Is that okay for me to refer to you as that?
RS: By hobby, yes, by profession no. But. I love it, you can see it in the books behind me.
JB: Yes, I can, I can, but what I wanted to do, and since we are right on the heels of Memorial Day and just to acknowledge the sacrifice and service of all our men and women in the armed forces since the days of the revolution and that's what it's designed or it's supposed to acknowledge and commemorate I wanted to have a conversation around Band of Brothers. I rewatched it, I've watched it a couple of times, but this is like the 20th year, 20th anniversary of it, an amazing docu-series, I guess it is. Well, it's a movie, it's a series about Easy Company, and you actually served in the 101st Airborne. Is that correct, correct? Your roots are connected back to that and one of the things that I thought would be fun to hear from Rod is leadership lessons from Band of Brothers. So, Rod, I gave a little bit of an introduction, but give us once again, in terms of your connection in the army, where you served and where this connection to Easy Company, where that comes from.
RS: Yeah sure, real quick. I was in the Army 25 years, straight out of high school I was enlisted, ended up retiring as a command sergeant major of a battalion and between the start and the finish I served a couple of years with 101st out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and deployed into Afghanistan with them for 18 months, and that's my direct connection. I was in the 506th Infantry Regiment, which is the direct descendant of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment that Easy Company was a part of and that unit to this day carries forward the history and the traditions and the high expectations that came out of that.
JB: Yep, that was depicted in Band of Brothers for sure. Well, let's go back to that. It all took place at Camp Toccoa, correct? And before we start to talk about one specific individual, Herbert Sobel, who really was the training officer for Easy Company, there was a small mountain or a hill there in that area called Kurahi, right? What's the relevance of that?
RS: So Kurahi is an Indian name that, roughly translated, means "we stand alone, and that's actually that was the motto when I was in the five or six stands alone. So every time they'd come to attention, that's what we would yell out stands alone. So every time they'd come to attention, that's what we would yell out stands alone. And the mountain itself just represented, in my opinion, a challenge that was to be overcome.
You'll notice in the series and if you've read the book, it talks about the numerous runs up and down Kurahi that Easy Company made. Many of them on a rather short or no notice type of a situation. When Captain Sobel saw something he didn't like, it seemed like his default solution was changing to your PT gear or stay in full gear. We're going up and down, Kurahi, and he often used it for what he would call corrected training.
JB: Well, and it was three miles up, three miles down, correct?
RS: Three miles up, three miles down. That's right.
JB: So let's talk about Captain Sobel. He represents and when I mean here, you know, within the Bosshole Chronicles and at Real Good Ventures. We love to talk about leadership and what makes for a good leader and, you know, trying to keep managers out of the Bosshole zone. This is really in the context of something totally unique in the military, but I think that there are some very valuable lessons to be able to take away from that in the civilian world and we'll get to that. But why was Captain Sobel so unique to Easy Company?
RS: I think it was unique for a couple of reasons. One not a lot of people realize this, but he was actually a National Guard officer, and that's not entirely uncommon to have National Guard soldiers training active duty, regular Army soldiers. But he was a National Guard soldier officer. He was the company commander of Easy Company and his job was to whip these men into shape and to have them certify as paratroopers, which was a relatively new concept at the time. And if you have watched the series, you'll note that these were all volunteers.
Many of the people in the military were draftees. Many of these men were enticed by the extra $50 a month, and they even noted it. Hey, that $50 on top of the $50 of regular pay, that's a hundred dollars a month, so a lot of money at the time. But they wanted to be part of the best and so these were all volunteers. So you know, for me, when I think back to what transpired under Captain Sobel, for this group of men to have volunteered to put themselves in that situation where you had to deal with, you know, basically somebody who was described as a petty tyrant given absolute authority through his command position, uh, that's pretty incredible in and of itself, because several of them did, but all of them could have said you know what I'm done with this. I want to go back to the regular army, the non-paratroop units, and there was a high attrition rate. If you've read the book, you'll notice that they said 500 officer volunteers were needed to land 148 through Toccoa and it took 5,300 enlisted volunteers to land 1,800. Wow, wow, okay, that's what showed up at Toccoa, not necessarily what came out the back end as certified paratroopers.
JB: I found that part of the story to be so remarkable I didn't realize how I don't want to say revolutionary, but new. A paratroop company was so this was really unprecedented. And of course, their mission was going to be to fly behind enemy lines because, in anticipation of the landing in Normandy, just to be able to wreak havoc, begin to disarm the enemy from behind and the front of the enemy line hadn't been done before. Um, there was a lot that hadn't been done before because of the scale of that. Go ahead. What were you going to say?
RS: Well, I was just going to say you know, another big part of their mission was to secure key road junctions and bridges.
JB: Right.
RS: And uh, that's important because if they hadn't, that would have just allowed, or could have allowed, German armor to push right up onto the beach and throw the seaborne landings right back into the ocean, and you know they do a good job. In the series of talking about the action at break court, manor, where Major Winters at the time, Lieutenant Winters um led a small group of easy company men and some guys from other parts of the 506th to take out four huge guns I think there were one, one, five, fives, I believe, in terms of size that were firing directly onto Utah beach.
JB: Yeah, yep, so we'll come back to that in just a second. Let's go back to captain Sobel real quick. He was I don't know no other way to really say that I mean, he was pretty much universally detested by the company, wasn't he? Yeah, but it had some. The consequences of that actually were very beneficial for the company. Take us through that a little bit.
RS: Yeah, there's a book that Dick Winters it's kind of like a biography where he basically just says, outright, I detested the man. There was a quote where it said, attributed to Captain Sobel, saying look, on easy company, we don't lead by example, we lead through fear. Okay, and again, I referred to him earlier as a petty tyrant with absolute authority. And that can happen in a military environment. When you're in command position, you have absolute authority and you know he was really into retribution. He didn't try to hide the fact that he was looking out for himself and his career and the things that he did to these men in Easy Company. I have a hard time tying back to any real military value. But okay, except for the fact that In leading the way that he did through fear, he actually caused these men to bond. Right.
He created a cohesion that is later attributed to hey, this is what carried us through the hardest days of the rest of the war for Easy Company Bastogne and immediately after Bastogne they attributed the fact that they held together through the Toccoa NCOs the non-commissioned officers that had come through Toccoa under Captain Sobel, because the replacements that were coming in both enlisted soldiers but in particular the officers, they were unknowns. They didn't have the comradeship and they didn't have the shared experiences and that bond of trust that the men had to develop to make it through airborne school under Captain Sobel.
JB: Yeah, and I appreciate, Rod, how you say it's hard for you to reflect on that and see any real military value. But he did galvanize that company and without that and I think even Richard Winters and some of them had acknowledged as much as I hated him this absolutely made us stronger, moving through well, all the way through to the Eagle's Nest, to Nuremberg, they really didn't get a break. I mean, Easy Company did not get a break. Something you shared before is what was it the effectiveness at that time of a soldier? Was it about 90 days that you start to see a decline in performance? Is that right?
RS: But they exceeded that. Yeah, Ambrose notes in his book that most men are good for about 180, maybe 140 days, but on average the peak occurred at about 90 days. Okay, but on average, the peak occurred at about 90 days, and by January of 1945, easy Company had been in combat for 116 days, so well beyond that 90-day average peak, after which men just largely become ineffective over time. All attributed to the leadership of, or largely to the leadership of, the non-commissioned officers that were a product of Captain Sobel's school of leadership.
JB: Yeah, and if you read about those NCOs beyond the end of the book or the series many of them had, is it promoted or they were elevated into more higher levels of responsibility simply because of how well they performed and their service in the European theater.
RS: Yeah, if you watch this series, you'll probably catch on to this, but Carlton Lipton was a sergeant, a buck sergeant at Toccoa. Yeah, by the end of the series, by the end of the war, he had been commissioned through a battlefield commission to a lieutenant. But he was one of that group of non-commissioned officers that gathered together and said I will not follow Herbert Sobel into combat.
So they all signed letters saying I no longer wish to serve as a non-commissioned officer in Easy Company, submitted it to Colonel Sink, a West Pointer, and Sink called them all in and said get out of my face. I ought to have you all lined up and shot, but I can't spare you because we've got an invasion about to happen right right he busted a few of them, sent some others to a different regiment. But those guys uh, Lipton, Garnier, all became key leaders. Um, for the duration of the war, for Easy Company.
JB: And when you think about the contrast, then of so that clearly a no vote, I mean a no confidence vote in Sobel to follow him into battle, because I mean again, he as is depicted, he really just was not a battle-ready leader back at training and that's ultimately where he went right, didn't sink yeah after those non-commissioned officers said I can't serve underneath Sobel, colonel Sink, the regimental commander called Sobel into his office and said you've got the best company in the entire regiment, a fine group of men.
RS: I think your skills are such that the army deserves to have you over here teaching doctors and dentists how to jump out of airplanes.
JB: Yeah.
RS: So it's a very soft landing for Sobel, but it was his way of saying you're out of here.
JB: Yeah.
RS: Because as soon as he said it, as depicted in the series, Colonel Strayer, who was the battalion commander, opens the door, which is the signal for Sobel to get out.
JB: Yep, we're done, we're done. So contrast that, then, to Richard Winters, who came up through, you know, in Easy Company and who, by all accounts this is my interpretation a man of humility, a man of great insight and introspection. But one thing that you said, Rod, is, you know, especially when they were dropped and scattered throughout, behind the end, behind German, the front lines in Normandy, into an occupy, into occupied France they were all scattered he stepped up. I mean, this is when his true leadership, uh, and capabilities really came through. And what did you say? He was known for? Just sort of the moniker of follow me. Is that right? Yeah, yeah.
RS: And if you were to go to the infantry school today, there's a statue out front and at the bottom of it is just simply a placard. It's a picture of a soldier doing this.
Okay, and at the bottom it says follow me. So it, so it's almost. You know it's the infantry model, but Ambrose also did a good job. He pointed out that Sobel had the authority, Winters had the heart of the men. Oh, that's awesome. Okay, right, and so when they, when, when they make the jump into Normandy if you're familiar with it at all, because of a combination of doing it at night, you know- these guys did not have GPS navigation systems like we did today.
They did have guys go in earlier in the morning and lay down beacons, but then the anti-aircraft fire was such that it caused these formations to just intermingle and scatter, and so some of these guys were dropped 20 miles off their designated landing zone right at Two divisions going at the same time the 82nd and the 101st and what ended up happening was they all became intermingled. So you know, if you recall in the series Winters lands, he's had all of his equipment ripped off by the prop blast.
He's literally just got a knife stuck that was stuck in his boot and right next to him lands a young enlisted soldier wasn't even a sergeant next to him, but from the 82nd airborne and gathers together this small group of paratroopers many of them not in his unit and leads them on to his mission and accomplishes his objective just as the others did. They cobbled together small teams and executed the mission and rod you would attribute that to.
JB: This is all about the training and the preparation for D-Day, I mean for the lead up to it. In that, no matter what the you call it, it's called situational understanding, correct? Yeah, what does situational understanding mean in that circumstance, in the heat of battle?
RS: To a military person, situational understanding kind of has a unique interpretation. I think I'm trying to incorporate this into my current organization through the leadership development programs that we're creating. But to me it means if I'm a leader and I get taken out of the picture for whatever reason on the civilian world, I get sick, I have a family emergency, I move on to another position. In the military world it's more often things like well, I get taken out of the picture.
I'm down in combat, I get reassigned, as happened to several of the officers in Easy Company. Well, the unit still has to function, the team still has to function, and so one. You have to train your subordinates. It's not just a matter of identifying successors, but you have to prepare them to step into your shoes. In fact, in the army you try to lead two levels down. But for D-Day in particular, these men had sand tables and basically they were instructed to study these sand tables, and a sand table is essentially a mock-up, a geographic mock-up on a small scale of your area of operations.
JB: Okay.
RS: So somebody will go in and lay down, for example, a blue yarn to represent a river, red yarn to represent major highways, put little wooden blocks for buildings. It's basically just a mock-up of their objective territory.
JB: Okay.
RS: Everything from wooden blocks to buildings, to, I mean, you name it.
JB: Okay.
RS: And you're looking down on it and what you do is you study where your objective is, you study where the key terrain features are, key danger points, choke points, avenues of approach, and you rehearse your movement on that sand table to your objective. Well, these guys were told to make sure you know not just your mission but the mission of the platoon to your left and to your right, if not even the company to your left and to your right, such that you could draw those features out on a piece of paper for memory. That's how well you were expected to know that terrain and your mission. And had they not done that, given what happened when they actually jumped into Normandy, where they all got intermingled some of them were 20 miles or more off their landing zone you might've had a case of well, what do we do now? I don't know where I am, I don't know what my mission is, and now you're with guys that weren't even in your unit.
Completely different mission. So this ended up happening again and again in small groups throughout the airborne area of operations at D-Day and fortunately they were able to, for the most part, reach their objectives and execute on it. And we know in the case of Lieutenant Winters, you know he had to make it to an area near Causeway number 2 to take out some guns that were firing on Normandy.
JB: Yep, which he did successfully. And as the story progressed, you saw how his company started to come together. They started to find each other, right and there was a little bit more structure and organization. And again you're saying this, and I'm thinking of circumstances we're experiencing right now with some of our clients, and I do not mean to minimize the intensity, the magnitude of battle, being in a firefight to what goes on in the corporate world. But when you start to think about situational understanding and awareness and awareness of what other people are doing, how often do we hear well, we kind of operate in silos. So had they not done that, it would have been literally silos within the military and people standing around not knowing what to do. Because I don't know what your mission is. That is just sort of a light bulb going off. And, if I may, one other, because I think this is going to take us to our last point about which is so critical in the military, as you've shared growing your replacement, which is not happening in the civilian world as well as we think it should.
One of the things that stands out for me is in working with and this has happened we have something we go through with organizations called an organizational rebuild. So we work with the senior, most officer, the executive team, to say they say, well, we're growing and we can't stay here, we want to get there, and so we help them in that process. Well, part of that process is equipping those people that will be in charge when you get there. It's not you, and for some CEOs, some executives, that's an area they don't want to talk about. That's an area that's really hard because it's like I'm giving up control, I am handing this off. It's like, well, yes, yes, you have to do that because you, you can't.
I hate to say you know, you, you know. I hate to use the example. Well, if you walk out and get hit by a bus, I say, well, what if you win the lottery and you decide to travel the world, who is going to step in? I think where you talk about in the military, training two levels down and being prepared for that, this is all around preparing your replacement, right? So how is that at the heart? Tell us about how critical that is in from a military context and how we can pull that forward to today to help, even in the civilian world, understand how critical that is.
RS: Yeah, in a nutshell, in the military you're expected to train your replacement, in fact kind of considered incompetent. If you're not training your subordinates to step up and step into your shoes should you go down, it's not uncommon, for example, to have a buck sergeant, a Sergeant E-5 in the Army have to step into the role of a staff sergeant. It's a little bit less uncommon to have them step into the role two levels up to a certain first class. But it does happen because the mission has to continue and even when we go into missions there's this big long planning process that takes place. But even down at the lowest levels, like at companies for example, there'll be an operations order that comes out that lists everything that has to happen and towards the end of that planning document or operations document talks about the chain of command.
It will say, for example, Captain Sobel will be in this vehicle, next in command will be Lieutenant Winters, who will be in this vehicle. You'll know what order the vehicles are in, you'll know where your medics are, where your heavy weapons are located, and so you know. It basically just becomes second nature to anybody that stays in the military over a period of time. That is not second nature. So much in the corporate world as I have learned. What strikes me is the biggest difference and this again is my opinion and I kind of get it. But in the civilian world, when you tell a leader, hey, I expect you to train your replacement, well, the first thing that pops into a lot of leaders' mind is no, I don't want to do that, because I might train them to the point where they take my job away from me or prevent me from getting promoted right. So it's a different expectation altogether.
JB: It's almost as if in a civilian environment, when you talk about training leaders, you're talking about training leaders not to step into your role, but to go and do something else altogether that I know that when I got into management and I had some great mentors, that I had one that said listen, number one, your number one responsibility is to develop other people when you're in management. We talk about that all the time here on the Bosshole Chronicles, obviously. But the other part is equipping somebody to step into your role and I mean I think it's fair to say that not everybody is equipped or even desires to be in a leadership role. That's okay. We need individual contributors. I mean I would say that we also need soldiers who are going to serve and we need leaders within our platoons, within the ranks of the military. Not everybody is equipped for that, but a good leader, I think absolutely in the corporate world, needs to be figuring out who can I develop or what people on my team have the desire, have the capacity, have the interest in growing to eventually perhaps step into my role.
And I think there's a scarcity mentality for a lot of Bossholes. If you will out there that are saying, why would I do that? I want job security, just like you said, why would I train my own replacement? That's almost like again when you talk about Captain Sobel being very much about himself. Now, the unintended consequence is he created one of the most decorated and honored units in the army at that time, obviously, but he was all about himself. I don't ever think he was thinking well that, Richard Winters, I want him to step into a leadership role that just was not conveyed in the story, does that make sense?
RS: Yeah, in fact it's not explicitly said, but if you read between the lines, when Colonel Sink handed Captain Sobel First Lieutenant's rank insignia and said you know I was thinking about giving this to winners today, but why don't you do it? He'd appreciate it and getting it from you the look on his face was like, ah, because he knew the men respected Winters and you know he even at one point tried to get Winters to accept 60 days restriction to the base in England and Winters called his bluff and said no, sir, I'm going to take the court-martial yeah, yeah that's what led to the stink where you had non-commissioned officers say look, they just assigned Winters to the mess hall.
He became the guy in charge of preparing meals for the company. I am not following Sobel into combat. He tried to get rid of Winters because I think he suspected Winters was giving him competition for that company commander position.
JB: Yep, yep, it's interesting I just had, I was at an event last night and talking to a gentleman and he found out the work that we do in terms of helping managers and leaders and organizations just optimize their talent, want anybody to threaten their status, their position as a leader, and I'm thinking that's somebody who's thinking pretty small and how detrimental is that? Obviously in the military and because now lives are at stake. And then we think about in the corporate world how that narrow way of thinking about being a leader or a manager absolutely holds back what could be incredible success when you're putting yourself against the development of others.
RS: I do see a lot of, or I'm aware of organizations that will go through the exercise, for example, of identifying potential successors, right. There's a difference between identifying a successor and activating or preparing that successor. And that's where a lot of organizations just stop.
JB: Yep.
RS: Hey, Rod, you're going to be the identified successor for Bob, but then you don't send Rob any kind of training, don't give me any education, and so when it comes time for Bob to retire, Rod is never really considered. We go to an external source and hire a new Bob.
JB: Right, right. Well, and that's what you are trying to avoid at Marco's University and, of course, Marco's, one of the fastest growing pizza franchises in the country. Have you guys succeeded the 1,000 store mark?
RS: Right at 1,200.
JB: Oh, 1,200. That's awesome. That's awesome, by the way, awesome pizza, anything that we missed.
RS: No, I think we covered everything. But look, there's value in cohesion. Ambrose in his book says that cohesion and comradeship are the strongest motivators. Now, particularly in the military, while we'd all like to believe that everybody's out there fighting and dying for flag and country at the end of the day, you're fighting and dying for the guy or the gal to your left or to your right and you don't want to let them down, and that's what holds units together and motivates them more than anything else. That same level of cohesion I find hard to replicate in the civilian world, but it's still possible with little strong cohesive teams. I just don't see a big focus on it.
JB: Yeah, I think people like to talk about it to your point, but we're not activating it. Well, Rod, thank you for this. I am so glad we had a chance to do this. Again, I value your insights. I've always enjoyed our conversations about our military history and again, thank you for your service, thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles.
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