“Great units do routine things routinely”
One of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen in my military career was watching the mental downward spiral of a young Second Lieutenant, culminating in suicidal ideations severe enough to put him in the psychiatric ward of the hospital for several days. The stress of combat did not cause this (there was no combat)—it was the pressure exerted on him by field grade officers who should have known better.
I knew he was in trouble the first day he reported to the unit. This was his first assignment straight out of Adjutant General Corps training, and he was assigned as the officer in charge of the battalion S1 section—essentially human resources.
He knew a lot about how the Army personnel system worked, how forms and memos needed to be formatted, and the relevant regulations regarding promotions and awards, but the poor guy didn't know diddly-squat about managing an S1 shop. He worked tirelessly, trying to keep his head above water, but he didn’t know how to handle the awkward situations that naturally arise when dealing with senior captains and senior NCOs when paperwork is being shuffled back and forth. Worst of all, he didn’t know how to lead his section. He didn’t know how to organize tasks, assign leaders, and hold people accountable.
His struggles were apparent to anyone with a modicum of social intelligence. He was losing hair and weight, his speech got progressively slower, he never smiled, and he was always at work.
Not only was he suffering, but the administration of the battalion was also suffering. Awards weren’t getting processed, evaluation timelines were lapsing, soldiers were being overcharged (or undercharged) for leave, and getting an accurate roster was impossible. If you’re a soldier unable to out-process because your evaluation isn’t complete, your primary concern isn’t the officer’s well-being—you just want your paperwork so you can move to your next unit.
The 2LT was getting hammered. The battalion executive officer gave him “negative” counseling, the battalion commander said that he was “shirking his responsibilities” and “making the battalion look bad.”
It wasn’t long after that that he checked himself into the hospital. He was quickly ushered out of the Army after that.
It was heartbreaking to watch.
It didn’t have to be that way.
Rather than let this new 2LT flounder as the head of the S1 shop, the Battalion Executive Officer could have moved a confident and experienced captain into the S1 shop to informally take charge. This captain would not have been from the adjutant general corps. She might be from the infantry, or armor, or engineers, or transportation, and she might not know the first thing about the Army personnel systems, but she would have known how to make the trains run on time.
On paper, this captain would have gotten rated as an assistant operations officer, but in reality, she would have managed the S1 shop. The new lieutenant would have been the subject matter expert on the things in which he was an expert—memo formatting, automated personnel systems, etc. The captain’s role would be to make the S1 shop function efficiently and handle awkward situations with more senior officers and NCOs. Rather than constantly getting crushed by things for which he was completely unprepared, the new lieutenant could have focused on what he was good at while learning how to manage a shop by watching the experienced captain. Under this arrangement, the new lieutenant would have learned a ton very quickly. He would probably have been ready to take over the shop in about 4-6 months, if not sooner.
I shudder to think what would have happened had he died by suicide. Had there been an investigation, I would have sung like a freaking canary, and I would have been happy to see the entire battalion leadership fired. What they did to that poor young man, driving him to the brink of suicide and forcing him out of the Army afterward, was inexcusable.
But part of me feels bad for that battalion leadership. Imagine being so obtuse and so unable to think of an obvious solution that you just hammer someone over and over and over while the organization suffers. It’s a level of stupidity so pitiful that it pains me to imagine being them. They forced themselves into a procrustean bed of how they thought things were supposed to be done, that it didn’t even occur to them that they could just put someone else in charge for a few months.
Their “logic” was this:
In the abstract, the S1 Officer does X, Y, and Z. The 2LT is the S1 Officer. Therefore he MUST do X, Y, and Z.
But the obvious question is: what if he can’t?
You might answer, “Well, we’ll train him!”
That’s a fine answer as far as I am concerned, but are you going to actually train him, or are you going to tell him he’s doing bad and needs to do better?
There was never a serious attempt to train this young man. No one went into the shop and tried to understand the problems. No, no! That would have been much too messy. If you are the battalion XO, it is much easier to fall back on the “it’s his JOB” argument, to avoid blame and scrutiny from the battalion commander. And, of course, that argument is sound! I am sure that you can even find a regulation where the job of the S1 Officer is spelled out in plain Army language, generally free of errors, and understandable in a single rapid reading.
No. The problem here is the logic itself.
Positions don’t do tasks, people do.
Positions don’t run organizations, people do.
And yet, we write job specifications for positions. We then fill those positions with people. The quality and type of people who fill those positions can be extremely variable, especially in an army where most officers change jobs every 24-36 months.
Military leaders will often put themselves in the same position as the battalion leadership in the story above. When someone is put into a position, and that position has certain tasks assigned to it, they will pound their head against the wall continuously if that person doesn’t do a great job in that position. They will scream at the sky yelling, “Why must this person be in that position!? Whatever shall I do!?”
The answer, of course, is simple. Just give that person’s work to someone else, duh!
“But that’s not fair!” you retort.
Yes, buttercup, life isn’t fair. It also isn’t fair to the organization to allow important tasks to be assigned to people incapable of completing those tasks!
Maybe in the private sector, you could fire the person and hire someone else, but in even the private sector, simply firing someone often isn’t feasible. In the Army, firing someone is almost impossible, and it only happens in extreme cases.
It is far easier to find someone else, in a different position, with different assignments, who is good at the needed task and wants to do the task than to try to force someone to do something they either can’t do well or can’t do at all just because it is their job.
Part of my bias here is my personal struggle with routine tasks. I am a special-projects type of guy. I am not a do-this-one-thing-the-same-way-once-a-week-every-week-until-we-tell-you-to-stop type of guy. If you have a really hard problem that needs to be solved, I can figure out the real problem and fix it. But once I make a solution, I’m on to Cincinnati. If you put me into a position where you need me to do the same thing, or even close to the same thing routinely, I am going to go out of my mind!
Earlier this year, I had a boss who knew that I loved novelty and he was always looking for ways to keep me employed with special projects. When the head of our protocol office (which handles VIP visits, and ceremonies, and receptions, and other stuff like that) moved on to another job, the office started to go downhill fast. The replacement that they had hired was struggling. He was completely unable (or unwilling) to make the office function, and he didn’t know how to leverage the staff to get things done. Protocol is one of those things that is completely unnoticed when things go well—if you are a 3-star general, you expect conference rooms to be set up with nice name cards, and you expect to have a full itinerary worked out for your visit. The Protocol office is only noticed when the expected things don’t happen.
But the expected things weren’t happening, and it was making the Division look bad. And because I was transferring out of the infantry to another branch, I was in a unique position to help. The only problem was that there is no position in the protocol office for a Major—it’s all run by civilians—and I was already in a slotted position. But because my boss was able to think a little out of the box, and he had a big problem that needed to be solved, he just had me stay in my position on paper but my day-to-day job was to run the protocol office.
And run it I did.
In the 90 days I worked there the head civilian quit and a new one was hired. By the time the new one was hired, I had put in a few basic systems and processes that allowed the shop to run at a very high level. And they are still using those same systems to this day.
One of the most challenging things about military organizations is the constant rate of change. Almost all Commanders and senior leaders in an organization will change about every 24 months, as will the majority of the personnel. If someone has been in the same unit for more than two years, they will have been there longer than the vast majority of the other people. I am in my 3rd year on the same staff and there are very few who have been here as long or longer than me.
This rate of change means that I have seen a lot of organizational variability over the years, at different echelons and at different scales.
In my essay Standard I talked about under what conditions a unit should write an SOP, and under what conditions writing an SOP would be a waste of time.
One of the things I cut out from that essay was a discussion on assigning specific duties to specific positions, and this essay has been a long time coming.
But what argument am I making?
In its most radical instantiation, the argument is that no work gets formally assigned to anyone. There are simply things that need to get done, and through proper construction of the network, people naturally drift into doing what they are best at.
For better or worse, the military is too rigid of an organization to attempt the radical approach. Standardization, in some cases, is simply unavoidable. Some tasks simply have to be completed by a person in a certain position, period. But military leaders can still ensure that a lot of the work drifts to the right people.
Great leaders excel at finding a wide variety of people and then empowering those people to do the things that they are best at. They don’t waste a lot of time trying to “improve” people's weaknesses.
This is why the best organizations have a lot of different types of people who are good at different types of things. As I said earlier, I am not good at routine tasks. If you have an organization filled with only people who are just like me, you’ll have a lot of grand ideas and a lot of people always wanting to optimize things, but there would be so much dynamism and constant change that the routine things would never get done. Everything would be different all the time. There would be huge swings in organizational performance. Sometimes we would do great, but often we would fail at basic things.
The key, I argue, is for leaders to free themselves of the idea that certain work must always be done by certain people for no other reason than they are in a certain position. Many leaders already realize this and are more than happy to assign tasks based on people’s ability to accomplish them. But many do not do this, and by refusing to try something a little different, they harm themselves and their organizations.
Portions of this essay were extracted from another one of my essays called Organization, you can read it here:
Great essay, thank you. Some reactions:
1. It is very fortunate this individual received some of the help they needed before the very worst happened.
2. Not only did the leadership fail miserably here, but the senior HR NCO did too. That S1 shop should have been able to all the routine things you described before that 2LT arrived. Moreover, that NCO should have been advising, assisting and helping train his S1. I fully realize that is easy to say, but hey, that really is part of being the NCOIC.
3. An actual AGC officer in a Battalion S1, other than an actual AG Battalion, was unheard of in any unit I was in. However, if 2LTs are going to be assigned to such jobs, perhaps the AG School should relook their POI, ‘cause this reflects badly on them too.
4. The remedy you discussed absolutely works. A number of years ago, much longer now than it seems, a certain 1LT was the S1 of an FA Battalion stationed in Germany and was not doing well. Many of the things you mentioned in your essay were occurring in this unit and things were not looking good. The unit lacked a PSNCO (as they were titled back then) as the senior NCO was a SSG or a SGT if I recall correctly, and the S1 was an FA Officer who knew little about Army Personal Services or admin operations. In this case, instead of not helping the S1, the Battalion XO did what you recommended and brought in an Officer temporarily from one of the Batteries to help fix things as the (de facto) Assistant S1. This officer, my wife, was also an FA Officer and not AG, but she understood organization, taskings and workflow processes. After several (very long) weeks as the Secret And Dangerous Missions Officer (SADMO) she returned to her Battery with the issues addressed.
5. Flexibility is essential, especially when things are not going so well and you either adapt or die. Horses for courses as the Brits say.
I’m a long way away from whatever management training I ever got ( and I think most of that was process focused rather than people focused), but it’s worth noting how common this duality exists in human organizations- we need to maintain connectivity between the org process charts and the in the margins notes about how things often really get done. Your notes about helping the people in the crunch zone are worth keeping.