From the CIA to the Boardroom: Andrew Bustamante on Leadership Style That Endures

Leadership under pressure is a skill often forged in extreme environments, but the lessons aren’t limited to the battlefield.

Andrew Bustamante, a former CIA covert intelligence officer, has infused this skill with decades of high-stakes operational experience to create practical strategies. From espionage to corporate advisory, Bustamante equips executives with tools to navigate uncertainty, make faster decisions, and unlock hidden potential within their teams.

Andrew is also recognized for translating intelligence tactics into lessons for business. From Fortune 500 companies to global leaders, he shows how adaptability, foresight, and problem-solving can unlock hidden potential in any organisation.

Now a sought-after leadership speaker, Andrew equips executives with the tools to inspire trust, create clarity, and transform adversity into opportunity. His work demonstrates that the principles of intelligence are equally critical in the boardroom as they are in the field.

In this exclusive conversation, he shares insights on resilience, decision-making under pressure, and how the principles of intelligence can transform organizations.

Andrew, thanks for joining us today. Your journey from the CIA to helping businesses navigate pressure is fascinating. I’d love to start with something basic. When it comes to teams, how do you figure out what people are truly capable of? Like, how do you unlock the full range of skills they might not even realize they have?

Andrew Bustamante: The CIA teaches us that all people are essentially a compilation of capabilities. Whenyou really want to tap into someone’s best, most optimised performance, you have to understand thatthey already view themselves as this compilation of capabilities.“You and I already know all the things that we’re interested in, all the things that we’ve experienced, all the things that we want to do, all of our passions, all of our interests. All people are like that.

The problem is that the standard business HR process doesn’t approach an individual as if they are a series of skills. They approach individuals as if they were a single skill. That single skill is the title on your résumé. That single skill that is the degree that you carry with you.“When you approach somebody as if one skill is more important than all the rest, then they feel the pressure to emphasise that skill over anything else. They feel the pressure to falsify or fabricate their level of confidence, their level of capability.

The CIA has taught us how to tap into the maximum potential of someone by treating them as a holistic set of skills. When businesses and business owners can treat each of their employees like a combination of skills, two important things happen.

First, you unlock loyalty in that person because they feel seen, heard, and valued as a complete and whole individual. But the second most important thing is that you unlock synergy between the people on your team, because two completely different people are going to have several areas where their skills, interests, and backgrounds overlap.

And you, as the business owner, get to capitalise on all the creativity, new ideas, and new energy that come from those people who didn’t previously get treated like they were compilations of capabilities.

That makes so much sense. And building on that, I’ve always wondered, military operations are so structured and all about managing risk. How can those same principles actually work in the everyday decisions businesses make?

Bustamante: It’s easy to think that military operations are completely different than daily business operations, but nothing could be further from the truth. Daily military operations are a representation of keeping people alive, keeping them safe, and maintaining progress. That’s the same thing that a business has to do in its day-to-day operations as well.

And when you start to look at how a military operation really is different from a business operation, it’s not about what they do, it’s about how they do it. Because the US military has been keeping the US people safe for over 70 years.

And militaries around the world, from the UK to Australia, have been keeping their people safe for even longer. The way to understand how a business benefits from military operations is by examining the process, structure, prioritization, resource deployment, and resource collection.

You review the training pipeline, examine the process for vetting individuals in the pipeline for leadership positions and areas. You look at leadership training and teambuilding. There are so many dynamic ways that a business can learn from military operations.

Got it. And switching gears a bit, negotiations are something everyone deals with, right? When you’re at the table with a client or partner, what should leaders really be looking for in terms of behaviour? Is it all in the words, or are there subtler signs we often miss?

Bustamante: The number one behavioural indicator that business owners should look for when they’re in a negotiation is body language.

A well-trained, acute person will control their mouth. They’ll control their words, their word choice. They’ll control their pacing and their volume. But it’s challenging to control your body language.

Body language is one of those things that is difficult to control, and it’s also difficult to observe unless you have a little bit of training and sensitivity in what you’re actually looking for.

As an example, you’ll find lots of Instagrams, lots of Reels, lots of YouTube videos out there talking about microexpressions, but in reality, microexpressions don’t really have an impact unless you understand the individual’s baseline.

Most of what you see out there, even in pop media, isn’t actually operationally useful when you’re sitting across the table from someone who’s trying to acquire you, from a new client, from a banker. Instead, you have to be able to understand the macro uses of body language, not the microexpressions.

And that is something that can be trained in just a matter of minutes, not just to you and to your sales team, but to everybody in your business. It increases not only how you negotiate but also how you cooperate and communicate within your own organisation.

That’s really interesting. You’ve been in some of the highest-pressure situations imaginable. For a business leader who’s feeling the heat every day, are there intelligence techniques from your CIA experience that really help in staying calm and making the right calls under pressure?

Bustamante: Pressure is a very real thing, and business owners and business leaders feel pressure of various types in various areas all the time. CIA operations are the same way. Sometimes you’re at risk of your life. At times, you’re at risk of spoiling a secret. Sometimes you’re at risk of missing a plane.

In all of those situations, the way that you actually deal with pressure is pretty much the same process. The foundation of that process is based on a simple question: is this a perceived risk or is this a real risk? Perceived risk and real risk are two distinct subcategories of the concept of risk, which many people assume are interchangeable.

Perceived risk is all those risks that you think might happen, whereas real risks are the probability of a risk actually taking place.

So when you’re in a high-stakes situation, a high-pressure situation, and you’re worried about all the things that could go wrong, simply understanding the difference between perceived and real risk helps you break down what you’re concerned about but is low probability, what is high probability, and what the true stakes are in the situation.

Andrew, this conversation has been incredible. To finish up, if you could give one actionable piece of advice to business leaders on how to think and act like an intelligence professional in their daily roles, what would it be?

Bustamante: Understanding the difference between perceived risk and real risk changes everything, from who you hire to how quickly you make decisions to what decisions you ultimately make. Because pressure is not just one consistent thing, it is a guarantee in day-to-day operations, but it doesn’t have to be a guaranteed stressor on you.