“You’re there to support the people doing the harder mission.”

 

Capital Planner John Gremmels already knew the military life long before he joined the Navy in 1988. His dad was in the Marines and Gremmels describes himself as a “Marine brat” who spent parts of his childhood on overseas military bases. After high school, he applied for an NROTC scholarship and had to choose between San Diego State or OSU.
 
“I came here because I liked the look of the college,” he said, citing the “classic look” of OSU’s Corvallis campus.
 
After graduating in 1987 with a business degree, he went on to Navy flight school. Originally, he wanted to become a pilot, but his eyesight wasn’t quite good enough to pass the pilot exam. Instead, he served as a naval flight officer which entailed operating the radar systems, sensors and directing air combat operations.
  
Gremmels also supported drug interdiction operations, intercepting illegal drug traffic between the U.S. and Columbia. He served in Desert Storm and was stationed in the Persian Gulf area after the war. From there, he got a teaching job with the NROTC program at OSU – his last job in the military after nine years of service. He finished at the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
 
After earning an additional degree in construction engineering management, he went on to work for a general contractor in Salem for several years. But eventually, the contractor began shifting operations north to the Portland area and Gremmels felt pulled back to OSU. A classmate of his from NROTC was the director of capital planning at the time and the two friends reconnected. Gremmels applied for an open position as project manager and then moved into the capital planner role.

Gremmels said that the military shaped his approach to work and leadership in multiple ways. A key lesson he absorbed was being flexible and willing to learn.
 
“In the military, you don’t do the same thing for more than a year,” he said. “When you start a new job, sometimes you feel like you’re trying to drink from a fire hose.” 

But that sense of chaos and overwhelm, he said, is all part of an important process. 

“You understand that you work hard and then you’re going to be good at that job. That sense of being able to take on new responsibilities, even if you’re in way over your head at first.” 
 
Gremmels said he feels that the military leadership style is often misunderstood and what he learned was that successful missions depend on leaders who resist the temptation to see themselves and their work as the most important. 

“You’re trying to get the best out of your people,” he said. He explained the ideal leadership structure as an inverted triangle – instead of placing the leader at the top of the triangle, with layers of people working to support them, flip the triangle over and think of the leader as someone supporting and empowering the work of everyone on the team. 

“You’re there to support people doing the harder mission,” he said.