英文原声 Reinventing the Leader Selection Process Part 1（1/2）

0:24 Addressing a class of West Point cadets in 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates asked bluntly, “How can the army break up the institutional concrete—its bureaucratic rigidity in its assignments and promotion processes—in order to retain, challenge, and inspire its best, brightest, and most-battle-tested young officers to lead the service in the future?” The question was, he said, “the greatest challenge facing your army—and frankly, my main worry.”

The secretary’s concern was not ill founded. In a 2009–2010 survey of 22,000 soldiers, 20% said they were serving under a toxic leader. Another survey showed that fewer than 50% of army majors believe the service promotes its best members. (The picture in the corporate world is similarly bleak. In one study, researchers estimated that half of senior executives were failing in their leadership duties. Another found that 16% of managers were toxic and 20% were incompetent.)

1:33In response to such feedback, the army designed an entirely new process for selecting battalion commanders—its first executive-level position, typically attained 17 to 20 years after an officer has joined the service. It chooses approximately 450 a year, each of whom is responsible for the training and development of 500 or so soldiers. Battalion commanders thus have an outsize influence on combat readiness and junior-leader talent retention; they are also the primary source of generals. That’s why Army Chief of Staff James McConville put the overhaul of their selection process at the core of his talent reform efforts.

2:17Over the coming year the first class of officers appointed under the new system will assume their commands. The selection process, which capitalizes on recent and emerging talent-management ideas from both the public and the private sector, includes physical fitness, cognitive, communication, and psychological tests; peer and subordinate feedback; and interviews rigorously designed to reduce bias. While specifically aimed at improving the validity, reliability, and developmental impact of the army’s executive leader choices, it offers important lessons for any organization seeking to bolster its talent assessment and promotion practices.

Transforming an Industrial-Era Process

3:02It’s little wonder that the army suffered a crisis of competence in its leadership ranks. Ever since centralizing its officer selection process, in the 1980s, it had chosen battalion commanders by having multiple senior officers simply score each eligible lieutenant colonel’s file, which contained subjective performance evaluations, an assignment history, and an official photo. On average, some 1,900 officers would be eligible for consideration each year. Each file review took about 90 seconds; the key text examined in each performance evaluation was shorter than a typical tweet.

3:42Changing course in any large bureaucracy is never easy, of course, and the army faced all the usual obstacles and then some. The dominant laws governing its personnel practices had been written in 1947 and 1980. They directed that several thousand second lieutenants a year be commissioned, brought up to a minimum level of competence, and assigned and developed on the basis of seniority, specialty, and performance. People were managed largely as if they were interchangeable parts—and the system was more or less frozen in place because of its codification in law. But in 2018 Congress passed the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act, which granted the army the flexible personnel authority it had lacked. McConville—then the vice chief of staff—began making plans to improve the quality of the officer corps.

4:37McConville arguably has more HR experience than any previous army chief of staff. Having spent three years as deputy chief of staff for personnel—the service’s lead human resources officer—he has insight into the diverse talent needed in the thousands of army jobs. As a former commander of the 101st Airborne Division, he has learned that every soldier possesses unique skills and that the army’s diversity is increasing. And as the parent of three young army officers, he knows firsthand that generational norms are changing and that Millennials and Gen Zers want more control over their careers.

Consider one of the problems he recognized. Let’s say the army needed to appoint an officer to advise an allied army overseas. Under its legacy system, it would identify candidates with the appropriate seniority (company commander) and specialty (logistics), perhaps reviewing their performance evaluations to make sure they ranked in the top 20% of their peers, and then choose from that pool. But whereas succeeding as a company commander mainly involves directly leading people who are similar to oneself, succeeding as an adviser abroad involves indirectly influencing people who may be quite dissimilar—and doing so in an unfamiliar environment. Simply giving the job to the best company commander would be unlikely to yield the best match. Better results could be obtained by identifying individuals with superior cognitive flexibility, cross-cultural fluency, and interpersonal skills. Moreover, if the army knew which officers enjoyed international travel and meeting people from different cultures, it could choose someone whose talents and preferences were suited to the position, most likely ending up with a high performer who would enjoy and remain in the job.

6:30Recognizing the need for adaptation that scenarios like this presented, McConville set out to transform how the army acquires, develops, employs, and retains its people, beginning with the linchpin role of battalion commander.

Starting from the Ground Up

First, the army redefined talent as the intersection of knowledge, skills, behaviors, and preferences, or KSB-Ps. Next, McConville energized and resourced the Army Talent Management Task Force—a small group of officers charged with prototyping innovative talent-management ideas—directing that inclusiveness should lie at the initiative’s core. (Disclosure: I serve as an external adviser to the task force, and I moderated one of the interview panels in the new selection process.)

7:20The task force researched army leadership doctrine and identified best practices from government, corporate, academic, and nonprofit organizations and allied militaries. It then designed the Battalion Commander Assessment Program, or BCAP: a four-day evaluation of more than 20 KSB-Ps, including communication skill, creativity, ethical leadership, and the ability to develop others. During the first three days candidates would undergo a physical fitness test, writing skill and argumentative essay examinations, cognitive and strategic talent assessments, psychometric tests, and a psychological interview. They would demonstrate their leadership and problem-solving abilities in a team-based outdoor obstacle course, and extensive peer and subordinate evaluations would be reviewed.

The process would culminate on the fourth day with 30-minute interviews in which panels would evaluate candidates’ oral communication skills and decide who was ready for command. Those deemed so would be ranked according to a cumulative score informed by their BCAP assessments along with the rating assigned after a legacy-style review of their performance file (which the army still considers a valuable part of the selection process). The top 450 or so would be designated for command.

8:47Following two successful prototypes in the summer of 2019, McConville directed a full rollout of the program. During January and February 2020, 750 lieutenant colonels—eligible officers who opted to participate after being recommended on the basis of an old-style file review—gathered for the new assessment process at Fort Knox.

Implementing Strategies to Reduce Bias

9:11The human brain is lazy; we are constantly looking for shortcuts when processing information. Interviewers are no exception. Research has shown that unstructured interviews are often the least-informative part of an assessment. Even experienced interviewers may spend the first 30 seconds of a meeting jumping to a conclusion about the candidate and the rest of the time subconsciously seeking information to confirm that conclusion.

To guard against such shortcuts, the task force designed a full day of familiarization, calibration, and training for the BCAP panelists. Handpicked colonels were trained to serve as moderators to maintain a fair and consistent process. The work was guided by the following principles:

9:58

Create diverse panels.

The selection process spanned four weeks, with six panels operating simultaneously each week. Each panel had five voting and three nonvoting members and was assembled for diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, specialty, and previous assignments. According to army tradition, voting privileges are limited to officers one level or more above the position under consideration; the voting members of each BCAP panel included three one- or two-star generals and two senior colonels, all of whom had been successful battalion- and brigade-level commanders. The nonvoting members, included to provide additional perspectives, were a command sergeant major with extensive experience advising battalion commanders, a senior operational psychologist, and the moderator.

10:54

Conduct in-depth antibias training.

Panel members were taught strategies for preventing the attributional errors that occur most often during job interviews, including primacy (a tendency to focus on first impressions), contrast (rating candidates against one another instead of against a common standard), halo/horn (allowing a single positive or negative trait to overshadow all else), stereotyping, and similar-to-me biases. The training also emphasized the tendency among leaders to exhibit blind-spot bias: recognizing that others may be biased but falsely believing that you are not. Each morning the panelists received a brief antibias refresher before beginning their work.

11:47

Don’t let panelists evaluate candidates they know.

At the outset, panelists were given the names of the candidates and asked if they had any knowledge of them. This allowed organizers to create panels whose members had no preconceived notions about the people they were evaluating. Panelists were told to recuse themselves if they realized during an interview that they knew the candidate, which happened five times.

12:15

Level the playing field.

Interviews can unfairly advantage candidates who have extensive interview experience. During the BCAP prototypes, the task force noted that whereas some lieutenant colonels were excellent interviewees, most were not. So candidates were instructed in the STAR method, which teaches people to answer questions by describing the situation, the task, the action taken, and the result. Although they were not required to use it, a majority did.

12:50

Calibrate grading.

To ensure a single grading standard, panel members were given a rubric for each quality to be assessed that described what was needed to attain each score. Before the panels began their assessments, they met together in practice sessions. First, each panelist independently assessed three mock candidates, and the entire group discussed the results. Members then regrouped in their panels to assess three new mock candidates and go over those results. Each group of mock candidates included one who was strong in the KSB-Ps, one who was moderately strong, and one who was weak.

13:34

Use double-blind interviews.

Borrowing a best practice devised by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1952, BCAP conducted double-blind interviews, with a black curtain separating the candidates from the panel at all times. This allowed panelists to focus on the content of answers and the KSB-Ps they were assessing rather than form judgments on the basis of ethnicity, attractiveness, or physical symbols such as wings on their uniforms. It minimized attribution biases that might be sparked by candidates’ physical presence. And it meant that deep issues could be discussed without fear of repercussions should candidates and panel members work together in the future. The task force also directed candidates not to disclose, and panel members not to ask about, specific jobs they had held or locations where they had worked.

Although double-blind panels reduce bias (a test showed that the sergeants major incorrectly identified 50% of BCAP’s minority candidates as white), they don’t eliminate it. It’s usually easy to determine gender, and panelists may consciously or subconsciously try to link pitch, accent, speaking style, or content with a certain demographic. Candidates who learned English as a second language or hailed from the deep South, for example, might have readily discernible accents. So the bias-prevention work stressed the need not to penalize or reward speaking styles or accents.

Tap psychological expertise.

Applying a best practice long used by special operations units, BCAP brought operational psychologists into the process. Each of six senior psychologists supervised several junior colleagues conducting one-on-one interviews with candidates before their day-four interviews with panels. The senior psychologists collected summaries from the junior ones on the candidates seen that day and presented the results to the relevant panels in a standardized format. Because they did not interact with candidates themselves, they could be much more objective in conveying information about them. They also synthesized each candidate’s BCAP assessments into a summary of strengths and weaknesses and suggested follow-up questions for the panel to pose.