Still Bleeding Talent

Army's Response to Retention Callouts Misses the Target

It was a decade ago that Tim Kane published the influential Bleeding Talent, a data-rich critique of US military retention policies. Tim recognized and brought to life the decades-long folly of coercive and centrally controlled talent management systems really good at driving out top talent. He argued that the services instead needed a talent market with calibrated incentives and agency to give people more control over their destinies.

Recent discussion exposes just how little the services listened to his advice, and how little things have changed.

Responding to a flurry of recent articles grumbling about working conditions and calling the Army’s attention to soldiers who still have amazing command opportunities on the table instead choosing to depart, the service published a response jointly penned by four command veterans at four different levels. They titled it We Hear You!

But I’m not sure they heard the message.

I’ll confess I had trouble pulling a central thesis out of this article. It starts off strong, reassuring the audience that it understands and empathizes with them, and that their Army is listening.

It then steps on a landmine by painting the arguments to which it responds as “emotional.” This is a marginalizing tactic. It implies something less than a rational or logical or principle-driven argument by painting it as the product of excessive passion compromising the clarity of the advocate. While done in benignly saccharine style in this case, it’s no less cynical. After this misstep, the article goes on a ramble, sputtering into a wordy commercial for the current system rather than a genuine acknowledgement of its shortcomings.

If there is a central proposition, it’s that Army officers should be less “emotional” and instead reconsider their entire worldview. They are encouraged to “reframe” their thinking about professional education courses many consider to lack quality and/or necessity. They are told to “zoom out” and see the big picture of what the Army is trying to achieve by subjecting them to frequent moves, deployments, educational courses, and broadening tours. They are also exhorted to “reframe” their command experiences to understand just how cool these opportunities are … and how motivated officers should be to have the opportunity to command again.

Basically, the response to officers disgruntled about operational tempo, administrative overload, and development obligations which create more family trauma than they do professional fulfilment is advice to stop worrying, understand how lucky they are, and choose to be happier. Telling people how to feel rarely works, and I don’t expect it will here.

I don’t know how others closer to the issue are taking this article, but to me it completely misses the target. I’m actually much more convinced by Capt. Lindsay Gabow’s February article in Army Times, which uses actual survey data to authentically define the problem. Gabow’s data suggests officers are leaving because of a lack of control over their futures, poor leadership, and undue stress on family and relationships.

If these are the root causes, no amount of re-framing and zooming out is going to improve retention of the Army’s best and brightest. It will need to actually solve resources, change policies, and restructure career progression to deal with such a problem. These are difficult but not impossible prospects … but the nature of bureaucracy is to maintain a stable, predictable, organized, and controlled status quo. It will change only when forced. And fewer bureaucracies in all of human history have been more hidebound and change-resistant than those of the military services.

It makes me want to revisit a few key propositions I left as feedback for the Air Force when I walked away from a promising career ten years ago.

Family doesn’t get weighed, it has its own scale. The authors of We Hear You! postulate that interpersonal relationships are a “hygiene factor” that, if not properly recognized, can lead to a greater degree of relative job dissatisfaction. They further argue that job satisfaction can be driven high enough to overcome this headwind.

This is totally wrong. Job satisfaction is weighed on a relative scale, but family and relationships are judged in absolute terms. If a professional obligation threatens to break family or relationships, the job becomes adversarial to individual happiness and even individual identity. While some will misjudge measurements and accidentally break their families and others will understand the damage to their family is excessive only after assuming an irreversible obligation, almost no one will deliberately break their personal life for the sake of career.

Moreover, relationships are a key barometer of character. Those who will sacrifice or neglect their families for a promotion or choose a life of tattered relationships in order to chase individual status tend to be of comparatively low character. Those who are principled enough to say no to professional opportunity in order to keep personal commitments tend to be of higher moral character. In other words, the first people to leave service due to excessive demands screwing with family are those we should be most committed to retain, as character is the engine of strong leadership.

Because the military services stubbornly cling to entrenched talent management systems which are centralized, opaque, and disempowering, officers who have the character and principles to resist, along with those who have the aptitude and marketability to succeed out of uniform, tend to leave service before reaching senior levels. This helps explain why a given cohort of officers tends toward a mediocre version of itself over time, and why those who rise to generalship are often poor leaders. Superb bureaucrats and organizational pragmatists, but they are products of and protectors of a system which rewards saying yes, going along, and surviving by not taking risks. These behaviours correlate with the poor leadership which is perpetuating the attrition cycle by giving good officers a big reason to leave.

The services have not updated their basic talent management model in decades, and it shows. Officers move too frequently, deploy unnecessarily, spend too much time on administrative and bureaucratic nonsense at the expense of leading fulfilling and meaningful lives, and feel too little control over their present and future circumstances.

For as long as this continues, the Army will not be all that it can be.

TC is a retired US Air Force officer who has studied and written extensively on the subject of military officer retention and development.