Stay Calm and Don’t Panic: Translating Military Leadership Lessons to the Corporate World with Paul Nadeau (1/2)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

Imagine transitioning from individual contributor at a company to managing an organization of 155 people. That’s quite the promotion. How would you approach that kind of change?

Before you get too anxious about what’s coming, Paul Nadeau, our guest this week in episode 344, has two pieces of advice: stay calm, and don’t panic.

Paul’s career began as a Radioman in the Navy where he focused on telecommunications, but he later pursued law enforcement. You’ll hear firsthand about the experiences that cemented this mantra of remaining calm in Paul’s mind and follow him through leadership training in the Navy. Listen in to hear how a specific mix of classroom instruction and practical experience forged a leadership philosophy that is widely applicable both in the military and in the corporate world.

Whether you are an individual contributor or a people leader today, you’ll learn how to identify the traits of natural leaders and understand some of the real challenges of stepping into a management role.

Original Recording Date: 08-28-2025

Topics – Meet Paul Nadeau, Birth of a Specialty, The Importance of Staying Calm, Leadership Training and Gaining Experience, Assessing Leadership Talent

2:28 – Meet Paul Nadeau

• Paul Nadeau is a Solutions Consultant at Palo Alto Networks.
• Paul’s early career began with joining the Navy, but his decision to join starts even earlier.
  • Paul grew up in the Texas Hill Country (areas around Fredericksburg and Kerrville) and attended a private school for most of his young life.
  • Though the academics were great at private school, Paul talked his father into letting him attend public school for his junior year of high school.
  • At the public high school, Paul started to get into trouble. At one point his father had a very frank conversation with him.
  • “You need to do something with your life.” – advice from Paul Nadeau’s father
  • Paul’s father was a Marine who served in World War II and was awarded a Purple Heart for his service. He suggested Paul consider joining the military. Paul’s father wanted him to have some type of trade to fall back on after military service.
  • While the Air Force did seem appealing, Paul ended up joining the Navy in 1988. After boot camp, Paul was sent to all kinds of schools before serving on the USS America in Norfolk, Virginia in 1989.
  • Paul was serving when Desert Storm broke out in 1990.
  • After serving in the Navy, Paul decided to go into law enforcement (something he had always wanted to do). Though his work in the Navy focused on telecommunications / satellite communications, Paul didn’t want to keep doing it after serving in the Navy. He chose to attend the police academy instead.
  • Though Paul enjoyed being a police officer, the pay did not support starting a family.
  • Paul re-enlisted in the Navy in 1995 to once again focus on telecommunications, trading some of the re-enlistment bonus money to use for school.
    • Paul says he did Cisco training, Novell training, Unix administration, and even Windows administration training. He and co-workers were pioneering running these systems across satellite links (from ship to shore).
  • When Paul went into the Navy, they were looking for people who had clean backgrounds. He was able to obtain a security clearance after joining.

7:07 – Birth of a Specialty

• How did Paul end up in telecommunications after joining the Navy?
  • At age 17 when he first enlisted in the Navy, Paul wanted to do something in the medical field. He was told no.
  • Paul’s second choice for occupation was to be a cop. At the time, you had to have at least 4 years of service to do this.
  • The there was an opening for a job (or ratings as they are called) called Radioman focused on telecommunications. Though the nuclear program was an option at the time, Paul wanted nothing to do with it.
  • “Whenever we say option, it was pretty much like, ‘this is what you’re going to do. We’re going to send you over here, and you’re going to learn this….’ That’s what got me into telecommunications as a whole and into networking. Yeah, it was a good step.” – Paul Nadeau
  • The job placements were generally based on ASVAB scores, and it was Paul’s high scores that presented the opportunities for different fields.
    • Maybe we should have a military recruiter on the show at some point to better understand how this process works?
  • What drew Paul to law enforcement after getting exposure to telecommunications in the Navy?
    • When Paul was a kid (even as young as kindergarten), his dad (a disabled veteran) would walk him to school each day. Every day he would ask Paul what he wanted to do when he grew up. Paul always said he wanted to be a cop.
      • Paul isn’t 100% sure why he wanted to be a cop from such a young age, but there was a state trooper who lived in the same neighborhood. Paul loved his car and thought he was one of the nicest guys in the world.
    • Six-year-old Paul wanted a career in law enforcement.
• John asks about access to schools in the military. The training seems relevant to a field even for the person who has not yet worked in that field.
  • Paul says his training for Cisco and Novell, for example, was delivered by a civilian instructor who visited the Naval base. It was civilian training paid for and sponsored by the Navy.
  • After Desert Storm while still stationed in Norfolk, Paul wanted to attend Old Dominion University.
    • He remembers having to attend in uniform, but the cost of attending was covered by the Navy. Paul wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to get more education.
  • There was also a Radioman “A” school Paul attended and some “Sea” schools. He learned satellite communication and cryptology, for example. The training courses for Cisco and Novell were mixed into the same curriculum as these Naval schools.
  • The schools you were eligible to attend were based on your job. Paul tells us the Radioman rating from years ago has changed to IT (according to Naval classification / rating).
    • He remembers studying morse code and HF (high frequency) communications (ship-to-ship, ship-to-shore, communication over satellite, etc.).
    • Radio was considered a secure space, and the personnel focused in these areas got exposed to all of the new technologies. Paul liked being able to tinker with it.
    • In addition to attending school, working on a ship 7 days per week is on-the-job training. Paul worked 7 days per week for 7 months during Desert Storm.

14:34 – The Importance of Staying Calm

• How did military training translate to intense / hostile situations in law enforcement?
  • Paul was assigned to an AMCC (American Mobile Communications Center) unit for Desert Storm, and as a result he went through a lot of training (hand-to-hand combat, logistics training, and other things one might use when forward deployed).
  • “The number one thing that you actually learn, believe it or not, is the key to success – stay calm. Don’t panic…. Panic is the number one thing that will get you in trouble every time…. It’s kind of been the guiding light in life…that one little bit of information.” – Paul Nadeau
    • Paul is a private pilot and understands the importance of staying calm while he is in the cockpit of a plane. This translates to so many areas of life (interactions with kids, situations at work, etc.).
  • Did Paul do anything specific to help himself stay calm? What would he tell people who are not good at this?
    • Listen to Paul’s story of being a field training officer during his time in law enforcement.
    • The instinct to stay calm sort of came naturally to him.
    • When situations begin to escalate, take a second to think about them rationally. It won’t do us any good to let our mind run away with a situation and have it take control of us.
    • Many people consistently fight anxiety. Paul has been fortunate enough not to struggle with it.
  • Was what Paul describes (staying calm even in difficult situations) a result of basic training and becoming a little bit desensitized?
    • Paul tells the story of basic training and getting exposed to tear gas.
    • “You can panic and pass out because you will. You will stop breathing and just hit the ground. Or you can stay calm and regulate your breathing and kind of center yourself. And when you do, you can…overcome the problem or issue. That was my initial wow. This is a really good thing for life in general…. Whenever you make it out, yeah, you’re coughing. You’re hacking. Your eyes are burning…. But you were still able to actually perform. You were actually able to breathe. You were actually able to say a sentence…. They want you to have that levity to do that….” – Paul Nadeau, on staying calm in basic training
    • Paul describes a similar type of training for firefighters. You’re in a giant room of 2-3-foot deep water, and someone dumps gasoline on the water to start a fire with it. Then it’s the firefighter’s job to put out the fire.
      • Despite instructors demonstrating how to put out the fire, people will panic when put in the situation.
    • Some of this may go back to the training Paul received on how to perform under pressure and stress.
  • Maybe we can practice responding calmly to high stress situations?
    • Paul shares the story of being a newly trained police officer. After 2 weeks of training, he was sent out on patrol by the sheriff. The first thing he had to respond to was the scene of a vehicle accident (a head on collision).
    • Paul remembers how quiet the accident scene was. He could hear the cracking of metal and steam from car engines.
    • “All of a sudden you hit that moment of levity. Don’t panic. You can’t panic with this. You got called here to do a job. You’re going to be the only person here that can actually do that job…. You have to kind of be that leader so to speak, that calm amongst the storm, and just do your job. And it’s difficult….” – Paul Nadeau, on being the first to the scene of an accident
    • Even if you are calm during difficult situations like the one above, Paul tells us you have to take time to decompress afterward and work through the situation mentally.
    • “I felt like maybe there was maybe something wrong because I wasn’t breaking down…I hadn’t lost my cool with it…. I was functioning perfectly fine. Did it affect me? Absolutely. There’s no doubt about it…. If you say that it didn’t affect you, you’re not human…. There’s still that human emotion side of it. But it wasn’t to an incapacitating level.” – Paul Nadeau
  • John has heard a panic or anxiety response is a lot like a glass of water. If the glass is close to full, it doesn’t take much to overflow. But if you intentionally keep the water level low, it takes a lot more to cause spills.
    • Paul has seen different people handle stressful situations differently over time. It’s not right or wrong but the way they handle it.
  • Does Paul not have an adrenaline response?
    • A pilot needs a healthy dose of fear when flying a plane.
    • Paul says it’s more of a primal fear response that we’re talking about. Panic in the early days of civilization, for example, might mean you get eaten.

24:26 – Leadership Training and Gaining Experience

• Where does leadership play into the story?
  • In the military, ranks of E-1 through E-3 are usually entry level. Being promoted to the rank of E-4 is normally when leadership responsibility comes into play.
  • In the area of radio, there were 2 subdivisions. E-4 was more of a leadership role in the message center because it staffed so many more people than the tech control side. Usually there is an E-5 and an E-6 to look over operations as well.
    • Tech control – setting up circuits
    • Message center – where all messages came in (could result of hundreds of messages per minute)
  • Paul says you get leadership training, but it is mixed with a lot of real-world, practical experience. In Paul’s first 4 years, he made it to E-6.
    • In the military, things are pretty black and white without a lot of ambiguity.
    • There are situations both in the military and in the civilian world in which leaders are expected to perform conflict resolution.
  • Listen to the lesson a senior leader in the military taught Paul after his leadership training about the difference between productivity and activity.
    • “We have to be productive, not just active. So, it doesn’t matter if you go have 15 conversations with customers. Did you have a meaningful interaction with them? That’s more important. The same thing when you’re in leadership…if you’re not having meaningful interactions or conversations with the people that work for you or the people that you work for, then you’re missing out. You’re really missing out…. There’s a lot of things you can talk about, but it has to be meaningful. It has to be directional. That’s what I learned…and it wasn’t actually in the training itself. It was actually from a chief warrant officer.” – Paul Nadeau
  • The activity vs. productivity idea applies to any technology job. There’s always another ticket to work on.
    • “Each one of those jobs…yeah, you can do a lot of activity. And you can be…the person that is just burned out at the end of the day…. If you sit back and look at it…, am I truly productive? Have I actually done something that has been great for the customer, good for the company, good for me…?” – Paul Nadeau
    • If we try to get more productive instead of more active, it could reduce our workload. Everyone around you will value this shift. Paul tells us it has a lot to do with meaningful interactions with others.
• Did the leadership training and the lesson Paul learned from the chief warrant officer make him want to pursue more of a leadership role in the future?
  • “The training itself was fantastic. What I learned was how much I didn’t know. And I learned what level I didn’t know it at.” – Paul Nadeau
  • Paul says anyone can take a group of people and manage them (i.e. make sure the tasks get completed). That’s management. True leaders can take groups of disparate people together and lead the team.
    • When Paul was in the military, he would ask other leaders how he could help the people under him evolve in such a score-based environment.
  • “To me, what was exciting about it was the ability to actually be able to connect and actually be able to help people with their career…. Nothing really dealt with your personal ability, your brand. You didn’t really have a brand, and then you do whenever you get out. And all of a sudden you don’t really know what this brand is because in the military you’re a collective. In the civilian world it’s more of an individual that works in a collective environment…. Taking that and fostering it was a really interesting evolution.” – Paul Nadeau
  • Paul’s first people management opportunity in the corporate world was at a telecommunications company where he worked as an individual contributor.
    • Paul’s neighbor worked for a power company and wanted someone to come run their operations. He had known Paul for a few years and knew he had military experience.
    • The neighbor made Paul an offer, and he decided to resign from his employer. But the story took an unexpected twist when Paul received a call from the CEO of the telecommunications company who would not accept his resignation without a face-to-face conversation.
    • The CEO told Paul they were about to flatten the company’s management structure the following week and made him an offer to be director of worldwide services. Paul had a good reputation, and the military leadership training made him a great fit for the role in the CEO’s eyes.
    • “I thought about it all the way home…. I’ve been here. I know these people. I know where the problems are and where the issues are…. One of the things that I didn’t anticipate – I was a colleague. I went from colleague to suddenly I was in charge…. And there’s a big difference whenever you do that.” – Paul Nadeau, on taking a new role within his current company
    • Paul says taking on the leadership role had a number of trials and tribulations he never expected. But it was a lot of fun and very rewarding.
• Paul was an ATM Engineer and then had to lead teams of ATM engineers. ATM stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode in the telecommunications world.
  • “I went from managing myself to managing 155 people in 3 different geos around the world.” – Paul Nadeau
  • Paul had to manage a $35 million profit and loss center that was in disarray, his first task was to systematically understand the problems and prioritize them appropriately.
  • It was a large, complex organization. Paul needed front-line managers underneath him, and it was important to take time to train and mentor those managers (some of which were first-time managers).
    • “Not only am I now managing North America along with the rest of the world…now I have to train somebody on how to be a leader. Now you kind of have extra hours built into your day…. You can’t just do your job and then go home….” – Paul Nadeau, on supporting first-time managers
  • An engineer who once worked for Paul went on to become the COO of a company in Canada. This person thanked Paul for everything he had learned about leadership while working on that team.
    • Paul cites military leadership principles as providing the foundation of what he needed to succeed.
    • “Everybody thinks the military is like Full Metal Jacket…. That’s not it at all.” – Paul Nadeau
    • In his role now at Palo Alto Networks, Paul is part of the Vets Net program. The skills of military veterans are widely applicable outside the military.
• Was there a specific NCO leadership training track or course that was especially useful to Paul, or was learning on the job from experienced leaders more useful?
  • Paul says it was really a mix of both.
  • There are advancement cycles in the military during which people go up for promotion. This involves taking tests and getting recommendation letters as well as usually going before a board of review. People either get promoted or are classified as PNA (Pass, Not Advanced), but there are only so many openings.
  • When you get promoted up to E-5 or E-6, this is middle management in the military. Once you are promoted to either E-6 or E-7, Paul says there is a structured, required class.
    • One part of the class is instructor-led training.
    • The second class is for reinforcement and absorbing knowledge from other leaders.
    • Paul tells us this is a really good combination of classroom training and hands-on experiential training.
    • Also, advancing from E-1 to E-6 in the same area taught Paul a lot about promotion from within, and he was able to apply this to roles outside the military.

38:48 – Assessing Leadership Talent

• Paul spoke about hiring new leaders and knowing he would incur an overhead of mentoring a new leader, which sounds like an idea built into the training he received and experienced in the military.
  • “One of the things that’s really amazing to me, and I see this all the time…. People think that because you’re a great engineer, you’re going to be a great engineering leader. They think because you’re a great salesperson you’re going to be a great sales leader…. It’s a completely different skill set altogether. Just because you can sell like there’s no tomorrow doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a great leader….” – Paul Nadeau
  • Paul talks about another type of person that is an individual contributor who may be struggling but has a number of really good skills we might consider leadership skills – being structured, being helpful, wanting to help people.
    • But even if someone has these skills, would they want to be a people leader? They might not. Paul mentions cases where he tried to persuade people to pursue leadership, and they refused because they were happy in their role.
  • There’s another group of people who want to be in management and continue to try for and chase it (like a dog chasing a car). But once they finally get the management role, they don’t really know what to do with it.
    • Once this leader begins to struggle, morale on their team goes down.
    • Sometimes higher-level leaders aren’t training their front line managers or other leaders underneath them. There are multiple negative downstream impacts of this.
    • Paul thinks being a leader should be embedded within us. Even if it isn’t, people can learn how to do it.
    • It can be difficult to find someone who has the skill set of being both technical and being a leader, but when you see it, you know that person needs to be in leadership.
• If Paul recognized leadership traits in someone, what would he say to the person to encourage them to pursue leadership?
  • Paul would start by asking whether the person had ever thought about leadership.
  • If the person did not think they had the skill set, Paul would politely correct them and tell them why they have the skills to do it. It could be transparency, conflict resolution, not avoiding problems, etc.
  • “The second part of it is…do you know what you’re getting into?” – Paul Nadeau, encouraging someone to become a leader
    • People might not realize managing upward is something required when you’re a people leader. You have to pick your battles, decide what to filter, and provide feedback to your boss (which might mean voicing concerns about an idea being silly).
    • Many times, people not in leadership don’t know they are qualified for it.
  • “You have that person in every organization that when they leave, it’s worse than if their leader left. If that first-level manager left, a lot of times that’s less of an impact than the natural born leaders that you have that are individual contributors on the team. Because that’s who actually rallies the team. That’s who actually gets people to do things.” – Paul Nadeau, on leadership qualities in individual contributors
  • Overall, it’s a fun conversation to have with someone according to Paul, but does the person really know what they are getting into by pursuing people management?

Mentioned in the Outro

• Paul’s move into law enforcement after being trained in telecommunications in the Navy might on the surface look like an odd choice, but he’s modeling going to try something new for the rest of us.
  • Paul wanted to be in law enforcement from a young age. It was his ambition.
  • Past guests like Daniel Paluszek and Brad Christian wanted to try working for startups and decided to make job changes, for example.
  • The decision to go and try something nets us experience we can take to our next role, whatever it may be. We’re confident Paul’s time in law enforcement helped him in his next roles back in the Navy and in civilian life.
• Many technology companies are looking for veterans who have transferrable skills from military service to apply in our industry.
• For more stories of veterans whose technology careers began in the military, check out our veteran tag and list of episodes.
• The comment about the impact of individual contributors leaving a team made Nick think a lot about our conversations on the role of tech lead or team lead. For discussions with guests where we focused on these roles and reasons for taking them, check out these tags on our site:
  • Team Lead
  • Tech Lead
• Paul’s move to director of worldwide services and the need to focus and prioritize for a large organization reminded us of the conversation about manager priorities from Episode 328 – A Manager’s Preoccupation: 1-1 Meetings and Focused Prioritization with Joseph Griffiths (2/2)

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