There is a moment most leaders recognize, even if they rarely talk about it openly. A key person on the team turns over. Someone new steps in, and everything you had built, every rhythm and shorthand and shared understanding, starts from scratch. The methods that worked before don’t necessarily transfer. The approach that earned trust with one person falls flat with another.
John Von Kleeck knows that moment well. As an officer who managed more than 160 people at a time during his military career, he encountered it not as an exception but as a recurring feature of the job. And what he learned from those transitions shaped a leadership philosophy that centers not on authority or rank, but on relationships, clear intent, and the discipline to understand what actually motivates the people around you.
John Von Kleeck is now transitioning from military service into the commercial construction and project management industry, bringing with him a framework for leading large teams through complexity. But to understand where he’s headed, it helps to understand how he got here.
How Managing 160 People Reshaped John Von Kleeck’s Leadership Thinking
The numbers alone are instructive. At his peak, John Von Kleeck oversaw more than 160 personnel at once, a scale where individual attention becomes logistically difficult and the temptation to manage by directive is real. He didn’t give in to that temptation.
“I believe social intelligence and people skills are still the most important to professional success,” he explained. “When managing large groups of people, having a plan is always important, but having good relationships with peers and subordinates is always key to carry it out.”
That belief isn’t abstract. It was tested constantly. Managing at that scale means working through layers of subordinate leaders, each of whom brings their own style, experience level, and professional background. The person at the top can’t do everything directly. The system only works when trust flows both ways and when communication is specific enough that people can act on it without waiting for approval at every step.
“The skill of giving clear intent and guidance has been a key skill that’s enabled me to manage large groups of people and complete tasks much larger than what I could achieve alone,” he said. That phrase, clear intent, is worth pausing on. It’s not about issuing orders. It’s about making sure the people around you understand the purpose behind the task well enough to make good decisions on their own when circumstances change.
The Subordinate Leader Who Changed Everything
One experience stands out in the way John Von Kleeck talks about leadership development. At some point in his career, he took over oversight of a subordinate leader whose skills, attitude, and approach differed significantly from those of the person who had held the role before. He described it as “more challenging than anticipated.”
The temptation in that situation is to treat the new person as a problem to be corrected, to train them into the shape of their predecessor. John Von Kleeck took a different path. “Learning to understand what motivates a subordinate leader, what their past experience is, and how they approach tasks is key to getting the most out of our combined experiences and approaches,” he reflected.
What he described next gets at something most leadership development programs miss entirely. The goal wasn’t uniformity. It was integration. “Learning how to teach them the new job, and providing guardrails while helping them use their expertise can be a fine line, but one that pays dividends when done effectively.”
That balance, between setting clear expectations and leaving room for someone to contribute what only they can offer, is genuinely difficult to strike. Too much control and you lose the value of their specific knowledge. Too little structure and the work suffers. Getting it right requires patience, observation, and a willingness to invest time in understanding a person before passing judgment on their capabilities.
What Deployment to Poland Taught John Von Kleeck About Scale and Relationships
If there is a single chapter in John Von Kleeck’s military career that illustrates how leadership and logistics intersect at the highest stakes, it’s his deployment to Poland. There, he played a substantial role in the logistics operations of the base, helping to supply mission-critical support and coordinate resources at a level that demanded both technical precision and strong working relationships.
“We provide all sorts of supplies for the mission in Ukraine, and were able to create relationships with locals and do training that hadn’t been done on that scale before,” he recalled. That last phrase is significant. Training at that scale doesn’t happen without relationships. It requires local cooperation, cross-cultural communication, and the kind of trust that has to be built deliberately, not assumed.
Back stateside at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he carried those same principles into the day-to-day work of running a unit. Managing over 100 newcomers alongside just one other colleague, he built systems for onboarding, delegation, and accountability that allowed a small leadership team to care for a large group without cutting corners on either the work or the people doing it.
These are the experiences that travel well beyond any single organization or sector.
Why Adaptability Is the Skill That Outlasts Everything Else
The military is not a forgiving environment for rigidity. Tasks arrive on short timelines. Personnel change. Circumstances shift without warning, and the ability to adjust without losing sight of the mission becomes the defining competency of any effective officer.
“The military requires a high degree of adaptability and flexibility, as tasks are often given on a short suspense,” John Von Kleeck said. “Learning how to accomplish the mission with a large number of people is challenging, but the military has taught me how to do so effectively.”
That adaptability extends to how he thinks about people. His time working across a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives taught him that there’s no single right way to approach a problem. “Being in the military, I’ve worked with people from all backgrounds,” he noted. “It has made me open minded, capable of understanding that people see problems from a different perspective than I do.”
This is not a small thing. In complex operations, whether military or commercial, the leaders who struggle most are often those who mistake their own instincts for universal truth. John Von Kleeck learned early that the person across the table might have a better read on a specific problem, and that asking, listening, and incorporating that perspective is a strength, not a concession.
How These Principles Apply to Construction and Project Management
John Von Kleeck is direct about where he’s headed. “I would like to become a project manager in the commercial or heavy construction business,” he said. “Leading teams to complete goals, and eventually learning the business enough to lead large projects and generate business.”
The parallels between military operations management and large-scale construction project management are more substantive than they might first appear. Both require coordinating multiple teams with different specializations. Both operate under real deadlines and resource constraints. Both demand clear communication between layers of leadership, from field crews to senior project managers to clients. And both can be derailed not by a shortage of technical expertise but by a breakdown in trust or communication at a critical moment.
John Von Kleeck is candid about being new to the construction industry. His authority doesn’t come from construction credentials he hasn’t yet earned. It comes from having done the harder, more foundational work of learning how to lead people at scale, build trust across diverse teams, and keep large operations moving when conditions change. Those skills have a proven record. The industry context is what he’s still learning, and he approaches that with the same open-minded discipline he brings to everything else.
- Managing 160-plus personnel simultaneously while maintaining individual accountability
- Building logistics relationships with local partners during deployment to Poland
- Onboarding over 100 unit newcomers alongside a single colleague at Fort Campbell
- Adapting leadership style to a subordinate whose background differed sharply from his predecessor
- Applying West Point-level standards of personal and professional accountability consistently over time
John Von Kleeck on What He’d Tell Anyone Changing Careers
He’s not someone who pretends the transition from military to civilian professional life is simple. But his advice for others in similar moments of change is grounded and practical.
“I would advise people to keep an open mind and try to learn the new job and field as best as you can before making judgements, forming opinions, or attempting to make sweeping changes,” he said. “The moment you think you know everything is when you stop learning, and learning new things is a key to success in a world that’s changing too quickly.”
That’s not the advice of someone who coasted through a career. It’s the perspective of someone who has had to earn credibility in new environments repeatedly, and who understands that listening well is often the most underrated professional skill a person can develop.
John Von Kleeck has built his career on the premise that leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about creating the conditions where the smartest people in the room can do their best work together. That principle doesn’t belong to the military. It belongs to any organization where success depends on more than one person to achieve it. And that, as it turns out, is almost every organization worth being part of.
