Business school leadership courses tend to assume a reporting line. Justin Fulcher’s six months as a senior advisor at the Defense Department taught him to lead without one, coordinating cooperation from people who had no obligation to give it and every institutional reason to be cautious about it.
Secretary Hegseth’s mandate at the Pentagon covered rebuilding military readiness, reorienting procurement culture, and modernizing the tools service members rely on daily. Carrying out that mandate meant working across defense organizations that each had their own institutional history and their own relationships with outside oversight bodies. As a senior staffer inside that structure, Fulcher’s effectiveness depended on credibility built through demonstrated knowledge of how the institution actually functioned, not on a title or a place on an organizational chart.
Credibility as the Only Real Lever
“Your credibility is the only lever you actually control,” Justin Fulcher has said. “The institution has absorbed reformers before. It knows the difference between someone who is genuinely trying to understand how things work and someone who has already decided.”
That kind of leadership, earned through relationships and grounded in operational understanding rather than positional authority, is largely absent from private sector training, where accountability and authority tend to travel together by design. Justin Fulcher has pointed to founders who struggle in government precisely because they expect clarity of vision and speed of execution to carry the day on their own. Federal agencies run on a different set of forces entirely, built around process, precedent, and the need to protect decisions against a wide range of institutional and political review. Fulcher says that adjustment, more than any single project he worked on, is the leadership lesson he has carried forward into his return to defense technology and national security work. It is also, he says, the lesson founders are least likely to expect before they walk in the door, since nothing in a typical startup prepares someone to lead through influence alone. Check out this page for more information.
Find more information about Justin Fulcher on https://www.crunchbase.com/person/justin-fulcher