Where is the Love, V - Continued

Like I said in my last post, there are more layers to this judgyness.

First point - as someone once said, if you want a zero defect army you will soon have no army at all. We are imperfect, we do make mistakes, and it seems like there are two ways of handling this:

You can go a punitive route and address those mistakes by giving real consequences for them - but you also then need to give people a way to recover from them. To learn and grow. Otherwise you will lose a lot of people, and the few you keep may just be the ones who covered up their mistakes better or never risked doing anything that could go wrong in the first place.

Or you can avoid penalizing people entirely for their mistakes, but if you go that route you have to be fair and consistent and apply it to everyone. No double standard. Otherwise penalties are just an indicator of who has power and who doesn't, and isn't really related to their mistakes at all.

I have heard officers criticize how generals are no longer held accountable, and often look back at WWII and Eisenhower's generation. There are multiple stories of officers were penalized or demoted for a failure, like General Miller. But such failures were not necessarily a career ender, just like I talked about with that warrant officer in my previous post.

Going back to some of the people I served with - some of the things I judged them for were indicators of low experience or poor training. Things that could probably be fixed eventually. And how are they ever going to get that experience or learn to do better if they're not put in the positions where they can learn?

So that's another layer - the system and culture around them. 

I also realized that some of the things I thought were pretty obvious (like avoiding groupthink) were things I learned about in specific college courses I took. 

And the way ROTC programs work is that cadets go through the training and courses required to get a commission on top of their bachelor's degree. By which I mean - some of my fellow cadets majored in chemistry, or computer science, or biology. 

They did not have the same classes I had. They did not learn the same things I learned. And sometimes they just legitimately didn't know.

Ignorance is not incompetence. And, again, people can learn and grow.

Which brings me to the next layer, where I go right back to judging them anyway.

Sort of. 

This is all getting a bit convoluted, but try to follow me here.

Someone once asked - is it better to have a perfect plan, executed imperfectly? Or an imperfect plan, executed perfectly?

I would argue the latter, because perfect execution includes checking on the progress of your plan and adjusting it as needed to meet your goals.

If your plan isn't that great, but you're good at monitoring it's progress and adjusting as needed, then you will get where you are trying to go.

On the other hand, if you're plan is perfect but you suck at implementing it... it doesn't matter how great the plan is. It will fail when things inevitably go wrong, or someone fails make a deadline, or they fail to communicate with each other where they're at in the process.

The important part, to me at least, is that follow through. It's knowing how to evaluate your progress, adjust course if needed, and effectively communicate any changes to that plan.

So someone may not start out as a great leader, and that's fine. The military is full of dumbass privates (affectionate) and butterbar lieutenants (also affectionate) who don't know shit, and somehow most of them end up being competent non-commissioned and commissioned officers anyway. 

The important part isn't being perfect from the get go.

The important part is knowing how to learn and grow along the way. 

And most of our solders do. 

Rather than applying this to planning, though, I'll apply it to learning how to lead your troops.

If you want to be a good leader, you will evaluate your progress and adjust course if needed. You will ask the questions. You will do the work. 

So the ones I am judging, the ones I am side-eyeing, I am doing because they don't seem to be doing the work. 

You're in a position that comes with certain privileges, primarily because of all the responsibilities and duties that come with it. Trying to keep those privileges without taking on those responsibilities and duties is the height of incompetence. 

If you're in a leadership position, it's not to lord it over everyone else. It's to make sure that your people are in the right place, at the right time, with the right training, with the right resources, doing the right tasks to accomplish the mission. 

It seems to me that some people, somehow, wind up in these positions without any interest in or care for doing the actual work required.

Which brings me to another layer. (Or should I say 'why?'  This is a bit like going through the '5 whys') 

Sometimes people stick around in positions they really aren't suited for. And I think it's because of the status and privileges that come with that position, or some other ego-threat that prevents them from looking for something more suitable.

To elaborate on "positions they really aren't suited for", I do think everyone has a talent in something. It's just that their talent might not be for the thing they are trying to do. Ideally, we want to have the right people in the right positions on the bus (as Jim Collins said in his book Good to Great.)

If someone isn't performing very well, and if it isn't because of some failure in training or resources or establishing expectations, then it could very well be that their talents aren't suited to the role they are trying to fill.

What you want is an easy way to move people in the positions that do suit their talents. One where they can excel, and you can set them up for success. (Note again, that they are not a failure. They're just not in the right place.)

But people resist being moved, and will sometimes cling quite desperately to a role they clearly aren't suited for and don't even seem to enjoy.

And they will quite naturally resist the most strongly when it's a position of power and privilege. 

I think that someone who truly cares about being a good leader will ask the right questions and learn and grow and eventually, probably, be pretty good at it.

But the ones who just want the status and privileges? Inevitably they will make mistakes, too. Everyone does, it's part of the process.

But instead of using that to learn and do better, it makes them realize that they could lose all those perks and privileges.

It makes them scared.

So they feel threatened, they get defensive, and they attack. They create a self-fulfilling prophecy where they make bad decisions that make people question their abilities which make them feel even more threatened which makes them make even more bad decisions. And they will always blame other people, always think that everything would have been fine if it weren't for _____. 

And so they fail. Which often makes them cling even more desperately to their power and position, and can easily turn them into tyrants.

Tyrannical rulers are incompetent rulers. (No, Peter Thiel. Evil is not competent.)

If they were competent, they would get people to willingly go along.

If they were competent, they wouldn't be threatened by criticism. They would know how to address it without suppressing it.

If they were competent, they wouldn't feel a need to hide their mistakes or find scapegoats and distractions.

The thing I am judging them on, the 'competence' they lack in, isn't that they screw up in the first place. 

It's that they let their fears push them into an ongoing series of bad decisions, ones that create the worst kind of command climate where everyone is scared to speak their minds and afraid of giving bad news or getting caught making a mistake. 

The kind of command climate that inevitably leads to terrible decisions.

 

 

Where is the Love, V

 There was something more I wanted to say along the lines of my previous posts, but I struggled to figure out where to start or how to say it.

So I have decided to go about it sideways.

Or backwards.

We shall stalk this idea, slowly following it's trail through the trees and grasses, getting closer and closer to it until we can pounce on it and make it ours.

Or, in other words, I'm going to start with something that seems completely unrelated. Two quotes from two very different traditions, though there are definitely some similarities on certain topics.

Judge not lest ye be judged

- Matthew 7:1 

 

If you keep your mind from judging
and aren't led by the senses,
your heart will find peace.

 - Tao Te Ching, Ch 52

I do try not to judge others, and I have noticed how often some form of judgement still creeps in.

It's there in the connotations and sub-text, there in our body language. We can say "tall" or "short", and often there's a hidden judgment. "Tall" is good. "Short", if associated with a man, is generally bad. If a woman, it might be good. 

Good and bad are poor words here, I'm really trying to capture nuanced subtext. Short men have a negative subtext, but calling a girl woman a "short stack" might be calling them cute and being flirty. 

Tall and short are, to me at least, easy to pull back on the judgement for. After all, your height is genetic and it mostly just means some people have an easier time reaching higher places than others.

Anything genetic is easy to look at that way, actually. It's not like anyone had a choice in their genetics, so what is even the point in casting judgment on it? 

There are other terms, though. Loaded terms where judgment seeps in. Like 'slut', which carries one of the heaviest loads of hidden - and not so hidden - judgment.

Given that Jesus hang out with prostitutes and refused to cast stones at an adulterous woman, I'm pretty sure Jesus would never slut-shame. And yet our society is full of people judging others - women especially - for who they're having sex with.

To me, that's also a fairly easy layer of judgment to let go of. I don't particularly care who is (consensually) sleeping with who. Unless, of course, it's someone I'm in a committed relationship where we've agreed not to. Even then, the issue is less about the sex and more about the lying, poor self-control, poor emotional maturity, and poor judgment. (As in, if you've agreed to be in a committed relationship and you want to change that - you talk to your partner first. And accept that you might lose that relationship entirely if they're not willing to accept that change. You don't just pursue your own selfish desires, hope not to get caught, and then think you can somehow keep your other relationship the way it was, and I am constantly amazed at how often people keep making that foolish mistake. Makes for lots of songs about heartbreak I guess.)

Note - you just saw whole bunch of judgment. I'm side-eying one of the most common bad decision people make, ever. One I'm not even fully exempt from.

I'd also like to point out that in this case, I am not saying that those people are bad. Or evil. Or terrible. Just - poor judgement, poor self-control, and poor emotional maturity. 

All things that people can get better at. If they choose to.

I know text is a terrible way of conveying sub-text and body language, but I want you to think of it like saying someone is a terrible cook. Like - you would never trust that person in the kitchen, you may choose not to eat any dishes they make, but you don't think they're a waste of space that shouldn't exist.

And if they took a cooking class and put some effort in, you eventually might be willing to try some of their cooking again.

In a similar fashion, if someone made poor decisions in the past but has put in the work to learn better, I'd try not to keep holding that past against them.

This is the layer of judgment that I'm much less comfortable letting go, because there are real world consequences to the behavior I am judging.

Not just in personal lives, either. 

I started thinking about this more because of my experience in the Army. I worked with some very competent and talented people - but there were also some that were... not.

Some of them were very nice, and I didn't wish them ill at all. But would I want to have them in a leadership position if I was sent into a combat zone? Where my life, and the lives of the people around me, might depend on them?

...

...

Thank God that never got truly put to the test.

That sort of scenario reminds of a story a warrant officer I knew once told me. He was a Vietnam vet I worked with during our deployment to Iraq, and he talked about how his team was ambushed once. I don't remember the exact situation, but they were driving vehicles of some sort when they were hit.

The officer in charge froze up, and wasn't making the right call (if you are unfamiliar with the situation - freezing up in an ambush site is a terrible decision. You're pretty much in their kill zone, where they will keep shooting at you and killing you and you need to move. Quick. Which way will depend on if it's a near ambush or a far ambush and whatever your team has already communicated to do, but the point is you move.) 

This warrant officer said that he basically shoved the guy aside, took the wheel, and got his team moving. He said he was demoted, which isn't a surprise. He also got a private "Atta boy" for making the right call, which also isn't too surprising. At least, not surprising if you have competent leadership. Also, given he was a warrant officer when I met him, he clearly had not been kicked out of the military or denied a later promotion.

The reason I relayed all that is this - I judge the poor leadership of the person who froze. And I judge it hard.

Again, not in the sense that I think they're a terrible person who deserves to die. I don't even know the guy, or if it was his first ambush ever... freezing is a pretty normal reaction to situations like that. It's part of why the military trains so endlessly. When the shit hits the fan you're likely to start doing what you trained to do without thinking, which is significantly better than just locking up and getting shot because you're an easy target.

At the same time, if you're in a leadership position in a war zone, you absolutely need to be ready to make the right calls in combat. 

If you can't, you're going to get your people killed.

What I have learned, then, is that when it gets to leadership and decision-making I am in fact very, very judgy. 

I have opinions. And I have whole blog here to share them.

There are more layers to this, too. But this seems like a good stopping point, lest this post get ridiculously long.