Learning for military personnel is sharply focused on a single goal -- accomplishing the mission. Despite the differences between military training and private-sector learning, CLOs can learn many lessons from their counterparts in the armed forces.
by Site Staff
March 27, 2006
I had the privilege to serve as a soldier in service to the United States on three continents and, on several occasions, the honor to lead soldiers in combat operations. Over the course of a 20-year career in the U.S. Army, conducting operations in hostile environments was just one part of the many roles I performed. Through it all, I learned that training is everything. And everything is training.
U.S. military training—in my opinion, the best in the world—played a part in why my soldiers and I were not wounded or killed. I’m sure luck did, too. But good training has a way of making people look lucky.
Accomplishing the Mission
The military specializes in teaching people the fine art of focusing on a single goal: accomplishing the mission. It’s the same for every soldier, sailor, Marine, Coast Guardsman or airman. The military is able to do this for its war fighters because today every level of the military hierarchy believes that learning and development matters.
What can a corporation or, more specifically, a civilian chief learning officer, glean from the military when it comes to learning? How are the private sector and military different, if at all, when it comes to investing in learning and development?
“The big difference I see between private industry’s approach to training and the military’s is cultural,” said Terry Bickham, CLO of the U.S. Library of Congress. “At the highest levels of the military, you have officers who see training as necessary for accomplishing the mission. The leadership supports it, invests in it and they generally tend to do it right.”
Bickham knows. Along with commanding a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, he spent a number of years as a senior training officer with the Coast Guard, retiring at the rank of commander. “Whether in the private sector or military, though, good training is good training,” Bickham said. “And good needs assessment is good needs assessment. But thorough analysis tends to get skipped over in the private sector. A needs assessment and audience analysis is often given scant attention because of a lack of time, a lack of money or both. Often the lack of time is used as an excuse to do nothing when even a little analysis would be better.”
Getting learning and development done right, despite a lack of time for training, has been a driving force in helping the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) focus its efforts on mission-critical training. “President Bush formed NORTHCOM in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Douglas Johnston, division chief of training and education for NORAD/NORTHCOM. “We’re a joint command working with NORAD, which is a bi-national command. And NORTHCOM’s mission, in part, is to conduct operations to deter, prevent and defeat threats and aggression aimed at the United States. NORAD – the North American Air Defense Command – has been around for almost 50 years, but Sept. 11 significantly changed its mission as well. During the cold war, NORAD protected the U.S. from air threats coming from outside the country. Sept. 11 changed that, and now they protect us from an air threat launched within the U.S. as well.”
Johnston added, “The typical tour of duty at NORTHCOM is 36 months for military personnel. We have a lot of turnover by design. We want to reduce the amount of time it takes for officers to learn about this organization and quickly get them conversant in the command’s language and processes, so they can accomplish the mission as effectively as possible.”
The officers reporting for duty at NORTHCOM normally hold the rank of major (or the Navy equivalent of lieutenant commander) and above. They’re experienced, mature professionals with, in most cases, a minimum of 10 years of military service. But many arrive at NORTHCOM seeing their first duty at a headquarters or bi-national assignment. Johnston said it’s a complex environment in which officers from all branches of the armed forces must work together with Canadian military personnel and federal, state, provincial and local officials to protect North America.
“Part of the military culture is change and adaptation,” Johnston said. “Officers move frequently throughout their military careers, so we’re all versed on change. I’ve had nine posts in 23 years of service. What we’re doing at both NORAD and NORTHCOM is a three-level training and education program. It offers a multi-tiered blend of learning that educates these officers about the mission and develops them as leaders.”
Let’s look at a hypothetical example that highlights the multi-tiered approach at NORTHCOM. Two Marine Corps officers report for duty at NORTHCOM. Along with other duties, they immediately get assigned online courses on homeland defense and military support to civil authorities (DSCA), which must be finished in 30 days. There’s classroom training for these Marines too. But the goal during this indoctrination period, which NORTHCOM refers to as Level-1 training, is to give each officer an introduction to the processes and ways of doing business within the command.
At Level 2, they begin learning about things that pertain to their respective billets or jobs. If the first of our two Marines is an intelligence officer, he or she will begin taking a separate battery of courses that show him or her that role inside NORTHCOM. The other Marine officer, with a different billet, might take courses that show him or her how to interact with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). At Level 3, both Marines will be immersed in courses designed to hone their skills as senior-level leaders within the military.
Focusing on the Individual
The military knows that succeeding at its mission requires individuals to perform at maximum capacity. Although the private sector’s CLOs and chief executives might know this, they often focus on the business unit at the expense of the individual. In the military, training is designed at the individual level first. For example, the military asks itself: What will it take to make a recruit a successful soldier?
The Army also has the overarching mission to prepare for wars. Cascading from that mission are all the objectives to support the tasks to achieve those ends. And training flows all the way down to the individual soldier. Those tasks are defined for each soldier through his or her military occupation specialties or MOS.
In the civilian world, companies also have mission statements. For instance, Ford Motor Company said its mission is to be “passionately committed to providing personal mobility for people around the world.” State Farm Insurance states that its mission is “to help people manage the risks of everyday life, recover from the unexpected and realize their dreams.”
But how are Ford’s and State Farm’s missions interpreted by the business units? That’s the key. Does everyone see the mission in a singular way? If so, then it’s likely that learning and development has played a role in not only aligning the employees with the mission but also ensuring that resources and supplies aren’t wasted. But many corporations, with perfectly good mission statements, have business units that interpret the mission differently. Some might even think the mission isn’t relevant to them, so they ignore it.
In the military, though, there’s buy-in about the mission from stakeholders at every level. And depending on the threat, these leaders and soldiers have been programmed years in advance to accomplish the mission.
Linking Training to the Mission
“It’s probably a false assumption to think military people participate in training because we order them to,” Bickham said. “If you’re training soldiers to recognize a landmine, then you’re going to have their attention and willingness to learn.”
But Bickham believes the private sector can grab workers’ attention just as effectively. “If you show an employee how a prescribed course of learning is mission-critical stuff that’s going to affect the company’s bottom line, ensure profitability and keep the worker employed,” Bickham said, “then you’re more likely to get his or her attention, too.”
In American companies, training is often seen as overhead or a luxury. It’s often done in response to some event such as a lawsuit or some competitive force bearing down on the employer. Chief executives and business managers, even training departments, see training as a reaction to carrying out the mission. But the military does training in preparation for the mission. “Generally, in the military, the leadership has been able to make the case as to why training is mission-critical work,” Bickham added. “In the corporate world, however, training professionals on average haven’t done a good job of linking training to its impact on the bottom line.”
“The military knows that education equips us to handle the unknown,” Johnston said. “In the shift from fighting a Cold War to a war on terrorism, we’re entering uncharted waters. But we do know this new, asymmetric application of military power demands that we equip and train all our forces to act in new ways to meet the changing face of war.”
However, that doesn’t mean that the military gets it right all the time. When it comes to learning and development, the Armed Forces clearly come up short at times. In fact, a recent article from Marine Corps Gazette highlights shortcomings in the training that Marine Corps platoon commanders received on mechanized operations prior to going to Iraq. Essentially, commanders weren’t getting the training in the Corps’ entry-level schools. Instead, they were learning on the job in a hostile situation. The article goes on to say that these officers’ level of proficiency with high-tech radios and phones was sub-par, too. Officers were learning must-know skills in real-time while on patrols in Iraq.
Learning What We Need to Know
It’s interesting to see the difference between the ways the Marines react to this sort of news versus how a corporation might respond. The Marines, or any branch of the Armed Forces, studies the failures. The military spends less time trying to assign blame for a miscue and more time holding the example up as a way to prepare for the next round.
In the military, ideally every day is planning and executing: planning for the unexpected, capturing lessons learned and putting it into practice.
Making Training Strategic
The strategic view of training that the Marines and NORTHCOM have separates them from many corporations. They have a clearly defined mission, and each member of the organization is marching in lockstep toward it. For many companies, training isn’t seen as mission-critical work. On the contrary, it’s generally viewed as something in which you do the minimum amount possible to keep yourself out of trouble with unions, regulatory bodies and employees.
Still, not all of the training a soldier or sailor gets is markedly different than what you’d find in a corporation. For instance, newly arrived sailors will report for duty with their division aboard ship and find they have to take courses such as Operational Security, Sexual Assault Victim Intervention and Fraud, Waste and Abuse. The difference between the civilian and military world is the philosophical approach.
In the military, the question might be asked: Why do we prepare sexual harassment prevention training? Yes, the law requires it, but the military also asks: Is it actually preventing harassment? The answer is: This training is essential in enabling all members of a unit to focus on a collective mission. Training on sexual harassment is linked to the strategic mission of the unit. It’s so ingrained in the military culture to ask these sorts of questions that learning of all kinds gets measured and adjusted.
“To get a corporation’s leadership to view training more strategically, training executives need to earn a seat at the table where the company’s business decisions are made,” Bickham said. “But training professionals have to work toward that level of responsibility and live up to it by demonstrating the value they’re bringing to the organization.”
These are good points that learning and development professionals can heed. And civilian CLOs and training professionals can avail themselves of this thinking to build a case in their organizations. Many corporations would reap tremendous rewards by looking for CLOs who’ve served as military training officers or by taking some of the practices of these training officers and incorporating them in their training analysis and design plans.
It’s true that there are many tremendously effective CLOs who’ve never served in the U.S. Armed Forces. But I’m willing to bet these CLOs are kindred spirits with their military equivalents because they’re guided by the following principles:
- They live and breathe their employer’s mission.
- They know what their company provides the marketplace and how its employees make this happen.
- They design training that equips workers to accomplish the mission. And they can prove it with analyses that point to a boost in productivity, sales or profits.
- They review what goes wrong, document improvements and build it better the next time. They put the success of others before their own.
- They know how to stay focused.
And anyone (inside or outside the military) who embodies these principles is someone I’d willingly serve under.
James Gill is director of government solutions for SumTotal Systems and is also a decorated U.S. Army veteran with more than 20 years service. He can be reached at jgill@clomedia.com.