military-vs-civilian-culture-excerpts.md

Excerpts about Military and Civilian culture

Excerpts from https://www.govloop.com/forums/topic/military-vs-civilian-workplace-culture-which-is-more-suited-to-government/

Culture

• Would I change where I work? No way. Could things be better? Things could always be better.

• “civilian culture” is constantly evolving and changing to meet the demands of the market because if it doesn’t than the company doesn’t survive.

• While the market drives budgets, personnel, strategies, and ultimately culture in the civilian business landscape, the world, its threats, and politics drive the military culture. The military is big and everything it does is played out on a world stage. Structure and hierarchy help manage its size, control its actions, and maintain accountability of its personnel. It also can lead to tyrranical leadership, game playing for advancement, and slow change.

  The size and power of the military help provide a buffer when the world and the enemy changes rapidly and allows it to catch up and evolve to meet the demands of the new threat (ie open warfare with main battle tanks vs. street to street fighting in urban areas). Most companies don’t have that same buffer, that same reaction time, to adjust to the market slowly.

• We don’t operate in a people-friendly environment. Sometimes it seems it’s everyman for himself, which is why retirement for me will be a welcome change. The military supports its people [...] Merit means something [...] Doing good things can outweigh the things you aren’t so good at. The best part is highlighted and the organization uses your unique talents.

• The best culture is the one which achieves the organizational objectives while gaining the most approval from internal and external stakeholders. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. So the next best culture is the one that achieves the organizational objectives with or without gaining approval from various stakeholders.

• Organizations which fail to achieve their objectives cannot be said to have a succesful culture regardless of the approval level from stakeholders.

• It is critical to remember that cultural norms which lead to great success in one environment can be ineffective or counterproductive under different circumstances. GE and Goldman Sachs have demanding “demonstrate success every year or lose your job” cultures. [...] The same culture would probably fail miserably in civilian government.

• primary difference may be the way we look at leadership in that culture. Do leaders earn and keep their place because they produce results from the internal and external stakeholders or do they remain no matter what?

  I don’t believe in strict formulas or labeling. I still think the more people-based approach works. With companies like GE and Goldman Sachs success is based on money. If people also base their success and worth on the amount of money they can make for the company, they are probably okay with the organizational culture; however, if they is not so motivated, they would probably fail at their jobs, or at least be unhappy in that culture unless what they base their worth on is met.

• I think there is success by degree; true failure is not an option. 25 people can sit on a committee for two years and do the work 4 contractors could do in two months. There is success; it took two years to accomplish.

Professionalism

• when you have an emotional expereince it changes your behavior [...] realizing that “more sweat in training, less blood in combat” changes your sense of urgency and how one conducts business

• Individualism and self-interest that can lead to disloyalty and corruption are some of the same forces which drive innovation, creativity, and rapid growth that are critical to companies.

• Values of teamwork, mission focus, self-evaluation, and accountability are critical. Understanding the unique threats to these in each “culture” and attacking them using all levels of leadership to get better should be the common denominator.

• The better leaders here understand individual initiative, but appreciate, at the end of the day, that I am going to “follow orders” and respect the chain of command.

• One of the things I have heard repeated here is a reluctance to adapt to the culture if you are not a part of the original culture in place or power. "The cultural language doesn’t make sense, the acronyms are foreign." “Just tell me what you need!”

  As I was told when asked about actors learning all their lines before rehearsal: professionals, if they want to get paid, need to adapt to what the theatre needs you to do.

  Even if we don’t like the way it is presented to us, it is still up to us as professionals to do our best to adapt so we understand the message sent and can deliver the product or service desired. No one said we had to like it. Not liking it and fighting will do nothing but make us miserable. If we are artists and idealists, we should find another line of work. Or, we can make ours work for us until we have the luxury of making that change.

• My office is very chain-of-command because that controls the situation and keeps everyone in their place; I’d rather be where my work is valued and my mistakes, a learning experience, rather than a way of keeping me in my place and showing my superior to be superior and always right.

• Whatever the situation, we need to work out an accommodation that works for us. When we’re in charge, we can make it the way we want.

Leadership behaviours

• [...] I have had leaders in my chain of command who prized individual thinking to develop the next generation of leaders. After all those people will some day be in charge of someone else. On the other hand, I have had leaders in my chain of command that micromanage. They constantly ask what I am doing and double check it before it goes out of the our hands.

• In civilian life the guidelines of who is actually in charge of what can get blurred. I think the people in leadership positions that choose to mentor and trust thier subordinates get the job done more effectively. Because everyone just wants to know that their supervisor, whether he/she addresses that person as Sergeant or Mister has confidence in his/her abilites to get tasks completed.

• There are good, bad, controlling, empowering, political, saints, egotists, and what have you whereever you go.

• I worked for civilians for whom profit ruled; it seemed they could see only that bottom line and were in a hurry to achieve it and the only goal after that was to find ways to get richer.

• Government civilians I have worked with were too worried or too impressed with their own careers, resisted change or creativity, attended meetings to be seen, micromanaged employees, and rarely would give a subordinate work that could get them promoted [...] I liked that my military boss trusted me to do the job and didn’t worry that I might make too much of a splash to outshine him.

• a good boss knows when to bend the rules… but they have to keep their employees in line or else they will be seen as “nails that stick out” and need hammering down

• I don’t necessarily think military culture and civilian culture need be mutually exclusive. My best leaders in the Army were able to cultivate empowerment and individual efforts; it was only in the surreal experience of boot camp where I was told “You don’t get paid to think, soldier.”

• We tend to think of military as very chain of command, but tend to also dismiss their ” get the job done” mentality and training. Most military folks I know are usually dropped into some kind of situation, given a goal and told to get it done, no matter what. Most of the time this is without extra training, skills or equipment.