[January 4, 2017] A friend of mine, a newly promoted U.S. Army Major at the time, was assigned on a normal rotation from Company Command to a Personnel Administration position. As an Infantryman, the assignment was not good for his career but more importantly, as he was to discover, the people were unprofessional at his new location. Yet, the best leaders make good from bad and that’s exactly what he did.
Every two to three years, U.S. military personnel are reassigned to a new job and usually to a different location. It means a geographic relocation where you uproot your family and move to a strange place. The assignment can be anywhere between great or, as it sometimes happens, terrible. We all make the best of it with the knowledge that we will again be required to leave in a few years.
But my friend, Major Jack (as I will call him here), was not content to allow his new assignment – as terrible as it was – to be passed along to his future replacement without any change. There were many Department of the Army civilians (DACs as they are called in local lingo) at this new assignment who were simply unaccountable to anyone; meaning the uniformed soldiers had to pick up the slack. Soldiers were told to “tolerate” the bad behavior of the civilians.
Major Jack went about first gaining the trust of the DACs. Nothing can be accomplished worth much that is not gained first through ensuring trust and confidence is firmly in place. He did this in many ways but his main effort was to never be openly critical or disrespectful. Several months into his assignment, Jack was able to convince some of the more senior civilians that changes were necessary to ease the load on his soldiers.
There is nothing more tempting than to criticize others who are not meeting our own perceived standards of work, moral behavior, or ethics. Jack made a simple leadership adjustment with this in mind. While his leadership style had worked among soldiers, it lacked some of the requirements to address the sensitivities of the DACs. The workplace had been a hotbed of “complaints” about military officers who had tried to clean the place up but had failed.
It is our moral obligation as leaders to make good of a bad situation. Easier said than done, this is probably one of the more difficult tasks a leader can come across. We’ve all been placed into situations not of our own choosing and told to “fix the mess.” Having your boss fully informed all along the way and having this boss backing that leader will also be important for a successful transformation of a terrible workplace.
Major Jack was a good man and while he didn’t accomplish all he wanted, he was able to leave this assignment with a positive work environment and his career intact. He was to later confide in me that he was more satisfied with this assignment than most others during his entire career because he had made something good from bad.
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