In the hours after September 11 2001, I was sent to war as a teenager. By then, the Navy had already shown me what it meant to be a man and a leader. I was taught to be tough. Selected for Navy Diving, the first step toward special forces training, I learned that leadership was about endurance. Of 16 candidates, only six of us graduated. We believed losers failed and leaders kept going, no matter what.

During one of my first missions off the coast of Iraq, I watched a teammate lose his nerve. Branded a coward by all, me included, he never went on another mission. The lesson was clear: fear was failure.

In the Navy, you were expected to show command presence, and we were told that a leader should be identifiable within 30 seconds. Orders were delivered with confidence and obeyed without hesitation.

“Don’t run, it scares the men,” we were told.

The medals on my chest and the stripes on my shoulders proved I had mastered that version of leadership: stoic, disciplined and unflinching.

After seven years of service, my wife Kaitlin and I took a one-way flight to East Africa. I became the director of a high school for at-risk students in a Tanzanian township, convinced I knew exactly how to lead and confident that I could work harder and longer than anyone else.

Six months later, sick with malaria and losing the trust of my staff and the community, I was deep in the greatest leadership failure of my life. Then came the news that a group of the young men I thought I was leading had planned to kill me.

What happened next is a story for another day, but the lessons remain.

Battlefield to boardroom: Leadership lessons

Those young men taught me that toughness alone is not enough and that leadership is not about always knowing the plan but about listening, collaborating and understanding what people really need. I learned to read the fear beneath anger and the hope beneath skepticism. I discovered that real strength lies in holding space for vulnerability rather than denying it under the banner of resilience.

When we handed the school over to the students to run, the results were extraordinary. The following year in Kenya, we helped a small community build its own bank and triple farm yields by letting people design the solution themselves.

Later, while completing a Master’s at Cambridge, I wrote my thesis on the power of that simple approach: listening to people and backing their ideas. It shaped the organization Kaitlin and I co-founded to support entrepreneurs in some of the world’s poorest communities, which has changed the lives of millions.

I also co-founded an education technology company that was later acquired by Australian tech unicorn Go1. In both ventures, I learned that strength still matters, but only when matched with heart. Plans were built together. When I did not know the answer, I said so, and we found it as a team.

Now, at 42, I am a husband, a father and an author. My new memoir, Far Horizons: A Journey From War to Peace, tells more of this path from command to compassion.

These days, I spend time with senior leaders across the Australian business. Many are exceptional, yet uncertain. They are grappling with how to lead in a world that increasingly prizes empathy while still expecting quarterly results. I see men, in particular, questioning what strength looks like at work, at home and within themselves.

My hope for these leaders is simple: that they can be strong, but take heart. That they may understand that sometimes the most courageous thing to say is, “I don’t know yet. What do you think?” That they listen more than they speak. That they lead by empowering others, not commanding them.

Because strength without empathy isolates leaders, and empathy without strength confuses teams. The future of leadership lies somewhere in between.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.