If I could change one thing (III): I’d have wide-open, tough 360-degree reviews

By Adrian Bonenberger

Best Defense personnel contest entry

There was a brief moment of enthusiasm that swept through the junior officer ranks shortly before I left the Army. It was the fall of 2011, and 360-degree assessments, long discussed as a potential method for identifying problem leaders, had arrived.

Junior officers were eager to see the assessment in practice. Only the more skeptical among us prepared for disappointment. As usual, it turned out the skeptics were correct: the Army’s 360 assessment was awful. It was not comprehensive, it was not 360 degrees in the sense that there were people I never had an opportunity to evaluate, and it was elective, which meant leaders had a certain ability to initiate it when they wanted. A toothless tiger.

If I had the power to change one thing in the Army personnel system, it would be to deliver on the promise of the 360-degree assessment, because I remember that feeling of hope, of knowing there was a correct way to implement it, and feeling crestfallen when that hope was dashed. I’d open the assessment up to everyone, I’d make it a mandatory annual event, and I would empower everyone to use it, for everyone they knew. Great leaders would be recognized as such. Good leaders would be rewarded for their hard work. Mediocre leaders would come in for a balanced mixture of praise and censure. And the rest — well, we’d know, for sure, who was bringing the rest of the unit down.

Everyone in the military has worked with a certain type of jerk. He or she rarely does their job, only dedicating effort to initiatives that burnish his or her reputation. He or she has a keen nose for the commander’s pet projects, and always shine when the boss is around, to keep their career moving forward. "Spotlight Rangers," we called them in the Army, for their ability to excel during briefings or meetings. I’m sure other services have their own variation on this theme — the guy who every colonel and general remembers when they do battlefield circ to hand coins out. "Where’s Sergeant So-and-So," they say, "he’s always squared away." And he’s there, ready with the perfect salute and a spiffy "yessir," to confirm their understanding of the military’s hierarchy, and reaffirm their place within it as the recipient of such a salute.

This type of person usually evolves into a Toxic Leader. They’re narcissists and egotists, and are primarily interested in personal advancement. Occasionally, their doing a good job for themselves also happens to benefit their unit, or the military in general — on those occasions, they are capable of contributing to the team. The majority of the time, however, Toxic Leaders are a drain on morale. Depending on whether they remain on the enlisted side of the house or become officers, they have different opportunities for mischief. This is the bad news: the military has a longstanding problem with Toxic Leadership that it has never addressed in any serious way on an institutional level. The Toxic Leaders I knew when I was in, for example, are still leading from behind, and skyrocketing up the ranks. The 360-degree assessment as it exists now would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. It was doomed from inception, and succeeded only in satisfying some need to simulate change. Thus far it has only served to perpetuate the status quo.

If the military ever decides to get serious about developing leaders — rather than just paying it lip service through the usual combination of repetition and high-profile shakedowns of conspicuous individuals — it would see an almost immediate, across-the-board increase in morale and performance, and a corresponding drop in incidents like suicide, sexual violence, as well as the host of legal problems that accompany desperation.

It should go without saying that the only people who actually have anything to fear from the 360-degree assessments are Toxic Leaders, but the concern about misuse is still worth addressing. Here’s how I see my assessment working. I’m taking the Army as my example, because that’s where I served, and that’s the organization with which I’m most familiar.

Everyone could potentially receive a review, within a certain unit’s structure. It would be an annual event, because the military already has plenty of quarterly and semi-annual paperwork — although the time and creativity generated by the dismissal of bad leaders would more than make up for the time lost once a year in satisfying the evaluation. Each soldier, sailor, marine, and airman would have a yearly opportunity to evaluate every other individual in his or her units. It would, in fact, be required at the squad level or its equivalent. It would also be anonymous. The evaluations would be weighted to favor factors like time spent in duty positions, good behavior, and time spent working with rated individuals — in other words, a squad leader’s evaluation of a squad leader would hold more water than a team leader’s evaluation of the squad leader. And a team leader’s evaluation of his or her squad leader would be more valuable than a team leader’s evaluation of another, different squad leader. The squad leader’s evaluation of a company commander would count for more than a private’s evaluation — and, depending on the experience and length of time serving in a duty position, it’s possible that certain squad leaders’ evaluations of company commanders could count for more than those of the company commander’s lieutenants. In more extreme cases, a soldier evaluating his or her division’s general, say — a person that the soldier is almost certain never to have met — would count for very little.

But every evaluation would count for something. And while one bad evaluation wouldn’t necessarily lead to immediate dismissal, unless perhaps criminal activity were revealed, over time, patterns would begin to emerge. The Army officer who was universally disliked by his or her soldiers, who moved over to S3 and was roundly despised by his or her staff, who led a battalion under highly suspect circumstances, and who eventually moved to brigade and despite delivering successful briefings, or knowing powerful people, would be exposed. The assessments would make certain of it, over time. Ditto on the enlisted side of the house, and in every other branch, too: Navy, Air Force, Marines.

As for the concerns that this would force leaders to second-guess their actions, and turn officers and sergeants into a group of pandering patsies, I’d say this: I never cared a damn about gaming the system, and neither did the best officers with whom I worked. The system would reward people who were focused on doing their jobs, and taking care of each other, and punish people who weren’t. My power as a leader, and that of the good and great leaders I tried to emulate (with varying degrees of success), came from actions, not words.

There are many ways in which the military’s personnel system could stand to improve. I believe that delivering on the promise of the 360-degree assessment — making it into a forum in which every individual in a unit is evaluated by every other, routinely — would do the most good.

For what it is worth, I wouldn’t have had a perfect rating under the 360 system, by any means. A handful of people hated my guts, and would have rated me low in a 360-degree assessment. I worked under seven total battalion commanders as an officer, and two of them would’ve given me low ratings — the others said I was a good, useful member of their team.

A sufficiently flexible and dynamic system could be worked out to identify the worst leaders, and remove them from positions of authority before they had a chance to do too much evil. When lives are on the line, the soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen deserve the very best — no exceptions.

Adrian Bonenberger served two combat tours in Afghanistan as an infantry officer, described in his memoir, Afghan Post. He is a graduate of Yale and Columbia, and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton.

Tom note: Got a thought about how you would improve the U.S. military personnel system? Please consider sending it to the blog e-mail address, with PERSONNEL in the subject line.