Nolan Martin :
Hello and welcome to the NEGOTIATEx podcast. I’m your co-host, co-founder, Nolan Martin. With me, as always, co-host, co-founder, Aram Donigian. Aram, how are you doing today?
Aram Donigian:
I’m great. Nolan, Thanks so much. It is my privilege to introduce a West Point classmate from the great class of 98, Duty Will Not Wait and an amazing developer of leaders, Lt Colonel Retd Bryan Price founded Top Mental Game, LLC to provide leaders in business, sports and the military with the leadership and mental performance tools needed to perform at their best when it matters the most.
Before starting Top Mental Game, Bryan served for 20 years as a US Army officer, retiring in 2018. As a three year starter and captain of the West Point baseball team, Bryan earned Patriot League All Decade Team honors. He commissioned as an aviation officer and flew the Apache Longbow, the Army’s premier attack helicopter.
Bryan served in a variety of command and staff positions, including 33 months of company command of the same unit across three continents and a 12-month combat deployment to Afghanistan. Bryan earned a PhD in political science from Stanford University before returning to West Point to teach international relations and US National Security in the department of Social Sciences.
Following another combat deployment, this time to Iraq, Bryan again returned to West Point as an academy professor and director of the Combating Terrorism Center. In this capacity, Bryan briefed the nation’s most senior leaders about the center’s counterterrorism research. Bryan’s own research focused on terrorist group leadership, and his book, Targeting Top Terrorists, was published in 2019.
Bryan was the founding executive director of the Pacino Leadership Institute, a comprehensive four-year leadership program at Seton Hall University, which was named the top leadership program in the nation by the Association of Leadership Educators in 2022.
Through Top Mental Game, Bryan works with business leaders, general officers, senior civilian military leaders, and Division I coaches, athletes, and teams. He’s spent time with many organizations to include Meta, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, T Rowe Price, and Bristol Myers Squibb. Bryan, thanks so much for joining us today.
Bryan Price:
Aram, Nolan, it’s great to be on your podcast. Thanks for having me.
NM:
Absolutely. So you had an incredibly diverse military career, as we just heard from flying the Apache Longbow to teaching at West Point, your leadership philosophy evolved over the course of your 20 years in the Army. And what were some pivotal moments that shaped your approach to leadership?
Navigating Leadership Evolution: Reflecting On West Point’s Legacy & Modern Challenges [02:21]
BP:
I think you can probably, I owe it all to my connection with Aram back at F1 at West Point. At the time we were, I think we were called the Friars era?
AD:
We were the Friars back then. Yeah.
BP:
They’ve since rebranded to the Firehouse. So all good. So in terms of like my leadership and no one, I know you’re also a West Point graduate, what a fantastic laboratory for leadership. And I think when I look at my leadership philosophy, I go back to the fact that leadership is a people business and people change over time and that’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. But if you’re going to be impactful as a leader, I think you have to be able to relate and connect to people.
And they change over time, right? So my older brother is a high school football coach, has been in the same school for coming on 30 years now. Sometimes he likes to complain about this up and coming generation and sense of entitlement and those sorts of things. But what we go back to is, look, if you are leading people or coaching people the same way you were 30 years ago, you’re probably not getting through to them.
So ultimately you have to up your game. And I know at Tuck, you probably see a variety of different students that are coming through. And so you have to find different ways to connect to people. So like first and foremost, I think is that connection piece. Two, in terms of going back to the West Point experience, I think you have an opportunity there, which might lead into questions later on in the conversation about the importance of actually leading and experimenting and dare I say, failing when it comes to leadership and trying out different techniques on how to lead, but then also iterating on that feedback that you get to make yourself even better.
So I’ll just share one quick story. I was a Camp Buckner cadre member. So for those of the uninitiated, they send after freshman year, or they used to, at least all of the freshmen through a multi week kind of leadership development program out of this place called Camp Buckner. And so I was a rising junior and I was able to be a cadre member to help lead these cadets. And so I had the mentality of, like, I knew that there was a lot of changes that were going to be made in terms of last minute changes and hurry up and wait type things. And I had this mentality, I told my squad that I was in charge of, so say about 10 cadets.
I said, whatever happens, that’s them. This is us. And to be honest, it was good for building camaraderie. But it wasn’t the smart move because I was undercutting my chain of command up top. And so I felt like I learned a lot about, yes, you want to build camaraderie, but you also want to do it in a way that is going to be aligned with your leadership.
I made a ton of mistakes as a cadet and obviously as an officer and continue to make mistakes, but hopefully you get a chance to learn from those. I have two quotes that I think might be pertinent to your audience. So I’m fortunate enough to do some work for, if you guys remember Zig Ziglar back in the 1980s. So his son has taken over the company. I’ve been fortunate enough to do a lot of engagements with them. And Zig used to have this quote that says, if you can help enough people get what they want, you can get what you want. And so at the heart of effective leadership, in my opinion, is service, right? Is selfless services, giving back to others.
And along those lines, a picture that I carry around that I took my last appointment in Iraq in 2012, and it was at the division headquarters up in Northern Iraq. If you’ve been to those places, it’s a nondescript building, but the 40,000 antennas coming out of it probably signal that it is a building of import, but otherwise they try to keep a low profile.
And so there’s really no signs or anything like that on the outside. Except they had put a sign immediately as you exit the building. So the only way you could see this sign is if you were actually in the building and walking out. It was a very simple sign. It said, I will not fail those with whom I serve. Both of you guys have been in deployment scenarios where it’s you’re doing those seven days working 14, 16 hours and you’re super tired. But boy, that was like a shot in the arm when you walked out of that building location and seeing a sign that says, I will not fail those with whom I serve.
And so leadership is about others. That’s the last thing I’ll end on, which is, I have an interesting anecdote on this too. The CINO Institute that Aram mentioned earlier, that I ran at Seton Hall, I did something for the four years that I was there. The very first class of freshmen that came in, I would ask them what their definition of leadership was.
So I said, don’t look at the Google machine. There are no right or wrong answers here. Just put it down on a three by five card. They did that and then they turned it in and then the next week I would come back. I would aggregate all those answers and put it up in a word cloud. And so the word that showed up more prominently and more frequently than any other was the word others.
And so if you ask me what is the one word? And by the way, this is four years in a row, completely independent. I don’t think that they coordinated on their answers, but the word others consistently showed up. So when you ask people say, how do you define leadership in one word? I’ll just say others.
NM:
Awesome. Yeah, powerful. And I think both Aram and I share the same experiences with just learning how to fail along the way and how it’s helped us continue to grow as individuals and everything. As a bit of a side question, do you have any advice for fellow veterans preparing to leave service and transition to a new profession?
The Value of SkillBridge For Veterans Transitioning To Civilian Careers [07:24]
BP:
Yeah, so there are fewer and fewer of our classmates that are still in, Aram. But we’re really proud to see those that are continuing to serve. And also as part of Top Mental Game, I’m fortunate enough to work with, I’m an executive coach for senior leaders in the Air Force and Space Force, so general officers, SES, senior civilian leaders, and the like.
I’m able to see from their perspective and to hear some of the challenges that they’re going through, as well as the challenges that I went through, and I’m sure Aram went through and yourself as well. I think that SkillBridge program, I hope they continue to fund it because I think it’s a fantastic opportunity in order to kick the tires. And in some cases I tell people my two recommendations, there is one: Utilize SkillBridge to go after the company, like your dream company. Because what it essentially is, it’s a long interview.
The second one though, is I say, look, you might want to use SkillBridge to go after a company or an industry that you were not familiar with. That you think you have this little itch that says what if I went into this particular industry and it’s different from say like defense contracting or whatever they were doing in the military. And so use that as an opportunity, in my opinion, in order to kick the tires and either conform or deny.
Maybe the bumper sticker I’ll put on this in terms of veterans and transitioning is don’t settle. I know we’re going to talk about mindset, just like one of my favorite topics, obviously to talk about. But I feel like too many veterans get into the situation where they feel like they have to hit the easy button and do something very similar that they’re comfortable with. And they end up settling. And unfortunately, when you talk about their satisfaction, their job satisfaction, and stress and mental health and all those sorts of things, I think it would be better served if they could choose an industry that they want to, right? Because you want, ultimately, we all want to do work that doesn’t feel like work and something that we love to do. So my recommendation is don’t settle.
AD:
I love that piece of advice, right? Very direct, but so apropos and takes, as you said, Bryan, I know we will get into a little more, some shifting in mindset, certainly some personal framing and awareness as well. I want to talk a little bit about the work you did at the combating terrorism center and your book, targeting top terrorists, highly influential on thinking for senior leaders. I’m curious, do any of the principles from counterterrorism research apply to leadership and decision-making in business and other non military contexts?
Exploring Leadership’s Impact Across Extremes [09:41]
BP:
A little bit of a stretch, right? But when people ask me, like, how did I go from studying the worst types of leaders to developing, hopefully meaningful leaders and effective leaders. There are some parallels, right? I mean at the end of the day, in some regards when you take a look at terrorist leadership It has to be influential because what you’re doing is you’re asking individuals in order to create the most heinous, violent acts possible oftentimes against innocent people.
And so to encourage someone to do that, even if we don’t like to admit it, does require leadership, maybe the one or two nuggets that I think are impactful. And just to give everybody some kind of context in terms of my own research. There was a graduate student when I was going to Stanford that was also graduate students someplace else. And she had written a paper that talked about leadership doesn’t matter when it comes to decapitation and counter terrorism.
So what she was arguing was that when you remove a terrorist group leader, and that’s what we mean by decapitation, by the way, just to be very clear, we’re not talking about lopping off heads. Kind of like a, it goes back to the snake head strategy and cutting off the head of the snake. But she came up with this theory that when you remove the terrorist group leader, it actually doesn’t make the group and sooner it makes them last longer. At the end of the day. leadership isn’t as big a deal as we think it is.
And everything in my core, whether it was from sports or West Point or the military, kind of said, I think leadership does matter here. And so what I did was I used, might be attracted to the more academic folks on listening to the podcast, but I use Cox proportional hazard theory, which essentially is used oftentimes, I think the best kind of example here is in the medical community to determine the efficacy of certain types of medical treatments. So you have a population of folks that have the same disease. You have a control group that doesn’t get anything. You have a group that is going to be administered a particular treatment.
And then over time you can see their survival rates of those two populations. You can determine which treatment is more effective than others. In my situation, my population wasn’t sick patients. It was terrorist groups. And my treatment was whether or not that organization had their leader killed or captured or removed. And so then we can see what the survival rates of both those. Long story short, organizations that have their leadership removed, especially in the first year of their existence are more than 8.7 times more likely to end terrorist groups that don’t have their leaders removed. Interestingly though, that effect is halved over time.
It’s halved after 10 years, and at the 20 year mark, it’s statistically indistinguishable whether or not a leadership removal is going to either increase or decrease the mortality rate of said terrorist group. So what does that tell us? It tells us that leadership does matter in this regard. Last piece I’ll say, when it comes to terrorist group leadership is the impact that stories have, right?
And what’s interesting is stories are sticky. We see this in politics today. We see this in a variety of different industries, but when you look at Osama Bin Laden, the most evil person of all time. He has these glorified stories about him in combat, most of which were inaccurate, or didn’t even happen. But it didn’t matter because of how influential those stories were and get passed down over time. So what I tell organizations is let’s talk about like values. If you want to articulate your values to your organization, it is much more impactful to pass down and find the most impactful stories of your individuals living out your values.
And a good story is worth 300 pages in an employee handbook, right? So I think stories matter when it comes to leadership. That’s, there are some parallels.
AD:
I think it’s interesting about controlling the internal narrative. The stories we tell ourselves certainly gets to the culture of an organization. As you look at artifacts and think of some of Edgar Shine’s sort of work there.
I was just reading an article the other day in the Wall Street Journal, the reporter was talking about a relationship that she had with an Afghan who had worked on behalf of the Taliban and everything. And so much of his motivation was founded in the kind of the story and legacy of fighting the foreign invader and that went back decades and was something that kind of motivated him. Of course, very disillusioned now with where things are in Afghanistan, but tying to your story about stories were the major factor.
NM:
Having worked in the military, academia, sports, and corporate domains. What do you see as the commonalities and differences in leadership across these various contexts?
Navigating The Leadership Spectrum: From Young Athletes To Generals & Beyond [14:17]
BP:
Yeah, this has been interesting given how eclectic an average week might look for me, because I get an opportunity to work with a lot of different leaders in different fields of different ages. So it’s not uncommon if on tomorrow, for example, I might have a 12-year old tennis player who’s trying to improve her play in tournaments that afternoon.
I might be talking to a two star General in the air force that is dealing with real world leadership problems. And then I’ll go work with a company or a corporation and talk about organizational culture or values and those sorts of things. And I think the one commonality, I go back to my answer in the beginning, which is like leadership is about people and people are complicated.
And so it doesn’t matter if you’re 12 or 62, you’re going to be dealing with people challenges when it comes to leadership and everybody. And this kind of is a good segue to talk about mindset. Everybody is dealing with something. I know this is not going to be aired until a couple months from now, but spoiler alert, if you’re not paying attention to the Olympics, Simone Biles fell off the beam today.
And so even the GOATs out there, The Greatest Of All Time to include leaders in their respective industries are dealing with stuff. And so I try to give people some grace in that regard, but also give people the tools to help become their best selves. And I know that you guys are doing that stuff at Tuck and with NEGOTIATEx and so.
AD:
You spoke about a Simone Biles, what a great story. And we take a little bit of a detour here. What a great example of just resiliency and mental strength along with physical ability and training and discipline. I was going to ask you if there are any other inspiring stories as you’ve watched the Olympics, this realm of sports and just the ability to persevere?
BP:
Yeah. I, to be honest, like in my world of leadership and mental performance, if you have that Venn diagram, Olympics kind of sits right at that shaded part of that Venn diagram. And it’s impossible to not turn on the TV and just. sit and watch for a half hour and you will see multiple examples of mental toughness or lack thereof.
We’re putting athletes under the most extreme pressure. And I think the fact that it only occurs for summer and winter every four years ups the stakes, right? And then you have the nationality component of it and representing your country, man, it’s just fascinating. And so for my world to my athletes, but also my executive leaders and my military leaders, About things like self talk, visualization, imagery, resilience, how to bounce back, not if you make a mistake, but when you make a mistake.
And all those things are on full display anytime you turn on the TV. I can’t get enough of these Olympics. I don’t know if you saw yesterday, but in the women’s road cycling race, you had an athlete from the US whose last name was Faulkner, who was a Harvard grad. I think she performed in crew in college. I never really took up bike racing until it was a hobby seven years ago. She was actually not even supposed to be in that race because she has an indoor track, which starts up tomorrow. And one of her teammates dropped out to focus on triathlon. So it opened up this slot and during the race, she actually was one of the few riders to be involved in a crash.
So she’s down on the ground and ends up coming back and blows everybody away for the gold. So if you, again, I know this is a little late, so go back to that and it’s easy to get motivated.
AD:
So you were the founding executive director of The Leadership Institute. What were the key elements that contributed to its recognition as the top leadership program in the nation? And can you share any success stories from the program?
Empowering Diverse Leaders: The Buccino Leadership Institute’s Innovative Approach [17:51]
BP:
So when I left West Point and was given a very long leash by the leadership at Seton Hall to come up with a leadership development program. First off, let me just say that most schools have some type of leadership development program.
Usually, oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes they’re situated in the business school, right? And so that’s where you find a lot of those. But in Seton Hall did have a very successful leadership development program inside their business school. However, they wanted to expand it University wide. So why are we only giving business school students this opportunity to grow their leadership?
I came in and we had to create essentially a leadership development program that was Interdisciplinary from scratch, essentially. So what I did was probably what most people would do is I did some benchmarking. I looked around to see what other types of leadership development programs are being done in colleges. And honestly, I was a little bit disappointed, I guess is probably the right word, because a lot of those programs, essentially, when you actually looked at their syllabi, first off, they were limited in scope oftentimes. So we just talked about, they can be siloed in a particular school. But number two is a lot of them, and this might be going too hard, but I felt like a lot of them were essentially ad hoc motivational speaker series that did not have a lot of rhyme or reason. It was just a bunch of senior leaders coming in to talk to students.
And when I looked at that, I felt like we don’t grow professionals in other fields, the same way we try to develop leaders in college for the most part, right? And so let me give you like an example here. In college, if you are in a leadership program and some are more intense than others, right? And some are better than others, but oftentimes it’ll be, let’s say a six-month experience over the course of a semester, or even over the course of a year, you attend these lectures where people are actually talking to you.
But you never really have an opportunity to lead or experience leadership. What you’re expected to do is to listen to these people wax poetically about leadership, who, by the way, might be in positions that are astronomically further up the chain than where you are, and you’re expected to glean those good nuggets. And then turn around and go apply them on your own without getting any type of feedback.
I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity that we have at colleges, which is like, there is no better leadership laboratory than a college. It’s the perfect time for those students to like, they’re independent, they’re ambitious, they want to help, they want to do good. But there’s also think about how many opportunities there are in a college campus to lead from sports to student government, to Greek life, to clubs, like it is literally almost infinite. But yet the piece that I feel like a lot of colleges don’t do very well is on the feedback side.
So what we wanted to do at the Buccino Leadership Institute was to give students, first off, it was a four-year program, and it was co curricular, which meant that I didn’t have the carrot of giving these students academic credit for this program. Even though they were going to invest a lot of time in this program. So if you were a student in our program, you saw me essentially, or their associate director once a week for all four years, which is a tremendous amount of investment that we put in the students, but we have the opportunity then to see how they grow and develop and evolve over time, which was really cool.
Our program was built on providing students with real world leadership opportunities and then giving them feedback. And here’s the kicker. Multiple sources of feedback. So one of the programs that we ran that I was really proud of was these things called interdisciplinary team projects, which doesn’t sound super sexy, but let me give you the reader’s digest version on this. In the second semester of their freshman year, we had about 83 students in the program, we divided those 83 students into teams of 10. So we had eight groups of 10, essentially, and they were purely interdisciplinary. So what I mean by that is we had two business kids. We had two arts and science students. We had education, diplomats, nurses, the whole gamut. And so what we did was we put them all in our conference room, but that conference room is called the market research center.
It’s used. I don’t know if tuck has something similar to this, but they used it. As a market research room, whether you had a conference room decked out with audio, cameras, everything, you had the double pane glass. And then on the other side was a control room where you could see and hear everything. I saw that and I was like, this is our new leadership lab.
So in that first meeting of those students of the interdisciplinary team projects, we brought each team in by themselves for their hour. And there was no faculty member. What we did was we filmed that first meeting. And what they had to do in that meeting was one was we had them come up with a team name, right? To see if they would spend 50 minutes arguing whether they want to call themselves the sharks or the jets. And then the second thing was we had them select, we gave them a menu of three semester projects to do. So they had to pick one of those three. And then the most interesting part, which was like a natural experiment was they had to determine who their leader was in that meeting.
And so there was real stakes on this because that was going to be the leader for the entire semester. And we filmed each session. And what we did was we gave that feedback, that film to each student. And then we did a coaching session with them to see like, how did you perform in that moment? Cause it was a real world moment, right?
It was like, how do you perform in a real boardroom? So my favorite story from that comes from one of my nursing students. I came from a big Irish family and she was a freshman nursing student in this room. And when it came time for the group to decide who the leader was going to be, they said, does anyone want to be their leader? Maybe about half the hands went up. Her hands remain firmly in her lap.
Number two, she didn’t really say much that entire hour. So she was introverted, right? Initially. She deferred everything to the more extroverted students in the room. And so when we had my coaching session with her, it was just her and I, after she had seen her film, I had this whole coaching script out of talking about the importance of, hey, even if you’re introverted, you can still get in the fight, but you have to choose your moments when you’re going to engage.
So I had all this stuff laid out. It was all for naught because when she came in the room, I said, so did you watch her film? And she said, yeah. I said how do you think she did? And automatically without me having to say anything. She said, When I was growing up in high school and elementary school, I had all these teachers that would tell me, hey, you have to be more engaged, but you’re too quiet.
And when you’re quiet, you look like you’re disengaged. And so they were calling on her to participate more, but she couldn’t see it until she said she saw herself on film. And once she saw herself on film, she said, I don’t want to be like that. And I was like, it’s like the best coaching session I ever had. I was like, I didn’t have to say anything. And she already had this moment. Fast forward at the end of the semester, we had each student provide peer feedback that was anonymized, but we had students, what we did was we had them rank.
So if you had 10 students in your program, you had to rank, including yourself. Who was most impactful to least impactful. And then we also had them come up with a scoring system of one to 10. So that if Aram was in our group and he was a 10, I also made you justify, why did you give Aram a 10 and Nolan a nine? The student that said three words in the entire first meeting at the end of the semester was co-MVP of her group.
I put a lot of that on the fact that she had an opportunity to lead, an opportunity to get feedback that she had never had. She’d gotten before, but it was delivered in a different way. And she had people behind her supporting her. So yeah, for those reasons, I think Buccino Leadership Institute was really exciting and impactful. And probably one of the things I’m most proud about.
AD:
Yeah. I love the model that you shared. It seems simple, but I do think it’s often overlooked, right? I think we often just go to sit, listen, and hope that through osmosis from, as I listened to you, I become a better leader, but it’s really that practice. And then, as you said, multiple sources of feedback.
And I love what you talked about with recording. I’m convinced I do the same thing in my negotiation course, Bryan, until I see myself and I hear myself, right? Sometimes it’s even the language that I use, but until I see it, it’s really hard for me to recognize these potential behaviors. How they’re received and maybe not, they don’t send the message that I’m trying to send.
NM:
Well, that is it for us on today’s podcast. If you haven’t already, please rate, review and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast, and we’ll see you in the next episode.
