This Isn't Your Father's National Guard

While serving as a public affairs specialist in Kosovo, I had the pleasure of conducting a brief interview with the Vice President of the United States. For those (83% of Americans) who don't know who that is, his name is Joe Biden.

His staff prohibited me from asking the questions that were most pressing and interesting, so I only threw unmemorable softballs. His answer, though, I have never forgotten.

"This is not your father's National Guard," he said with a folksy smile.

The gist of his comments was that our national defense strategy relies heavily on Citizen-Soldiers, who must leave families, jobs, and communities, to operate in technically and politically complex environments. More than ever, National Guardsmen bear the heaviest loads in our military operations.

I have written quite a bit about the phenomenon, which I happen to applaud. If the United States is going to send anybody to war, it might as well be those who represent our nation the best. They are the men and women of the various National Guard units across the country and its territories. They are well-trained, well-prepared, and ready to serve.

That preparation hasn't come easily, though. Sparing the explanations of how Guardsmen have always been shunned by regulars, it's enough to say that they have had to go above and beyond to prove their mettle. Meanwhile, our political leaders and the public have put their confidence in the National Guard's warfighting capability.

All that leads to one undeniable fact, which was summed up in Biden's epigram: the National Guard is a lot different than it was a generation ago. It has changed. It has adapted (and quite well) to its more prominent role.

The Army itself has adapted, too. In fact, "adapt and overcome" is a common saying for Soldiers, to advise them on how to cope with obvious challenges.

The advice is good for everyone. No matter what the expectation or demand, meet it with the confidence and determination of success. It might be attained by changing an approach, a perspective, or a timeline, but adaptation is a skill that needs to be practiced.

Is the National Guard the most adaptive organization? By no means. Institutionalism and orthodoxy are plagues that need to be fought at many turns. But the Army has shown, for example with the new directive on immediate repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, that it can adapt quickly.

Front line leaders should be teaching their Soldiers to be flexible. But usually it is the leaders who can learn a thing or two from their juniors. The newer members-- who tend to be younger-- of an organization are the ones riding the wave of new trends.

This is not your father's world. But your parents would be proud to see you adapt to it.

The Reasonableness Standard

Let's be reasonable folks.

Seriously, how frustrating is it to deal with unreasonable people? They pretty much suck.

I have never had an unreasonable boss, nor have I had unreasonable teachers. I have dealt with unreasonable people, though. (Why are they, more often than not, government employees?)

Every teenager has unreasonable parents, and cops are generally unreasonable when they pull you over; are they not?

So we all know unreasonable when we see it.

At any rate, an unreasonable person in authority—whether she's a boss, teacher, wife, or other leader—is cheating herself.

We ought to stand up, as a people, and demand reasonableness from our leaders.

An example is in order here. An Army officer I knew on my overseas deployment, who we'll call Col. Jerkface, always said "no" reflexively. He looked for opportunities to say no to his troops. Any time there was a request for any type of amenity, the answer was "no."

Moreover, there was absolutely no pleasing this man. He looked for failure in his subordinates. You could never say the right thing, or do anything to make him proud. He was, in a word, unreasonable.

Did he ever get the best from his troops? Absolutely not! Some would say that his cantankerousness was the source of his effectiveness. Baloney. Yes, unreasonable people sometimes do get things done, but I would argue that he’d be even more effective if he was a little more reasonable.

Oh, I just thought of a better example of unreasonableness in action. Again, from the Army (we are proving the government employee rule, here).

In a class at my advanced Army journalism training, we were delivered a lecture via PowerPoint. Now these slideshows tended to be 40 or 50 slides long, chalk-full of text and dense information.

At test time, one particular question threw the entire class for a nut roll. To a man, we complained that we hadn’t gone over the information being tested. The instructor was skeptical of our pleas for leniency, but we stood firm in our defense.

This man scoured the slides for an oblique reference to the question material, and he found one. Never minding that he had skipped over that slide without mentioning it, he left us on the hook for the question.

UNREASONABLE!

Students need to operate in a real world environment. The real world, we like to teach them, is reasonable. In fact, we need to be to teaching them the lessons that supposedly buttress ours. Hard work, deadlines, follow though, manners—they are all rewarded in the real world because most people are reasonable.

If the world were populated only by Col. Jerkfaces or the instructors who find remote test questions from interminable lectures, then there wouldn’t be any incentive to do those things. Unreasonable people are arbitrary, and did I mention that they pretty much suck?

Let me now tell you how to be reasonable. If a student is sick, let him make up work. If a student needs help, help her. If a student doesn’t have access to a computer, work something else out.

A common practice for good teachers is to eliminate questions from a test that the entire class misunderstands. One of my students misread a question and answered the wrong question correctly. I knew she understood the material, so I made arrangements for her to earn the points.

We can get our jobs done while being reasonable. It is not a sign of weakness.

So the new standard is the reasonableness standard.

What are some horror stories from your organizations of people who don't meet it?

Teamwork Saves Lives and Time

"I am a Warrior and a member of a team."

That line from The Soldier's Creed might apply even better to students. While individual achievement is on everyone's mind, teachers all want to develop soft skills in their learners.

One of the most valuable of those skills is teamwork, and it's here that teachers can take some tips from Army trainers. Needless to say, Army operations rely on effective team interactions.

A course on the topic, developed by the Army, gives some really useful insight.

“You get what you pay for; if you want teamwork, you must reward it.” When teachers demand (or even merely hope) that students work together, what are they doing to incentivize it? How many points is good team work worth versus neat homework or participation?

I made a parent angry in my math class by grading students on teamwork. The concerned mother assured me that her son would earn As were it not for his deadbeat teammates. I stood firm, insisting that I was just as interested in his ability to cooperate with and communicate to peers as I was of his demonstration of individual  knowledge.

Even if he never joins the Army and has to deliver cover fire for his buddy who is bounding toward the enemy, he will likely land a job that requires team play. And one of the greatest lessons we can give our students-- far more important than how to find the solution set for a system of inequalities-- is the ability to cooperate and lead a team.

My incentive was to require classwork to be done in teams, with a strict formula for its evaluation. Each team's "foreman" would staple individual work into a packet. I graded random problems from the packet en toto, and assigned each team member the same corresponding grade.

The format lent itself to another team building recommendation from the Army: ensuring that responsibilities and decision making are clear. My math teams had specific roles assigned to each member.

There is no magic formula for bringing "community" to a team other than a sensitive leader who develops relationships based on understanding members' strengths and weaknesses. Students can learn how to be  good, sensitive leaders. They know what their peers can do well.

They also need to learn to communicate. In an effective team, everyone knows 1) what they are trying to accomplish; 2) why; and 3) how.

Then the fun begins. Conflict is inevitable, as any Soldier will tell you (Just ask the NCOIC of our detachment who was almost accosted for joking about throwing balloons full of feces at a snoring Soldier). But conflict should seen as an opportunity to grow, and teachers need to recognize those opportunities to teach skills beyond keeping the volume down or "staying on task."

Certainly the Army model has major shortfalls. Conflict is often resolved by stubborn seniors, who operate on the "that's how it's done in the Army" paradigm. But when teams are clicking, seniority takes a back seat to group decision-making. Even tough leaders can get their groups to solve problems together.

Creativity can get students beyond the impasse, as can having them write down their understanding of the expectations and plans.

After all, until students get comfortable in assuming a variety of roles within the team, we are the leaders. And,

“[The leader’s responsibility is] to clarify the team goals, to identify those issues which inhibit the team from reaching their goals, [and] to address those issues, remove the inhibitors and enable the goals to be achieved.”

Building teams is a process that never ends, and there is much more to it than the few ideas above. And though students aren't facing life-and-death situations in the classroom (hopefully) they can take another lesson from the Soldier and his creed:

"I will never leave a fallen comrade."

Teams help students understand that mutual success is good for the individual, too.

Is It Better to Be Reliable or Excellent?

A few weeks ago, I paid homage to Maj. Gen. John Schofield for his insight into what makes Soldiers successful. To be more specific, he referred to battlefield success as "reliability."

I instinctively concluded that reliability was a goal for every organization that required performance from individuals.

Then I was challenged. From a reader:

Interesting that you point out that the goal is "reliability" as opposed to something else like "excellence" or "commitment" or "creativity" or "sheer awesomeness." I think that sometimes in a non-battle situations, I'd actually prefer someone who's a little bit unreliable but capable of flashes of creativity and greatness.

It was a good challenge, but ultimately, the call on the field was upheld.

First, some concessions. Semantically, "excellence" could imply reliability. Some Army types would offer some rigamarole about how excellent means reliable and vice versa. 

But the way the reader framed it makes it clear that it's possible to be excellent inconsistently. We know that there are pro athletes who are capable of excellence, or who can dominate one night, then not show up the next. As a teacher, I had many students with those flashes, or even longer glows, of brilliance, but who were hopelessly uncommitted.

When I coached, I would have loved to have amazingly skilled athletes. I rarely had them. Much more valuable to me were the reliable ones, on whom I could count for dependable performances. Slow and steady wins the race, as the saying goes. 

In battle, General Scholfield knew, dependability and consistency is also more important than brilliance, if leaders don't know when it will show up.

How do Army leaders cultivate consistency, then? Drills and procedures. Their methods offer lessons to teachers who want consistency in the classroom, too. Best practice is rife with drills and procedures (without all the yelling).

That gets to Schofield's point: discipline-- based on drills, I presume-- is best developed by mutual respect. In that regard, the Soldiers can take notes from good teachers. 

Yeah, yeah, we want to cultivate creativity, of course. We want our students to think as individuals. All that, of course, goes without even saying. What does need to be said is that none of those lofty goals are possible without a foundation of consistency, dependability, and yes, reliability.

As a teacher, I believe that all learners are capable of excellence. But just like the coach that needs consistent play from his athletes, I know that they will achieve excellence only if put into the right position. 

So my readers were once again sage: By a 15 to one ratio, they also said that reliability was preferable.

I knew I could count on them.