Problem is there are a lot more different types of civilians than there are different types of military people.
I’ve always gotten along well with ex-military coworkers because they tend to be results driven. People who were involved in team sports also seem to do well. They understand the concept of working with people to achieve a tangible goal.
What I’ve also found is that people in academic fields (including law and management consulting where I work) tend to be the worst managers. Similar to the officers **bump **described. My friend calls it “being educated above your ability”. Similar to the Peter Principle, these tend to be people who achieved a great deal of academic and intellectual success, however they suck at dealing with people. They have a lot of big ideas but can’t actually build or run anything. Mostly they just float around causing people headaches with their vague requests and unreasonible deadlines while spending an inordinate amount of time politicing and create a facade of brilliance to hide the fact that they don’t know what they are doing.
I think military experience counts for a lot in the “real” world. As does other experience. The experience a person gets out of their past depends on how much attention they paid to what they do and what habits they developed due to their experience. I have observed that retired “career” military folk are usually very good at observation and remembering to take into account what they cannot immediately see as well. That’s a valuable management skill.
One problem with military people is they often develop a mentality that there is one right way - the military way - and every way that is different is wrong.
For example, Chessic talks about helping somebody move and how the military people were doing most of the work. But I wonder if the civilian people saw it that way?
Maybe if one of them were posting here they’d say: “Remember that time we were helping Joe move? And those three military guys were there? We were trying to do the job right and pack everything carefully and sort it out so things that were going to the same place would be packed together and we’d know what was in each box. But those military guys acted like it was some kind of race and just threw everything into boxes as fast as they could so they could quit as soon as possible. They really did a half-ass job. I heard Joe spent weeks trying to sort everything out in his new house and a lot of stuff was broken.”
I think it depends on the kind of company it is. If it is a well established company with well established policies and procedures, military experience is very helpful.
OTOH, I have worked for two companies who had radical changes in the way they did business. One was a startup who changed their business model completely due to market acceptance, and the other was a software company who had to change constantly due to technological innovations. Ex-military were useless in these companies, they resisted every change and were counterproductive. They really didn’t like their cheese being moved. In the first case, we had a lot of former IBM’ers and they were similarly worthless.
I think what you describe isn’t a military/non-military thing, but rather a symptom of the lack of management training that **Oakminster **refers to above. Unfortunately, I see that all the time in IT- plenty of folks get promoted because they’re good at coding, or whatever, but they’re not really good manager material. Then, when they’re in the position, they don’t really get training in how to lead or manage, so it’s a giant clusterfuck from the get-go.
My biggest problem with the ex-officers has been generally their “make it happen” sort of attitude. Which is fine when they realize that in some cases, further questioning or expecting them to play a role is neither insubordination nor incompetence, but rather doing a good job. They want to issue an order, and have finished solutions or software come back, but it doesn’t work that way, at least not very well.
Expecting a manager who has asked for software mods to be able to articulate what he wants, and then be willing to either test it or delegate someone to test it isn’t incompetent or insubordinate at all. And when that person gets chapped and throws a fit because their software is late because they didn’t articulate it or do the testing, is particularly infuriating.
This really has nothing to do with anything, but I like this conversation I had with an O:
Me: Sir, we’re fucked.
O: You know, I’m really tired of you just coming to me with problems and no solutions. At least try to come up with something.
Me: Yes, sir, I will. But I really do think we’re fucked. Here (hands paper), look.
O: Hmm…we’re fucked.
Or “we were all hanging out having a good time helping Joe move. Then these three douchebags came in bossing everyone around acting like they were storming a bunker or some shit.”
As a manager, I don’t want to have to tell 5 people exactly how to do every single task I assign them. If they require that much hand holding, I mind as well do it myself.
What you will typically find as a manager is that people will complain that you treat them like children. And yet when you give them the opportunity to take on some responsibility for themselves, they don’t want it.
Sure, but when the managers won’t give clear requirements or bother to put any emphasis on user acceptance testing, it’s not a matter of hand-holding or treating someone like a child, it’s active obstruction of the process because it’s inconvenient to them. Believe me, I’m not one of those anti-responsibility workers, but nor will I take responsibility for things that are not clearly defined and that don’t have clear success/failure conditions attached. That’s just a recipe to fail, because it’s unclear how you succeed.
There’s an old joke that goes “There’s a right way, a wrong way, and the ARMY way”. And for many in the military, now and in the past, that’s the way things are. You do things the way the ARMY (or whatever branch) says to do them. Now, in many cases, the military way has been tested over the years, and it’s been found the most efficient way. But things change, and those who cannot adjust to new circumstances will not thrive. While this mindset is not unique to current and ex military members, many of them find it very comforting to know exactly what to do in any given situation. Other people get incredibly frustrated at this outlook, and don’t do well in the military.
Some people learn to be followers in the military, but not leaders. Ex-military, assuming that they served satisfactorily, are almost guaranteed to be able to follow directions, without fussing or whining about it. Sometimes, though, fussing and whining is what it takes to get a problem solved. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need this. But take a look at the workplace griping thread. Some bosses are…ineffectual, or downright toxic, and you just have to learn how to cope.
My husband was in the Air Force for a dozen years, and I married him when he’d been in for six months. I saw a lot of people in the military, both officers and enlisted, and some of them were fine workers, and fine leaders. Others weren’t. My husband is a fantastic worker, he’s very good at what he does. But don’t ask him to plan or lead anything more than a fishing trip. He just doesn’t have the skills to do this.
LOL sort of reminds me of camping with House Bloodguard at Pennsic … it was full of various military and reservists [and one male model, go figure] and it was hysterical. You had to be very careful telling someone off to go dig the sump because you might end up with a 6x6x6 marine style 2 man fighting hole instead of the 2x2x3 serenghetti-legal sump…I will admit I had no trouble with the sump overfilling that summer. :smack:
Right, but certain things I shouldn’t have to spell out. Let me give you a specific example from today. Our vendor kicks off a database process every week that takes like 10 hours. Today, for some reason a bunch of major tasks were turned off. The guy is understandably confused because these tasks are not supposed to be disabled (and I still have no idea how they got that way). Anyhow, he requests assistence so I tell him to turn them back on and restart the process.
Four hours later, he is still sitting on his hands not running this ten hour process.
I have too much of my own work today (thanks to my boss who is an idiot for completely different reasons) to sit down with everyone and walk them through shit they have been doing every week for the past two years.
Consider the length of time and the position in the military. Say, a command sergeant major with 25 years in is probably rigid and inflexible. Someone who was in a highly technical position for five years and decided to get out is likely to have a very different mindset.
I really have a hard time believing that the military is not subject to at least the same amount of beurocracy and institutional bullshit as the civilian world.
When I was with Home Depot they were having issues adapting to the new business model that came with CEO Bob Nardelli. The older store managers basically were resisting any and all of the corporate mandated changes. The answer was to bring in ex military guys, they brought them in and fast tracked them to management positions. I trained a number of them in operations and overall I think it was good for the company. Not all of them made good managers but they absolutely followed orders which was the company wide issue that needed solving. They adapt well. Tell them what to do and how you want it done and they will do it.
If you want someone to come along and offer dynamic leadership, a military guy probably isn’t your best choice but if you want someone who can lead given a strict set of guidelines the military guys can do that well.
I agree, that’s a real head-scratcher. I (and anyone with some initiative) would have probably turned the things back on without asking.
Our problem was more of the variety that begins with “Our system to sell and track X sucks. Make it work better sort of like this.”
Then, after trying to pry more clear requirements out of the guy and his underlings, we end up with a reasonably clear set of requirements and we develop the solution.
Trying to get them to log in and test it to shake out any bugs or more importantly, misconceptions was a huge trial, but we thought we had that done after a lot of toil, trouble and harassment.
New mods go live… all sorts of unintended consequences to Lt. Col’s solution become apparent when the system gets a real workout, and his response is to blame us. Needless to say, we were not happy; we tried at every stage to engage him and his folks, but they were uncooperative.
I think had he had his way, he’d have just issued an order to fix it, and we’d have gone, done it, and it would have worked, without being involved any more in the process.
I’m a civilian who’s worked for the military for 25 years. Many of the civilians I work with are prior military, and their military experience was absolutely essential - for some jobs, joining the military was the only way to get the skills. I know this case is kind of a no-brainer, but lots of civilian enterprises lend themselves to the kinds of experience and habits you pick up in the military.
As others have said, there are other jobs for which military experience is less applicable. I remember NPR ran a story about veterans who were experiencing workplace discrimination and having trouble fitting into civilian culture. One guy said that upon being introduced to his boss as a veteran, she replied that she was a pacifist and didn’t support the (Iraq) war. I thought, jeez, what a bitch. Then it was revealed where this took place: MTV. C’mon, you expect recording industry sleazes to have the same values as the military? I would bet that if the average MTV employee went to work on an Army base, they’d have to work at fitting in.
Another article in the Wall Street Journal a while back dealt with this same problem, of veterans not fitting into their civilians jobs’ culture. They quoted one frustrated vet as saying something like, “I can’t understand why civilians have trouble accepting veterans into the workplace. Having lived under the exacting standards of the military, we are vastly superior to them!” I bet you’re a hit around the water cooler, buddy.
Military culture today places a great deal of emphasis on agressively taking charge and louding touting (or exaggerating) your accomplishments and merits. In some workplaces, that attitude can take you far; in others, people will think you’re an asshole.
For three years my wife worked for an organization whose manager was a retired Marine colonel. Indeed, everyone addressed him as “Colonel.” The only positive thing she has to say about him is that if there was any heat from outside the unit, the Colonel would always back up his people, defend them, and protect them from outside criticism.
Other than that, he was a disaster, especially in the sense of being able to manage people on a personal level. He was routinely snowed by flirty girls and had no idea how to handle interpersonal difficulties, often taking the side of the perpetrators of discord.
He was homophobic and constantly made inappropriate remarks to young women in the office. He routinely failed to intervene with problem people, such as the guy who started throwing staplers at people. He hired his incompetent loser of a son whose sole experience was a few years in the military with no relevant training or skills for the job and no college degree, just to get him off his couch.
He was almost comically oblivious to the interests, tastes, and feelings of the people around him in a very Michael Scott-like way. He would organize potlucks, and ignoring the young, hip, urban, cosmopolitan tastes of his employees, assign them contributions. One girl who loves Asian and fusion cuisine who wanted to bring in something she liked, was forced to bring in hamburger fixings – buns, lettuce, mustard, etc. He would of course bring in his gigantic George Foreman grill every time to make a whole pile of hamburgers, never really noticing that in his small unit of a dozen or so people, very few of them were big fans of hamburgers.
Personally, I’m convinced that the main reason he was kept around was that his veteran status gave the company a significant preference for government contracts.
I didn’t find that to be true. Sure there were some ex-military people who were blowhards but there were plenty who didn’t talk about their military history. And usually the ones who had the most history talked the least.