Duty begets meaning

I was invited to be on a panel this past Wednesday to speak to a physician leadership program about leadership. I spoke from three perspectives: as an academic who studies leadership, as a leader in an academic unit, and as a former military leader. One of the participants asked me what it was like to make the transition from military leader to civilian educator. Without the boring details, as some of you know, the Army helped me with that by allowing me to teach while I was on active duty, and so the transition to civilian education was not that jarring. More jarring, in terms of the work, was moving from graduate to undergraduate education. It took me a couple of years to adjust to the different student. The challenge of the transition was not so much about the teaching. The challenge of the transition was more about the context – going from soldier to civilian. And to be more precise – from going from a thick culture to a thin one.

What I told the audience was that the military has a thick culture. Indoctrination into that thick culture formally begins in basic training for enlisted soldiers and at the Service Academies or ROTC for officers without prior service. At its core, the culture is built on subordination of the self to the mission. The new recruit is expected to internalize that service is about duty and obligation. The culture rewards discipline and selfless service, and punishes self-interest. A thick culture is one where all of the members of a group have a clear understanding of the expectations and behaviors, and those expectations are enforced by all the members of the group. The members of the group internalize the values of the culture, and it becomes integral to their identity.

Most civilian organizations (excluding military-like organizations like fire and police departments) have a thin culture. A thick culture is costly to maintain, and not necessary for mission accomplishment for most civilian organizations. The indoctrination of each soldier into the Army, Marine into the Marines, sailor into the Navy, or airman into the Air Force is significant. Sustaining and nurturing the culture is also costly. Civilian organizations don’t need to make those investments because they are never going to ask their employees for the potential sacrifices that the services regularly do of servicemembers. You don’t need 12 weeks of basic training to be a good office worker. The relationship is more transactional and more contingent in most civilian organizations. An employee has a job description and they can generally refuse to go much beyond what they are hired to do. If they don’t like what they are asked to do, they can quit. No MP is going to show up at their door if they don’t report to work the next day.

The costs of being a member of an organization with a thick culture are also borne by the individual. There is a loss of autonomy and a loss of privacy. I remember in the year before I retired, at the age of 45, I had to get a “distance pass” before I could drive more than 100 miles from post for a long weekend with my wife, and I had to have a sergeant (a nice young guy who was probably in his mid-20’s) inspect my car to make sure it was road worthy. That was annoying. Supervisors often asked personal questions about family and things we were doing outside of work. This was considered good leadership in the military, and would probably get a complaint filed with HR in a civilian organization. If you got hurt, or your spouse was in the hospital, everyone knew. That was intrusive, but people showed up for you. If you were hurt, someone would come help shovel snow or mow your lawn. The military had no boundaries, as people like to say now. The chain of command was always in your business, and it was never shy about asking you to give more. But you were never alone.

Some of my libertarian friends don’t like JFK’s famous 1961 inaugural, "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country", because they construe “country” as the state. But I think that is too simplistic of an interpretation. I like to think of “country” as community. The military culture is encapsulated by JFK’s famous call to serve. Greatness is in what you can give, not in what you take. The military takes and takes. How much you can give without complaining was a measure of how good a soldier you were. We spoke of obligations to the Army, to our country. We knew the pay was ok. But it wasn’t about the pay. You don’t join the military to get rich – you join to serve.

What I see in civilian culture is a lot of “but what are you going to do for me?” and “that’s not in my contract”. Or, as I have finally understood after 10 years of working at UNH, professors are on a 9-month contract. They aren’t paid in the summer by UNH, and many of them effectively refuse to do anything during those three months that doesn’t directly benefit them. This isn’t particular to UNH – it’s typical of academia. It’s not that I didn’t understand I was on a 9-month contract – I very much noticed my pay stops at the end of May. It’s that it took a long time for me to really understand how transactional the relationship is for many people. I always looked at it as I was technically being paid for 9 months of work, but I cared about the organization 12 months of the year (still do – that hasn’t changed).

I interviewed many former officers who had retired from each of the services and gone on to leadership roles in civilian healthcare. Almost all of them expressed a sense of loss. It’s not that civilian healthcare isn’t mission-driven – of course it is. But it’s the larger context. It’s not the same. It’s thin. It’s far more transactional. And it really shouldn’t be the same. It’s not necessary. But it could be thicker.

I think good leaders create a thicker culture. They get to know their people. They listen to them, and care about them. They cultivate relationships that are not strictly transactional, while respecting the boundaries appropriate to civilian work. They thicken the ties. Those thick ties help create meaning. That’s the thing former service members miss. It’s not the demands and obligations, per se. It’s the meaning from service that they miss, and being in an environment where everyone understood that duty, not pay and benefits, begets meaning.