Two-star general Matt Smith is the special guest on this week’s podcast, where he talks about his role at Emory University helping servicemembers transition into the business world.
After spending more than 30 years in the Army and National Guard, retired Gen. Matt Smith is spending his post-military career helping servicemembers and veterans translate their leadership skills developed in uniform into civilian career success.
Smith is the executive director of Veteran Initiatives at Emory University in Atlanta, where he leads the Goizueta Business School Master of Business for Veterans program. The accredited one-year master’s degree program is designed for servicemembers transitioning out of the military after 20-plus years who want to translate their leadership strength into civilian business terms.
“We basically have like this foundational professional development transition program … it's translating your experience as a veteran into business context to give you confidence in that transition,” Smith said.
Smith, a retired two-star general, joined the Tango Alpha Lima podcast to talk about his path from a “Leave It to Beaver” childhood to military service, and how he’s helping former servicemembers prepare for the business world by showing both employers and veterans the qualities that military service brings – leadership, adaptability, teamwork, resilience and commitment to mission.
Smith likened his childhood upbringing to the popular 1957 family show, as he had a stay-at-home mom, his dad worked in the public school system, and he was involved with church and Scouting. So “in many ways the Army was the next logical progression from that because I liked walking around in the woods with a backpack on. Might as well have a weapon also.”
Over the course of his career, Smith commanded at every level from company to brigade and led deployments and operations across Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Georgia, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Europe, and served in strategic leadership roles at the Pentagon.
His three decades of military service led him to his leadership role at Emory University, where he is teaching veterans “the language of business through the academics,” he said, to help them transition into a nonprofit, commercial or entrepreneurial role at the end of the program.
“One of the points I make to the students in the program I'm running now, half of whom are senior NCOs (noncommissioned officers), is life is about selling, whether you're a salesman or not, you got to be able to interact with people, get your points across,” Smith added. “And a lot of military veterans, especially more senior ones, I've noticed, don't particularly think of themselves that way. Like the NCO Corps, to me, are the ultimate salespeople because they don't necessarily have the authority, so they have to be able to convince through influence. And it's a highly translatable skill into the business world.”
Smith also spends his time educating civilian employers of the value veterans bring to the workforce with their leadership skills. “I spend a significant portion of my time kind of addressing that issue, if you will … about bringing those leadership experiences to other endeavors outside of the uniformed services,” he said. “I basically tell our collective stories a lot to make the point about the dynamism that veterans can bring to any organization.”
Smith shared a story of asking a volunteer professor for the veteran’s cohort at Goizueta Business School why she liked teaching a different demographic of students with an average age of 39-40.
“She said, ‘(Veterans) are accountable to themselves. They're accountable to each other. They hold us, as professors, accountable, and they're always on time. And, you know, the vast majority of our student body and higher ed is not like that these days.’”
Also in this episode, podcast hosts Stacy Pearsall, Adam Marr and Joe Worley discuss:
- How the USS Skate made the impossible possible at the North Pole on Aug. 11, 1958
- America’s oldest military decoration that dates back to the Revolutionary War
- Why yelling “Geronimo!" became a military tradition, thanks to a U.S. Army paratrooper in 1940 at Fort Benning, Ga.
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