The Evolution of a Staff Officer

It has been a little over a year since I decided to join in the blogsphere and I haven’t looked back.

After a year of intensive study, I was happy to be in a comfortable post that involved duties well within my capabilities. I perceived the biggest challenge to be working in time to buy coffee in between the policy writing and honing my PowerPoint ninja skills. There wouldn’t be any need to delve into controversial topics or to explore unknown policy territory — I was going to be working for a more senior officer, who was going to be the buffer zone between me and the Badlands of strategic level leadership scrutiny — after all, my signature wasn’t on the correspondence.

At this point of my career, I wasn’t planning to be exposed or tested; or to fail and have to pick myself up again and keep on going.

These things were not in my plan at all. But as HvM told us, no plan survives contact.

What if I told you that a book by a cabaret punk rocker about her performance as a living statue and her experiences about asking for help has much to teach about leadership and the ability to work as a staff officer at the strategic level? I’m sure you would look at me with a raised and quizzical brow. So, please indulge me and let me explain what a cabaret punk rocker taught me about how to be an effective staff officer at the strategic level.

I read Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking on a recent leave break on an island somewhere in the South China Sea (not the controversial part)[1]. It’s about her experience and growth as an artist and as a human — with vivid stories about her challenges in connecting with her audience and other artists around her as a means of creating art and sharing her creation in a genuine, uncensored way. It is also a story about her struggle with self-doubt, and the important people around her (her friend/mentor Anthony; and her author husband Neil Gaiman) who she turned to for advice and guidance. I took three lessons from Palmer’s book that was of immediate relevance to how I could successfully perform my duties as a staff officer in a strategic level headquarters:

1. Human connection and the art of problem solving
Patton said that ‘wars may be fought with weapons, but are won by men’. While you are not ‘at war’ in a headquarters environment, it remains important to have consideration of the people you work with and put in the effort to understand them. This quote from Major-General CP Summerall, Chief of Staff of the US Army in 1927, says it all:

‘While the consideration of the human element is predominant in war, there is great necessity of comprehending it as an essential in the management of men in peace. Indeed, if one does not understand and practise the art of controlling the human element in peace, he cannot do so in the test of war.’ [2]

The ‘Management’ aisles of any book store is stocked full of books on ‘EQ’ and leadership. These books are great for understanding the theory and for some general guidance about how to get along with others, but none of them is a substitute for getting out there and engaging the people around you to truly understand them. You will probably learn more about the human condition by reading Shakespeare than reading theory books on EQ. Connecting with others also means that you have an understanding of yourself and opening yourself up to the people in your team and others you work with routinely. The trick is balancing professionalism — getting your war face on — with showing enough of your true self to connect. Rank matters less at the strategic level — people want to know if they can trust you because you are a good human, not because you were a big deal in your own Service.

Building relationships and connections with other humans is important at the strategic level, where a lot of what you do is more of an art than a science. This is because you are compelled to use your creativity to solve novel/complex problems, or have to navigate through a policy quandary to find a practical and useful solution. It is the one disadvantage of working at the top of the pyramid — all the hard problems filter to the top and you are it! There is no one else to pass the problem on to. You are compelled to engage in the act of creative problem solving with your team, where you connect the seemingly disparate dots to try to piece the puzzle together. This includes coordinating tasks with people (military and civilian) outside your immediate unit/directorate/group/department/organisation; who have no real imperative to listen to you or do what you ask of them (outside of direction by a higher authority).

Bringing disparate groups of individuals together and inspiring them to work together can be challenging. It is difficult to make ‘art’. Connecting with members of the team, and getting them to connect with each other, is fundamental. Amanda points out: ‘When artists work well, they connect people to themselves, and they stitch people to one another, through this shared experience of discovering a connection that wasn’t visible before.’ [3]

2. The importance of influence versus authority
Joe Byerly’s post resonated with me on the issue of influence versus authority in the world of the staff officer. Joe’s post gives some good pointers on how you can lead as a staff officer. He wrote: ‘In the end, it comes down to perspective. How do you view your role within the organization regardless of formal authority, how do you interact with and support your peers, and how to do view the subordinates who work for you?’

Most staff officers are the ‘worker bees’, putting in the hard yards to write the decision briefs and papers to enable senior leaders to make informed decisions about myriad complex issues from serious personnel misconduct to the drafting of operational documents such as rules of engagement. This requires the investment of time in relationships throughout the organisation that form the foundations through connection and helping out with the challenge — you can’t understand the struggle while watching from the sidelines. As a staff officer, your job is to get the hard work done so that the boss can make a good decision on the basis of your work. The staff officer has to coordinate responses from stakeholders and distil all the input into a short, sharp, briefing pack that the time poor senior officer can absorb and understand. While this sounds simple, it requires communicating and influencing people throughout the Defence establishment who have potentially divergent interests or perspectives. You can’t wrangle these people on the basis of your rank or authority — because, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter as much. What matters is that you can influence people to come to the table in the first place, encourage them to provide frank and relevant input to your brief/paper, so the boss has a good basis for making the important and difficult decisions.

3. Every padwan needs a jedi
Amanda Palmer talked about the concept of ‘the fraud police’ — the voices in your head that tell you that you’re not good enough, or smart enough, or ‘whatever’ enough, to do what you want to do. All of us have it to a degree. The important thing is to not let the fraud police get to you. Having a mentor, or someone to guide you and give you objective and frank advice, is important. They give you that reality check and a different perspective, which helps to keep the fraud police at bay. For Amanda, it was her good friend Anthony. It helps to have an Anthony when you are navigating through the maze of strategic level headquarters for the first time.

Jason Howk wrote a great post about the basics of mentoring and explained what it is. If you haven’t found that mentor, Nathan Wike wrote a post on The Strategy Bridge blog a while back that talked about some strategies for people who are going on the hero’s journey alone — all is not lost.

When you do find that person who can be your Anthony, or the Dr Cox to your JD, or the Obi-Wan to your Skywalker; don’t be afraid to ask for help. As Amanda points out, sometimes we are afraid to ask for help, particularly when the professional pride kicks in. She said:

‘Everybody struggles with asking.
From what I’ve seen, it isn’t so much the act of asking that paralyzes us — its what lies beneath: the fear of being vulnerable, the fear of rejection, the fear of looking needy or weak. The fear of being seen as a burdensome member of the community instead of a productive one.’ [4]

My Anthony/’Dr Cox’ turned out to be a general officer who scared the crap out of me when I first met him. He was a confident warfighter with a look that could burn through your retinas and read your mind. But he epitomised everything I want to be. He put all that stuff I wrote about human connection into practice. His job required the coordination of disparate parts of the organisation — internal and external stakeholders, to work together on some hideous, ‘train-wreck’ problems. ‘Dr Cox’ had been doing this job for a while and he had the trust of a lot of influential people. He was a good communicator and had a quiet, confident persona that made people feel safe — that he had it all gripped up and everything’s going to be okay. It was very intimidating to work for someone like that. As one of his staff officers, I represented him and had to live up to some pretty high standards. I worked my butt off to prep for meetings that I would be running on his behalf. I had to live up to the example he set, and that was intimidating, particularly with the voices of the ‘fraud police’ in my head.

But the few months I worked for him are some of the best of my career — because he was the kind of leader that seemed to know, intuitively, how to ‘grow’ other officers by extending them and giving them the confidence to find their own approach. He had the patience to listen to my plans for tackling some of the problems we were dealing with, and let me run with them. I’m sure some of this came at some risk to his reputation and credibility, but complex problem solving needs some novel approaches and he encouraged me to think differently. Sometimes he didn’t like that we were ‘of the same mind’ and made me do more red-teaming. This was new to me.

In the time I worked for this leader, I wrote a lot of notes in my little book; to capture my experiences and his ideas. Working at the strategic level is a new experience for me, and having someone to mentor me through the nuances and pitfalls of that environment, and whose example sets the benchmark, is incredibly important and valuable.

Where to from here?

We all have a picture in our minds of how we want to develop as professional military officers, including the qualities we want to emphasise or obtain as part of this personal growth. The process of learning involves facing major challenges and extending ourselves outside of those areas of comfort that we have formed around us over the years. You can’t grow if you don’t subject yourself to new opportunities. Fortunately, circumstances removed all choices for me. Reminds me of a quote from Joseph Campbell, who wrote about the ‘hero’s journey’:

‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek’. [5]

Some of the events of the last 12 months were milestones in my professional growth. I found myself working as a staff officer for a couple of very different commanders. They each looked to me for advice to help them make some difficult decisions about a wide range of operational and personnel matter — I no longer had a ‘buffer zone’, but found myself as the officer who was thrown into the Badlands of strategic level leadership scrutiny.

My signature was on the bottom of the correspondence. I was exposed and vulnerable — my professional reputation and credibility were up for close examination and challenge. In the last 12 months, I had to re-learn and confront a few things that I had intellectualised but had to experience to properly internalise as part of my learning and growing as an officer.

I was told that the word ‘risk’ in Mandarin is comprised of the characters representing concepts of ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. I learned that development as a professional military officer cannot occur without both.