Generally Speaking (17 page)

And it's important to remember that two thirds of the units in the Army are
not
in the combat arms, so women play a vital role in maintaining the effectiveness of the total force. Increasingly, women are commanding battalions and brigades in the combat support arms, such as Military Intelligence, Engineers, Military Police, and in the combat service support arms, such as the Transportation, Ordnance, and Signal Corps.

As women advance into such positions of authority both in the military and the civilian world, they often discover a close relationship between personal authenticity and leadership power. By authenticity, I mean the leader's ability to draw on her innate character traits and personal history, often involving experiences that lie outside the traditional leadership model.

In “Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity,” an article in the
Harvard Business Review,
September–October 1996, Harvard Business School Professor David A. Thomas and Professor Robin J. Ely of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs describe the levels of sophistication and effectiveness of three workplace paradigms for managing the talents of a diverse array of leaders. They note that, although efforts to improve effective workplace gender, racial, and ethnic diversity have been underway for decades, it is difficult to identify the actual positive impact of those initiatives in corporate America. This is because those efforts were based on two ineffective paradigms. Models of a corporation's culture can be seen as stages of evolution in its path to using the full range of talent available. Alternatively, these diversity paradigms can be viewed as descriptions of different corporate cultures that may not necessarily be in the process of changing and improving.

The first, the discrimination and fairness paradigm, is the most widespread and the least effective. It stems from the recognition that discrimination is not only wrong, but also generally runs counter to federal Equal Employment Opportunity requirements. The goal of this paradigm is to meet those requirements, and to do so, companies often create mentoring and career development programs tailored specifically for women and minorities. Meeting recruitment and retention requirements to fit this paradigm becomes an end in itself, as does the goal of creating ostensible gender- and color-blind conformism. But the “diverse” employees normally do not rise to positions of leadership proportionate to their numbers. As Thomas and Ely indicate, “The staff, one might say, gets diversified, but the work does not.” And individuals' talents are not adequately exploited.

One of the major shortcomings of this model is the myth of the desirability of conformity, which denies all gender, racial, and ethnic differences and assumes assimilation is the goal. For example, three decades ago in the Army, officers discussed seeing only “green” soldiers—whom they viewed by the color of their uniforms, not by their race. Today in the Army and elsewhere, bitterness over supposed political correctness—in which diverse groups exert their own identity and seek commensurate rights and responsibilities—is a product of the false assumption that organizations composed of diverse human talent should desire to create uniform approaches to work and leadership.

The access and legitimacy paradigm takes the opposite tack, celebrating gender, racial, and ethnic differences. Here the goal is to use a diverse workforce to seek access to a more diverse clientele, matching company and consumer demographics. But this paradigm often leaves women and minority employees feeling marginalized or exploited, not truly integrated into the corporate mainstream based on their demonstrated individual personal strengths and potential.

In the third, and in my opinion, more enlightened, approach, the learning and effectiveness paradigm, corporate leaders are proactive in exploiting diversity in their quest to harness employees' strengths and cultural experience. Company leaders make a sincere effort to fight all forms of dominance and subordination (generally based on the presumption that leadership is the prerogative of white men). They encourage people to make explicit use of their personal backgrounds and cultural experience in the workplace. For example, women managers are viewed as soft if they display empathetic support to their employees. In other words, in this paradigm, a woman leader is not encouraged to abandon her authenticity as a woman in order to retain her power as a leader. Equally, members of minorities are encouraged to retain their cultural identity and not split their characters between workplace and community.

Thomas and Ely illustrate this point well in a case study of a large national insurance company in which an African-American woman being groomed for a leadership position faced dismissal just three months after being selected by the manager of her unit, an African-American man. That manager told the vice president investigating the situation he was deeply disappointed with the woman's performance, even though he had been certain she possessed “tremendous leadership skill.” It turned out the man knew this woman from church where she was an extremely effective leader in that traditional African-American community setting in which women often fill high leadership positions. When the vice president questioned the woman about the gap between her effectiveness as a community leader and her lack of leadership in the corporate workplace, she replied, “I didn't think I would last long if I acted that way here.” She added that her personal leadership style—her authenticity—worked well where she felt free to employ it fully. But she felt constrained, afraid to be herself, in the corporate setting. Having worked for the company for years, she added, “I know this organization, and I know if I brought that piece of myself—if I became that authentic—I just wouldn't survive here.” The vice president, herself a woman who'd had to adapt, recognized the mismatch between this woman's cultural background and the cultural environment of the workplace. She had long seen herself as undervalued in the organization, even though she was a highly valued person in her own community. Both the supervising manager and the vice president began to guide the woman toward drawing on the personal power released by being authentic.

The learning and effectiveness paradigm integrates personal diversity and approaches to work, making explicit use of a person's background and cultural experience. This paradigm's measure of success is how well the company allows employees to draw on their personal assets and perspectives to accomplish their work. People working in this paradigm feel authentic and incorporate their perspectives into the main work of the company.

As I watch younger women officers assume their well-earned commands, I reflect on my own career and recall the turmoil that accompanied my selection as a battalion commander in the spring of 1985.

I was a recently promoted lieutenant colonel working in a huge office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans in the Pentagon. About seventy fellow officers and I sat at groups of desks in a windowless maze of gray partitions on the supposedly prestigious E-Ring (but in the inner, less prestigious, part of the corridor), breathing air that, according to Pentagon myth, had been recycled since World War II. In DCSOPS alone, majors and lieutenant colonels numbered in the hundreds, each responsible for a multimillion-dollar “program package.” The work was heavily bureaucratic, but filled a vital function in support of the field Army.

I had been a commissioned officer almost sixteen years and could retire four years later as a lieutenant colonel and as a young woman ready to take up a second, civilian career. My professional life was at a crossroads. I awaited a decision by the Army. Selection for battalion command might be next. There was, no indication that this splendid possibility was in the offing, however.

Then one March afternoon, I was sitting at my desk after lunch when I got a call from a friend. “Claudia,” she whispered, “you've been selected to command a battalion.”

I felt a rush of elation such as I had not experienced up to that point or since. “How do you know?” I found myself whispering like a fellow conspirator.

The Department of the Army selection board for fiscal year 1986 for battalion commanders in the combat arms, combat support arms, and combat service support arms had concluded. And my name was on the list.

“Are you absolutely sure?” I asked.

“I'm looking at it,” she confirmed.

“Can you get me a copy?”

“Absolutely not.” My friend was taking a real chance by revealing this confidential information that had not yet been cleared by the personnel command.

It seemed I would have to wait an indefinite period of time before official notification. But I couldn't help smiling broadly through the rest of the afternoon. And over the coming weeks, I'd feel surges of joy just thinking about this wonderful opportunity. I was going to be a battalion commander, the dream I'd harbored as a young officer ten years before when I'd decided to stay in the Army.

I considered what Military Intelligence battalion the Intelligence and Security Command would assign me. I had experience in Korea, and I'd served as an operations officer at the largest SIGINT operation in Germany—Field Station Augsburg, where a four-battalion brigade was stationed. The unit that most attracted me was Field Station Korea, an independent battalion, still stationed at Pyongtaek. The outfit had its own helicopter detachment and several remote sites along the DMZ. If I got that assignment, I thought I would be well prepared to build on the work of past commanders and to forge productive relationships between tactical and strategic assets.

The actual assignment process after selection for battalion command was called “slating,” matching a particular officer's qualifications for the requirements of the command. Officially that process was an objective procedure conducted by Military Intelligence Branch, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and the leadership of INSCOM (Intelligence and Security Command) to determine who fit best where. Since I had previously served in Korea and had spent two years in the Junior Officer Cryptologic Program at the National Security Agency honing my strategic intelligence skills—and much of the responsibility of Field Station Korea was strategic intelligence—I felt I had a reasonable chance of being slated for that coveted assignment. A woman had never commanded that battalion before. In fact, women had commanded only a handful of battalions in the entire Army.

In June, I received word of my official slating. I was to attend pre-command training later that year, before assignment to Field Station Korea. Once more I was elated. The unit was the premier SIGINT battalion in the Army. It had an interesting mission, with a broad range of responsibilities that required unusual operational and logistic skills and I would have much more latitude to lead the battalion.

Then a peculiar event occurred. The lieutenant colonel slated to take command of the Support Battalion at Field Station Augsburg telephoned me one day. “Do you want to trade assignments?” he asked.

I was taken aback by his question. “No,” I replied. “I certainly do not.”

But he persisted. “Well, if you don't mind, I'm going to make some calls and try to get the trade anyway.”

“Look,” I said as forcefully as I could, “I
do
mind, and I hope you will
not
try to make the switch.”

That was the end of our conversation, which left me uneasy, even though I felt confident that any phone calls he would make could not upset the formal slating process and deprive me of my assignment to Korea. I was also confident that no change would be considered based on his request without someone calling me and asking my view. In my years in the Army, I had learned that officers operated honorably and didn't lobby for selection to certain assignments when the decision had already been made, unless the other officer affected agreed.

So I was shocked when I called the training people at Fort Devens to review the dates for the pre-command course there, and learned that I would be assigned to Germany, not Korea. “You're not going to Korea, Colonel,” an officer insisted. “We've got you down as slated for the Support Battalion at Field Station Augsburg.”

I was gripped by simultaneous disappointment and outrage. Somehow, that other lieutenant colonel seemed to have manipulated the system and pulled off this trade against my will. I called INSCOM. They verified what the school personnel at Fort Devens had told me: I was now slated to command a support battalion, not even one of the three SIGINT operations battalions in the Field Station Augsburg Brigade. Further, INSCOM verified that they'd known of this change in slating for some time, but no one had bothered to tell me.

“There's got to be some mistake,” I told the INSCOM personnel officer. This was not just denial. I simply didn't believe the Army leadership would become involved in a manipulation of our system.

So I now called the most senior personnel officer in Military Intelligence Branch that I could reach. “Yes, Colonel Kennedy,” he verified. “Your slating has been changed to the Support Battalion in Augsburg.”

And the phone call confirmed that my fellow officer had indeed secured Field Station Korea. I was disappointed in that officer and in not having been informed by those involved in the decision process, either before or after the change. The time was drawing near for me to begin pre-command training, and it looked as if I'd been undermined by a peer rather than assigned by an objective Army process.

Then a friend, an Infantry officer, called with additional news. He had seen a message sent from Korea to the Military Personnel Center concerning the change in my slating and the reassignment of the other lieutenant colonel to Field Station Korea. The official reason stated in the message was my “gender.” Ostensibly, Koreans would not respond to a woman in authority.

“You and I both know that's not fair, Claudia,” he said.

“That's for sure.”

I'd never had any trouble with my Korean counterparts when I'd served there before. Dealing with Korean officers, they had always respected the mission and our operation, and I had received their full cooperation and complete access to their leadership. My gender had certainly had no negative effect on our professional interaction. And given the mission of Field Station Korea, the battalion probably had the least direct contact with the Korean military of any of the American units stationed in the country. I could have been a green-striped purple gremlin and still effectively commanded the battalion as far as the Koreans were concerned. The issue of gender was utterly irrelevant.