Exit Interviews: The Missing Piece in Transition

This piece continues the Twitter based professional conversation between military leaders in the United States and faculty and students at Kings College in London.

The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the US Army or the Department of Defense. Read the post and join the discussion on Twitter #CCLKOW.

Transition is a dirty word for the Company grade leader. It incites images of sitting in a room full of other service members being given instruction on how to pay bills responsibly and plan a budget. Let’s face it, you may have led troops in combat, but surely you cannot figure out how to budget and spend your money wisely after you leave service, right? While a silly question, this image is does not starkly contrast the realities of the Army’s current retirement and transition program. In a #CCLKOW post not too long ago we featured the first in a three part series about our take on some of the challenges that company grade leaders face during their transition from service. In this edition, we will examine the incredibly important and increasingly absent presence of exit interviews of transitioning Army leaders.

The exit interview isn’t a new concept or a unique concept that only applies to transitioning civilian employers. Many companies use exit interviews to capture lessons learned from their employees about best practices and seek to retain institutional knowledge from members of their workforce to gauge workplace satisfaction and get a general idea of why they’re leaving the organization. In the case of retirement, the exit interview is more focused on capturing institutional knowledge. Forbes Magazine from July of 2012 describes some of the latest examples of how exit interviews are being used today by other organizations to improve their organizations.

This begs the question of how our Army can best incorporate this strategy into our own transition program. The current ACAP program makes plenty of time for classes on how to prepare a resume, plan a budget, and plan for your future. At the Company level, Army Regulation (AR) 600–20, Command Policy, requires Commanders to simply support the transition of his Soldiers’ from uniform to suit. It integrates transition into the Army’s “Ready and Resilient” campaign and is only briefly mentioned. What’s absent is a requirement to catalogue a Soldier’s knowledge before they transition. The Army’s cornerstone document on leadership, FM 6–22, does not discuss transition or the associated leadership responsibilities related to transition even once. The Army’s budget for base support programs, which includes transition programs, has increased by approximately $1,310.2 million over last year. The reality of a downsizing Army is that we’re going to lose valuable leadership experience from retiring officers and company grade leaders who have either been directed to leave, or decided to leave on their own. There is sure to be some callousness associated with certain departures and these lessons cannot be simply transcribed from yet ANOTHER survey. Numbness to surveying caused by the over years isn’t likely to effectively capture the lessons and is sure to get lost in information-space. What I would propose is part of the increases in funding to be allocated to building multiple teams at each installation whose mission is to analyze and catalogue the lessons learned. At the highest levels, categories would be based on our current unit focuses and include research and development (R&D-Largely contracted out, but still being done), force generation (training, schoolhouses), fighting force (war fighting functions). “Collection teams” would have specialized training in interviewing techniques and would require an understanding of how to properly archive such knowledge. Meetings with these teams would only be conducted AFTER Company/Battalion level command teams have interviewed their transitioning leaders personally. This highlights the target of the program; Company and, at the max, the Battalion level. These exit interview teams could provide valuable information to the Command teams about why their leaders are exiting military service and provide important data for the command on ways to improve the direction of their organizations; and the Army at-large.