
In July 2014, after finishing company command, I chose to attend grad school and stay in the Army for what I now hope to be a career. If you’d asked me 2 years ago where I’d be today, I’d still be in grad school except I’d have a sick freedom beard and I’d be a civilian like many of my peers and close friends. Veterans make great business leaders and I was ready to cut slingload on an organization that I felt was out of touch with me. I had no shared connection to the field grade officers above me and felt that they had no interest in me either.
In a surprising and wonderful twist of fate, I met the amazing woman who is now my wife just as I was applying to grad schools. She is also in the Army and I decided to stay in, too, so that we could have some better control over our careers and not be fighting to stay together. It was, I believe, the right decision. I have always enjoyed my time in the military, so choosing to stay wasn’t a hard one for me.
Attending business school in Washington DC is unlike any normal active duty assignment. To put it simply, I have freedom and I am inspired to challenge myself every day. During my first year in the MBA program at Georgetown, I took a class that aimed to teach students to find meaning in their professional callings. The sort of class that asks: If your job is something that you love, is it really work? I spent weeks reflecting on my time in the military and why an organization with so many great people in it can’t motivate and engage many of them. I’ve always loved to serve, but I’ve rarely been inspired.
Bleeding Talent In Tim Kane’s outstanding book “Bleeding Talent”, he analyzes our archaic, industrial-era personnel systems and he shows with painful clarity how the Army’s mismanagement of talent is slowly killing itself and uses the Army as an example for the DoD at large. Talent management is, quite simply, getting the right person in the right position at the right time. As Tim makes clear, the current systems are inflexible and impersonal and these failures drive people out of the military never to return.
The military’s talent management systems may be impersonal, but the people that they manage can never be. How can people fail to engage other people? This may be an overstatement, but I like to think that if more of the military’s best leaders spent more time trying to engage with the junior leaders that they hope to retain, we might actually disrupt that cycle (and do it faster than the military will change their personnel systems). This is nothing novel; it’s just mentoring.
Key Leader Engagement Despite being an Army officer for just shy of a decade and being in the Army for even longer, I can honestly only claim to have had three real mentors: Chevy, Dave, and Tom. I’ve served with thousands of men and women in at least a dozen organizations, but my meaningful relationships with superiors can be whittled down to what can be counted on just one hand. I also only met Tom this summer, so that list would be even shorter if you’d asked me in May. In the last decade, I’ve had twice as many lifting and rock climbing partners than mentors.
Military leaders often speak of engaged leadership, but I spent a long time thinking about why it’s so hard to find a mentor in the military. I realized that while I’ve had over a dozen different bosses, I have rarely been able to connect with them personally and that leaders who impressed me were often just in a different battalion or outside of my immediate circle. In many ways, it has simply come down to bad luck and bad timing. “If only I’d been in that other battalion…”
I just could not accept that there was not a solution to this. Why the hell is it so hard to find a mentor? Why the hell is it impossible to have a casual conversation with someone senior to me? I want to be challenged and I want to learn – I am physically seeking engaged leadership – so, why the hell is it so hard to find?
Team of Teams When General Stanley McChrystal took over the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2003, he quickly realized that conventional military leadership approaches were failing at meet the demands posed by a new type of enemy. Coalition forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter. He documents the transformation that occurred in his latest book, “Team of Teams”.
GEN McChrystal and his colleagues remade the task force into something new: an agile and transparent network that increased communication while retaining independence. He describes tearing down the walls between silos and enabling leaders to disseminate best practices by using technology to establish a oneness that would have been impossible even a decade or two earlier. JSOC became faster, flatter, and more flexible.
Military Mentors General McChrystal’s transformation of JSOC relied heavily on technology and ability to use it in new ways to share information. In a few years, they went from conducting ten operations per month to over 300. Everyone in the team was engaged and saw how the community of analysts, operators, and ISR managers could directly support each other and achieve such breakthroughs.
One specific type of network is called a community of practice. In these communities, informal connections among professionals with shared expertise and a passion for joint enterprise lead to organizational improvements. It can be one-on-one or it can be groups. It can simply be meeting once a month for lunch or it can be an email network. It can have an agenda, but often doesn’t and rarely adheres rigidly to one. The output is knowledge and because it is immeasurable, the value given to communities of practice may be viewed as low. Communities of practice can drive strategy, solve problems, promote the spread of best practices, and recruit and retain talented members.
Today is the first day in a long journey to improve an organization that we at Military Mentors love deeply. Our structure is a network. Our strategy is teamwork. Join us as we work to transform the military and the people who serve in it.
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