How Veterans Can Develop Their Leadership Capacity

My career fit in a 9.5-inch by 11.75-inch folder. Inside was a Navy career's worth of documents, beginning at age 19. The DD-214, the Defense Department's official record of separation, listed my dates of service, medals, assignments, and an honorable discharge.

The brown folder felt cool in my hand as I stepped out of an old World War II-era building into the hot San Diego sunshine. My last day in uniform wasn't sentimental. After 21 years, it was simply over, and it was time to move on again, just as I had moved on from a dozen duty stations across the country. My career had been shaped by those bureaucrats: 12 addresses and as many roles. I was an officer who had adapted himself to organizational needs. 

I was certain my Navy experience would translate. Twenty-one years had taken me from flight decks to Iraq to the Pentagon, and my final role as Chief of Staff had placed me at tables where consequential decisions were made. I had a playbook for leading through complexity. It served me well until it didn't.

New Mission, Civilian Clothes, Familiar Playbook

Months later, I joined a well-regarded medical technology company. I no longer had a uniform or base. I was now part of a distributed team interacting primarily through company laptops, bringing a new product to hospitals that promised to improve patient safety and clinical efficiency. My wife worked in healthcare; I could picture her depending on the quality of our work. Success, as in the military, was personal.

The FDA-regulated environment felt familiar. Naval Aviation had demanded strict rules, standards, and accountability. After fighting through applicant-tracking systems and a lengthy interview process, I landed a mid-level role in an industry where I could build a career.

For a while, my military instincts delivered results: I grew the team, tightened scheduling, added guides, technology, and oversight. The logic was sound. I would streamline the process with other managers; the results will follow. But revenue targets remained out of reach. The gap widened. More of the same wasn't closing the distance.

My bosses and I were frustrated. In response, the organization launched Project Peloton. Compliance was mandatory, and my evaluation hinged on the target metrics, so I did what I always did: I implemented the new process and executed it. However, after some time, I sensed Project Peloton wasn’t working. This was confirmed by the team. One on ones surfaced the same story repeatedly. Many team members felt Project Peloton wasn't working for them or for customers. I felt it was time to try something different, but 21 years had ingrained a clear lesson: as a mid-level manager, my job was to optimize the system, not question it.

A year later, I was burning out. The Project Peloton playbook hadn't delivered the change needed. The performance gap hadn't improved enough. The leadership thinking that served me in the Navy had stopped working. I wouldn't understand why until after I left the company and reflected on how I made sense of the situation.

What Transition Misses

Through hundreds of coaching conversations with The Honor Foundation and Vector Accelerator, I speak with talented veterans who are confident they'll make a difference. I agree and then ask them to consider not only the skills they'll need in their new role but also their capacity for leadership. That distinction is subtle, which is in part why both veterans and the organizations serving them miss it.

Military and most veteran transition programs understandably focus on job-related skills and job-search capabilities. These are familiar, approachable topics. Career advancement within the military is based on acquiring measurable, trackable skills tied to deployment readiness, and transition programs reasonably follow the same logic. This approach, known as horizontal development, emphasizes acquiring knowledge, skills, and competencies. Think of it as adding more pages to an existing playbook. It is a vital preparation for employment. But it is only part of what veterans need to thrive in complex organizational environments where their well-established playbook may not apply.

Leadership capacity development

If adding more pages to a filled playbook of the same size is horizontal development, vertical development involves cultivating the capacity to think in more complex, systemic ways. Vertical development emphasizes how we interpret situations and how we respond in real time, with awareness of ourselves, others, and the larger systems in which we operate. That awareness doesn't arrive on its own. It deepens as we examine the assumptions we didn't realize we were making. 

Taking action in the moment: Action Inquiry

Bill Torbert spent decades developing a theory called Action Inquiry. A distinguished leader, teacher, and scholar, he had a prolific career. He served as Dean of the Carroll School of Management for 30 years, during which he transformed the MBA program into the 25th-ranked in the US (Boston College, 2025). He founded two consulting firms on both sides of the Atlantic: Action Inquiry LLC in the US and Global Leadership Associates in the UK. As an educator, he was renowned for clearly connecting theory and practice. Action Inquiry was developed by someone who looked at leadership not simply from a theoretical perspective but as a practical matter of action.

A practical entry point into Action Inquiry is the cultivation of attention. This may sound simple, but Action Inquiry requires a quality of awareness that most people do not naturally possess, though it can be developed with practice (Torbert, 2003). Awareness of what, exactly? Torbert refers to four specific areas he calls territories of experience.

Territories of experience

Torbert (2003) introduces four territories of experience to which we direct our attention. The word attention itself is worth pausing to consider. Webster's dictionary defines attention as 'the act or state of applying the mind to something.' The prefix 'ad' suggests direction toward something with purpose, while the verb 'tendere' means to stretch. To attend to each of the four territories, then, is to consciously stretch ourselves toward deeper awareness of each one.

As you read through each territory of experience, take your time to reflect on how you relate to them. Do not be discouraged if your awareness is limited to the first two. Most people primarily operate there. When you reach the third territory, consider where you might align. While some develop an intuitive grasp of it, very few fully engage with the fourth. Personal development is gradual, and simply becoming aware of these four territories is itself a step toward expanding your leadership capacity. In the descriptions that follow, I will model reflection and draw on the story that opened this essay.

First Territory of Experience

The first territory of experience focuses on external results, the outside world of observable outcomes and data (Torbert, 2003). For many of us, this is where we spend most of our time. In Naval Aviation, we tracked everything: sorties flown, flight hours, and training readiness. The private sector felt familiar in that regard. In my first corporate role, I had access to extensive performance and customer data, and my goal was to achieve tangible results. That familiarity was reassuring. It was also, I would later realize, part of the problem that prevented us from achieving transformational change.

Second Territory of Experience

The second territory of experience concerns our perception of our own performance, including our behaviors and action patterns as we experience them (Torbert, 2003). After about a year in my new role, I felt confident in my progress and received positive feedback from peers and supervisors. The team was improving. What I could not yet see was that the thinking patterns I had developed over 21 years in the Navy, which had served me well, were quietly limiting my view.

Third Territory of Experience

The third territory of experience concerns our modes of thinking: the strategies, schemas, and mental frameworks we use to make sense of the world (Torbert, 2003). These patterns are reinforced throughout our lives, particularly during vocational training, when our emphasis shifts toward problem-solving strategies aligned with our chosen fields. My training began at 19 in the Navy and continued through a myriad of formal schools over a 21-year career: flight school, aviation safety officer school, division officer and department head school. Through that training and experience, I developed the leadership playbook I carried into my first corporate role.

In team sports, coaches refer to playbooks containing preset responses to different situations. Our thinking works similarly. We carry playbooks we may not even realize we have. Torbert called these hidden yet discoverable playbooks action logics: 'strategies, schemas, ploys, game plans, typical modes of reflecting on experience' (Torbert, 2003, p. 22).

The action logics matter because they show us how we make sense of the world. When we can see our own action logic, we can begin to understand which playbook we are reaching for and whether a more complex way of thinking might serve us better. Torbert proposed seven increasingly complex ways of making sense of the world: Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist, Strategist, and Alchemist. The table below summarizes each.

Action Logic	How They See the World	Strengths	Limitations	% of Leaders
Opportunist	Winning is everything. Others are competitors or obstacles.	Effective in emergencies and high-pressure sales situations.	Few people follow them for long. Self-serving and manipulative.	5%
Diplomat	Harmony matters most. Avoid conflict, follow the group norms.	Provides social cohesion; attentive to others' needs.	Cannot deliver hard feedback or make difficult decisions.	12%
Expert	Logic and expertise are the currency of credibility.	Excellent individual contributor; drives efficiency and precision.	Dismisses those with less expertise; resistant to collaboration.	38%
Achiever	Goals exist to be met. Success comes through teams and strategy.	Effective manager; balances competing demands; open to feedback.	Tends to accept goals as given rather than questioning them.	30%
Individualist	Recognizes that all frameworks, including their own, are constructions.	Bridges different worldviews; effective in consulting and venture roles.	Can frustrate colleagues by disregarding rules they see as irrelevant.	10%
Strategist	Organizations and people can transform. Every assumption is open to examination, yet is collaborative and pragmatic	Highly effective change leader; creates shared vision across differences.	Rare and often misunderstood by organizations not ready for them.	4%
Alchemist	Society and organizations itself can be renewed.	Capable of leading transformation at a societal scale.	Extraordinarily rare; difficult to develop systematically.	1%

As an officer and Naval Aviator, my expertise was in the technical and administrative aspects of safely executing missions. As a corporate manager, I managed organizations efficiently and in compliance with directives. In Torbert's terms, I operated primarily from the Expert and Achiever action logics. I met deadlines, hit goals, and led teams effectively. While these served me well, I realize in retrospect that I might have better served my team by questioning some of the goals themselves, not just optimizing toward them. 

Fourth Territory of Experience

The fourth territory of experience involves intentional attention: a quality of awareness that encompasses vision, intuition, and aims (Torbert, 2003). Torbert calls this “supervision.” Think of a seasoned coach who, in the middle of a game, is simultaneously watching the scoreboard, sensing their own energy and the team’s, questioning whether the game plan is still right, and noticing the pull of something deeper about what the moment requires. This simultaneous awareness, in the midst of action rather than after it, is what the fourth territory aims for. I had flickers of intuition within the fourth territory of experience in my first role after transition. It came to me in moments when I thought it was time to try something different, but instead of listening to that intuition, I shut it out, seeing it as a distraction and redoubling my efforts. I was not yet capable of holding all the territories of experience at once.

Application

No military mission begins without a thorough assessment of the terrain. Yet veterans enter the terrain of transition, one of the most critical missions of their lives, with only a partial framework for interpreting the new environment.

The frameworks offered by well-intentioned transition programs can be built upon. The veterans I meet weekly are doing diligent work: reviewing career files, translating military experience into civilian language, and assessing assignments and awards. In terms of the territories of experience, their awareness of the first and second territories is well developed. This is necessary and important work. But it misses an opportunity to cultivate awareness of the third and fourth territories, awareness that can help veterans not only find their first job but also understand the action logics they are carrying into it.

So how can transitioning veterans and their supporters begin to extend that awareness? Veterans are already familiar with intensive planning and after-action reviews. Introducing the territories of experience as part of pre-mission planning can serve as an entry point to a framework for extending that reflective practice beyond the first two territories.

Conclusion

A process for mutual reflection and development

First, discuss these concepts with others. Veterans and their mentors can share observations and experiences with one another. Talking through the territories and the action logics opens new perspectives that solitary reflection often cannot.

Second, veterans and mentors review the territories and identify half a dozen critical moments in your careers where something did not go as intended. They do not have to be work-related. I recommend including the transition itself. For each moment, think about which territories were in play and which action logics from the table might have been operating.

Third, write it down. A journal is the natural home for this kind of reflection, but thoughts do not always arrive while sitting in front of one. Keep a notepad or an app that captures whatever surfaces. Journals can serve as a home for those fragments that eventually find their meaning when reviewed.

These recommendations are practices to sustain. Mentors and organizations committed to supporting veterans should embrace this as an ongoing commitment.

Through their service, veterans have developed a substantial playbook of technical expertise and leadership abilities that bring immense value to organizations in numerous ways. Many well-meaning transition programs focus on adding to veterans' already considerable skill sets to help them attain their first job, often by expanding their existing playbooks. By adding vertical development, specifically offering Bill Torbert’s four territories of experience, the action logics, and discussing them in community, veteran transition programs can expand their programs to include veteran leadership capacity development.

Torbert, W. R., & Associates. (2003). Action inquiry: The secret of timely and transforming leadership. Berrett-Koehler.

Rooke, D., & Torbert, W. R. (2005). Seven Transformations of Leadership. Harvard Business Review.