We’re excited to introduce another valued Employer Partner of The Honor Foundation.
These are companies and organizations who have hired men and women from our program and/or who have generously given us their time, resources and connections in an effort to help build a stronger network for our Fellows after service — a community post community.
Read below to hear from Millennium Health CEO, Andrew Lukowiak, on career transition, company culture and more.
Q1 What advice do you have for those who are experiencing transition?
Without question, the military training received by Honor Foundation Fellows is an asset to any private company. Thriving in uncertain environments, dealing with ambiguity, placing “Team” ahead of “Self”, and understanding what it means to be mission oriented has already prepared each of you to be incredibly successful in the private sector. The best advice I can provide is that learning how to effectively communicate these accomplishments in ways that the private sector can understand and value is essential. Finding corporate sponsors, workshops, or other venues to help you translate your military capabilities into meaningful corporate vocabulary can be all the difference in landing that first job in the private sector.
Q2 What is your favorite interview question?
“Tell me about a time that you failed and what did you learn from it?” All too often hiring managers are focused on a candidate’s successes in an interview. How an individual responds to failure, to criticism, to feedback and uses these opportunities to improve themselves will tell you a lot about their ability to grow through adversity, a key factor to success in any corporate environment.
Q3 What makes the culture at your company special?
We operate on a principle of decentralized leadership, that is, we empower our team members from all levels within our organization to make change, initiate improvements and own our success. This environment of collaboration makes the entire company stronger and more effective.
Q4 What drives you every day?
Making a difference in the lives of our customers and their patients. Over the past two years, we have researched and developed trend reports utilizing real-time urine drug testing data to identify and alert clinicians about emerging developments in the drug use landscape, resulting in multiple, peer-reviewed, open-access publications and scientific reports. These publications have been widely accessed by the healthcare community and provide resources that professionals can use to help better identify and treat patients coping with the devastating disease of addiction. As a result of this work, in January of 2020, we announced that we had joined forces with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to donate this data to help combat our country’s ongoing drug overdose epidemic. Every day we get to come to work and ask “Ok, now what else can we do better to help save lives?”
Q5 What book do you find most valuable?
Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Lief Babin describes how leadership―at every level―is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails. With topics including Decentralized Command, Cover and Move, and Leading Up the Chain, the former SEALs (and authors) use their experiences in Iraq as examples of how individuals can improve leadership in any environment. According to Babin, “There are no bad teams – only bad leaders.” There’s considerable truth to that statement.
Q6 What is a lesson you learned the hard way?
A lesson I learned the hard way is often quoted, “you deserve what you tolerate”. It is up to us as leaders to recognize when changes need to be made for the good of the organization, even when those decisions are difficult to make.
Q7 What defines a leader?
A leader is defined by their ability to create a vision for a given purpose and identify the individuals whose specialized talents, when aligned as a team, can successfully execute on the vision to achieve the desired outcome.
Q8 What is your favorite quote?
Hard to pick just one but the quote that I reflect on the most often is hanging in my office from the Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena; “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
