Generally Speaking

by Claudia J. Kennedy

  • How work is assigned: Does the boss provide a mission for you to accomplish within a context? Or, rather, does he generate a series of specific tasks?

  • Experience: Is the boss experienced in her position and therefore has more concrete views on getting work done? Or is she less experienced and likely to be more flexible and perhaps innovative?

  • Personal chemistry: Is the relationship with the boss augmented by friendliness? Or must the two of you overcome lack of personal warmth?

  I believe that women more than men often suffer professionally when the interpersonal atmosphere in the workplace deteriorates to the point of animosity and distrust between superior and subordinate. Once, I had presented my views on workplace dynamics to a group of military women, when a field-grade officer approached me. “That really rang true, General,” she said. “May I come to talk to you later about a problem I've been having?”

  As I expected, the problem involved a personality clash with her boss, who, she said, was trying to exert unreasonable control over her. She had always been used to doing her job independently, roaming freely around her building, where she had cultivated a mutually supportive network of colleagues. But when her new boss arrived, he saw her long absences from the office as a neglecting of her duties. He took away more and more of her responsibilities and autonomy, and an atmosphere of open distrust developed between the two. A bizarre situation ensued. He required that she sign in and out of the office to use the bathroom and go to lunch, although he did not try to exert this type of stringent control over any of the other officers or civilian employees he supervised.

  When the situation became intolerable, the officer went to her boss's senior officer, ostensibly to tell him the whole unhappy story. The problem was, however, that she did not relate enough detail and only told him in effect, “We're not working well together.”

  Like many women, she was trying to resolve a serious conflict (analogous to my earlier slating difficulties) without admitting just how serious the conflict was. I think one of the reasons women do this—especially in cases involving bizarre circumstances such as these—is that they think that they won't be believed, that people will look at them as if they are the problem. After all, in our culture, the woman complainer is a pejorative figure of near legendary proportions. In Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, John Gray says that men panic when women start talking because they're afraid the women will never shut up. Women learn this lesson young: Don't talk too much; above all, don't complain. Be grateful. Accept what you're given.

  But there are often times when a woman cannot accept inappropriate behavior on the part of a supervisor, who, for the sake of this argument, is almost always a man. Too often women think if they adjust, the man's behavior will change. What they don't realize is that his behavior is not a reaction to her. The man will act as he pleases anyway, unless he is challenged.

  Although they certainly do not like their position, many women silently accept it because they feel they have no control, that men have manipulated events to their own advantage. In reality, I believe it is often that very attitude that keeps women in such a position either in the military or civilian workplace. The lower the expectations, the lower the achievement. If women expect to remain in subordinate positions, everyone around them will expect the same thing.

  This diminished level of women's expectations relates to the differences between the sense of professional entitlement men and women experience. Men generally feel entitled to advance as high as a combination of talent and connections will permit. Women usually feel entitled to advance only up to, but still short of, the limit of their talent as defined by the system in which they find themselves.

  A telling example of this pattern occurred when I attended a dinner meeting organized by a male colonel who invited me and two field-grade women officers, the purpose of which was to discuss an upcoming leadership conference. Toward the end of dinner, he asked one of the women whether she wanted to attend the conference. Her answer was, “Do you want me to be there?” He explained they needed help with a number of topics, and repeated the invitation. Again she asked, “Do you want me to come?” After a third such exchange, I interrupted, and said, “Yes. He wants you there. We all want you there.”

  She had been a pioneer in a branch that had long excluded women and had no experience of feeling entitled. It was clear from later conversations that she did not even hear the colonel's repeated explicit invitations to participate in the conference. Although she wanted to advance professionally, her cumulative experience had taught her she had no right to expect inclusion.

  But today it is not enough to say to our young women that all they have to do is hold the expectation of advancing to top leadership and they will do so. Both military and civilian institutions have to continue to expand the diversity of their leadership paradigms (as has GE's Jack Welch) to demonstrate that they value women's leadership style equally with men's. As this additional leadership paradigm evolves, a parallel evolution in women's sense of professional entitlement should also occur.

  Traditionally, of course, often the reason women are not well represented in the most senior positions is that they, unlike men, have no one to whom to pass responsibility for family life. The negative impact of the Mommy Track on advancement to senior executive has been well documented in business literature. But there is a new pattern emerging. As women acquire valuable and marketable skills, their status as wives and mothers becomes much less important to their employers than their professional accomplishments.

  There is, of course, a productive and fulfilling middle ground for lower-level professional women, both military and civilian, who wish to balance career and family. The library and bookstore shelves are full of advice books on how women can or should walk this difficult tightrope. The reality today is that both these approaches are outdated. Most professional women who have talked to me about their careers also want to find a more balanced life. What they need is practical information on how to manage both.

  As a military commander, I began discussing this, after drawing on my own approach as a younger woman thinking about the pivotal choices I faced.

  A married twenty-seven-year-old captain with five years' service came to see me to discuss her future. She was an excellent officer with solid OERs who had a promising future in the Army. Married to another well-qualified career officer, she wanted to decide whether to continue in the Army or resign to pursue a civilian career and have children. To make such a decision, it helped her to visualize how she might construct a twenty-year career during which she would advance to the rank of colonel while also raising two children. This was an ambitious objective, and one that would require real cooperation from her husband and self-discipline.

  Although they were currently assigned together at Fort Huachuca, it was likely she would be selected for Command and General Staff College at her eleventh year of service on promotion to major. That was an excellent time, I told her, to have her first child. But this might mean she would be separated from her husband during the pregnancy and birth. As we worked further along the timeline, we anticipated she could achieve battalion command as a lieutenant colonel at about sixteen years of service. After that command, it would be appropriate for her to have her second and final child. That baby would then be old enough to comfortably leave in child care during her time at the War College, which was a precursor to brigade command. The timing of these events all fit together so that both her and her husband's retirement as colonels would coincide with the entry of their first child into college.

  This, of course, was not easy, especially during a period of frequent deployments when both might expect to be assigned overseas with little notice. Nevertheless, she has chosen a profession that requires unusual levels of self-discipline. And if she is going to succeed in balancing her personal and professional lives, she will have to become a master of timing and flexibility.

  As I was promoted into positions of higher
authority, I sometimes found what I consider to be an inappropriate level of curiosity about my personal life among my colleagues and some of my soldiers. It was known that I was a divorced woman who dated men, and I guess that was just too intriguing for the gossips to leave alone. So I completely separated my personal and professional lives because I knew, as unfair as it was, that women lose authority if their personal lives become too openly discussed in the workplace.

  We all need a circle of confidants, and I'm no exception. But I cultivated that circle of close friends well away from the people I commanded or in my immediate office. And if there were one piece of professional advice I could give to aspiring women leaders it would be to maintain a clear distance between their personal and professional identities. The popular entertainment industry today has gotten this message dead wrong, with TV shows such as Ally McBeal in which a purportedly successful young lawyer who possesses no personal boundaries discusses her most intimate secrets nonstop throughout the office. This doesn't work in real life.

  At DCSOPS in the Pentagon, when I first learned I'd been selected for battalion command, I had felt some apprehension considering the demands of leadership. I was a short, rather slender person. No one would ever mistake me for square-jawed General William Westmoreland or “Stormin' Norman” Schwartzkopf. Army command involves a combination of leadership, considerable intellectual work, and substantive mission knowledge. But beyond this, traditionally there has been required a certain military bearing and presence. Would the soldiers in my battalion respect my authority and be proud of me as their new commander?

  In a private counseling session for me as a newly selected battalion commander, I mentioned my concern to my boss in DCSOPS, a highly respected infantry colonel named Steve Arnold, who later retired as a lieutenant general.

  “I'm just afraid my troops won't be proud of me, Colonel,” I said. “I'm not the usual male leader with the broad shoulders, narrow hips, and the steely gaze you associate with command.”

  Colonel Arnold smiled. “Once your soldiers get to know you, Claudia, you'll be just fine.”

  His prediction proved accurate. And when I got to Augsburg, I also followed the advice given in pre-command training on how one introduces oneself to the new battalion. In the first two days I walked the entire area, including the operations floor staffed by my battalion during all three daily shifts, and when the fourth shift rotated onto duty a few days later, I also visited them. All the soldiers had a chance to meet their commander and engage in an informal exchange. In later detailed briefings with warrant officers and NCOs, I learned the full scope of our mission and our degree of success. Meeting with my company commanders, their first sergeants, and the battalion staff, I posed three basic questions: What were we doing well? What were we doing badly? What did they want me, the new commander, not to screw up by changing?

  I knew the impression I made on my soldiers in these first few days was extremely important. A leader sets the tone of command unconsciously through appearance, sense of purpose, and communication style. If a new commander is sloppy or disorganized, the unit will follow that newly lowered standard.

  A few days after my individual meeting with Colonel Arnold, Major General Tom Tait, another respected Infantry leader, addressed newly selected battalion commanders as a group. “Within three days of your arrival, your battalion will reflect your personality.” I found his insight invaluable and believe it's a lesson all leaders, both military and civilian, can apply to their organizations.

  Surmounting the problems of a stressful workplace dominated by a complex and sometimes difficult boss is never easy. But I know from personal experience that it is essential to maintain one's habits of self-discipline during such trying times. In 1986, I was among the first women to command a battalion in Military Intelligence. The fact that I took command of the 3rd Operations Battalion at Field Station Augsburg under the acrimonious circumstances of the slating controversy certainly did not help the initial relationship with my brigade commander, Colonel Sam Simerly. On the other hand, given our difference, I might have arrived completely free of controversy and still rubbed him the wrong way. Professional relationships within the brigade were convoluted. Although Colonel Simerly was one of the best managers I have ever worked for, and I later employed many of his management techniques when I commanded a Military Intelligence brigade, he was an inconsistent leader.

  In my opinion, Colonel Simerly also found it useful to pit his officers against each other, to keep them off balance, rather than try to form a cohesive team. He convened the four battalion commanders (three men and me), and warned us bluntly, “I have to spread my ratings.” This was an uncomfortable, one-sided discussion because the Officer Efficiency Reports would have a critical impact on our future careers. We all knew that the Army expected him to distribute his ratings recommendations over a roughly diamond-shaped hierarchy with no more than one in the top block.

  But I felt it was inappropriate for him to emphasize the “block check” of the rating rather than the standards against which he would judge our performance. In effect, he was inviting us to lobby for ourselves, to make our personal case to him why each deserved that top rating.

  It was not the task of professional officers, however, to put themselves forward to win their commander's favor. I did not intend to do so. Rather, I would do my job to the best of my ability and try not to think about OERs. In this regard, none of the other battalion commanders had an obvious advantage, but the colonel did apparently see me—someone who had complained about the slating changes—as a likely candidate for his average rating. I knew I was the odd “man” out in Colonel Simerly's mind.

  Still, the Army had given me this battalion to command, and once I formed the productive partnership with Command Sergeant Major Gant, we concentrated on the mission. It was a job I knew fairly well, having served in the brigade as assistant operations officer and later operations officer from 1981 to 1984.

  To deal with the stress, I maintained the discipline of regular running. And I was pleased that many of the battalion staff officers and NCOs followed my example and ran as the Army advocated. Several months into my command, I'd often see groups of lean young officers and NCOs running for the sheer pleasure of the exercise.

  But my professional relationship with Colonel Simerly never improved. Despite the fact that my battalion always accomplished its intelligence mission and met all Army training requirements, I sensed an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. I learned to keep silent and not rise to any bait. When I realized his discontent was more personally than professionally directed, I focused on accomplishing the battalion's mission and making certain our soldiers had the best quality of life possible. Still, Colonel Simerly's reaction to my performance ran hot and cold. This unpredictability was an unpleasant factor in my life for a year.

  One of the most egregious incidents between us happened about nine months into my command. The 3rd Operations Battalion had a small, remote site in Schleswig-Holstein in the far north of West Germany, close to the East German border. The inspection of the site was a big event for the soldiers involved because both their battalion and brigade commanders were coming at the same time.

  But I had long been concerned about the isolation these young soldiers had to endure in this bleak, windswept countryside near the Baltic. They were far from any other American unit, and their main recreation was beer drinking at the local village Gasthaus. This might seem innocent enough, but German beer has much higher alcohol content than American beer, and is also often served in big one-liter steins. The unit's first sergeant, Becky Hibbs, had told me she was worried that some of the soldiers were showing signs of drinking problems, a situation of which Colonel Simerly was well aware.

  The night after our inspection, the colonel, First Sergeant Hibbs, all the troops who were not on duty, and I went to the local Gasthaus for dinner. The food was excellent, as one might expect. And behind the bar, there were several embossed mugs and plaques revea
ling that some of our soldiers had become champions in local drinking competitions. These were events in which the last person literally standing after hours of swilling beer was the winner. Colonel Simerly thought this was a splendid achievement. I began discussing the problem of chronic drinking, night after night, with the young NCOs at the long plank table.

  But the colonel, who was enjoying the beer himself that night, loudly interrupted me. “Claudia,” he said, “I don't agree with you at all about cutting back on these soldiers' beer. After all, they don't have much else to do up here.”

  I was dumbfounded. First, I was the battalion commander and he was publicly undermining my authority, something an Army leader should never do. Secondly, that was a terrible message to give those soldiers, who certainly needed no further encouragement.

  But after he spoke out, I saw a hard glint in his eye. I believe he wanted me to start an argument in front of these soldiers. Instead, I remained silent.

  Driving back to the quarters, First Sergeant Hibbs told me, “Ma'am, I couldn't believe that Colonel Simerly spoke to you that way.”

  “Don't worry, First Sergeant,” I assured her. “Everything will be fine with the battalion. And don't worry about me, either. I'm tough.”

  This was true enough. I continued to focus on my job. But as Colonel Simerly had warned us, he spread out his Officer Efficiency Reports, forming a pyramid with a narrow point. In my OER, he skillfully damned me with faint praise, precluding any recourse on my part to have the rating removed based on more objective evidence of my performance. By the end of that year, I was fairly sure I no longer had a good chance for promotion, attending the Army War College, or selection for brigade command.

  Although Colonel Edwin Tivol, my new brigade commander, and I had a positive professional relationship and he wrote favorable OERs on my performance, I thought the damage of Simerly's ratings had already been done. One cold gray afternoon in the winter of 1988 when I was nearing the end of my battalion command and thinking longingly of a warm-climate assignment, I called the Military Personnel Center to enquire about openings at the NATO Defense College in Naples, Italy.