Military Veterans Use Their Experiences from the Field to be Leaders as Civilians

Having military experience can give one a valuable skills life while teaching how to live a disciplined lifestyle. Many former and current servicemen and women have utilized the skills they learned in training and applied it to their everyday lives. However, for some military veterans that transition from military life to civilian life, these lifestyles can clash, and transitioning comes with its own set of challenges.

How do some military veterans navigate utilizing what they learned in service with everyday life and leadership encounters in civilian life?

In the newest episode of “Straight Outta Crumpton,” host Greg Crumpton is joined by Gabrielle Bar to interview Tony Grayson, General Manager of Compass Datacenters, to talk about his military background and how it’s helped him maneuver through his role as a leader.

Grayson is a Navy veteran and served for over two decades. The former Sub Commander led over a thousand other servicemen and women during his post. After leaving active duty, Grayson went into the data center field and naturally applied some of his military experience to his leadership skills. But the marriage between them isn’t always seamless.

“You know, there’s a myth that in the military that everything that you learned in the military carries over, and I think it’s the exact opposite. I think that’s why you find a lot of military fail in the civilian worlds…” said Grayson.

Crumpton, Bar, and Grayson also touched on …

1. Grayson’s extensive military background commanding submarines
2. The importance of being open minded to different opinions and mindsets
3. The mission of Salute and Grayson’s advocacy work for military veterans

“Salute is kind of one of those groups that are out there and there’s OverWatch, there’s a couple of them that really try to bring veterans, National Guard, reservists, and spouses … and you know they use it as a feeder system, so they’re okay with…someone coming in and leaving out here and go and do better things,” he said.

Grayson added that as the Veteran’s Chair at Infrastructure Masons, a mission of his is to attract and acquire as many veterans as he can into the tech field.

“We should stop looking at these quotas hiring veterans and then actually trying to reach out and bring veterans in, and being totally agnostic of where they go,” he said.

Tony Grayson is the General Manager of Compass Datacenters. He has been in that role since 2021. Prior to that, he was an executive at Oracle for three years and had previous roles at Amazon Web Services and Facebook. Grayson entered the tech and data field after over 20 years of service in the Navy, where he served as a Deputy for Operations and submarine commander. He is an alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and Old Dominion University.