Lagace: Why did you and your co-authors of "Making Sense of Officership: Developing a Professional Identity for 21st Century Officers," a chapter in The Future of the Army Profession, decide to study professional identity as a part of leadership development? Why is this a management issue for the Army?
Snook: Our world changed in 1989. The Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed. Almost fifty years of living in a bipolar world had shaped a very strong and static sense of professional identity built around a Cold War mentality.
As a result of monumental change in our competitive environment, the 1990s found the U.S. Army struggling with an "identity crisis," both for individual soldiers and for the very soul of the institution itself. What was the Army all about? Fighting wars or keeping peace? With the two Gulf Wars as exceptions, the Army's past decade has been largely filled with peacekeeping, nation building, and a whole range of what we call "operations other than war." Not surprisingly, such confusion over roles and missions at the institutional level resulted in serious identity challenges for individual soldiers: "Who am I? A warrior or a peacekeeper?"
| We take thousands of young recruits every month and train them to operate some of the most sophisticated equipment in the world under some of the most challenging conditions imaginable. |
| — Scott A. Snook |
Such an identity crisis manifested itself in a variety of symptoms: low morale, high turnover, waning commitment, missed recruiting goals, and officer retention nightmares. By studying the development of professional identity over time within the Army's career structure, we hoped to identify a conceptual leverage point potentially capable of refocusing our entire thinking about leader development in the Army. We saw professional identity as having the same type of conceptual promise at the individual level as organizational culture has at the unit level.
Q: The Army has a "Be, Know, and Do" framework for leader development. Which of those elements is the most challenging for an individual to develop, and why?
A: Upon his return from the first Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf addressed the United States Military Academy at West Point and told the Corps of Cadets that leadership is about "character and competence."
To become a "competent" leader you must develop the necessary knowledge and skills to accomplish your mission. However, technical competence is not enough. To be an effective leader you must also have "character"— the BE component of our leadership doctrine: who you are, your values, your worldview. Clearly, the BE component of leader development offers the most challenge, because who you ARE is very difficult to change. Developing the other two components are rather straightforward and much less threatening.
The Army is one of the best training institutions in the world. By focusing on a clear set of tasks, conditions, and standards, we take thousands of young recruits every month and train them to operate some of the most sophisticated equipment in the world under some of the most challenging conditions imaginable.
We also have a long history of educational excellence in the Army. However, knowledge (KNOW) and skills (DO) are highly perishable. If you don't use them today, they're gone tomorrow. And, with the world changing at breakneck speed, the knowledge and skills we learn today may be irrelevant tomorrow.
Hence, our contention that the real leverage in developing leaders has to do with the BE component: Give me a soldier who has that part right, and I can teach her to do anything. Give me a soldier who doesn't, and all the knowledge and skills in the world will not make up for a lack of character.
Q: How did you carry out your research?
A: To understand officer development with a focus on professional identity—the BE component—we turned to the literature on adolescent and adult identity development.
Our work was grounded in the constructive-developmental theory of Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan (The Evolving Self, 1982). Kegan is primarily interested in how people make sense of themselves and their world. In his view, the level of sophistication of how one structures an understanding of oneself and one's experiences lies at the heart of identity.
First, we actively construct our understandings; we don't simply receive them from others. We build our understandings of ourselves from our experiences. Second, we progress through a finite series of universal and progressively more complex stages in how we construct our understanding. These two ideas in combination make Kegan's approach to identity development a powerful explanatory system.
| We build our understandings of ourselves from our experiences. |
| — Scott A. Snook |
Within this framework, officer development involves qualitative shifts in how officers make sense of themselves and their experiences. Each shift leads to a progressively broader perspective toward oneself as a professional and one's relationships to others within and outside the profession.
Over a period of ten years, we conducted a study of officer identity development using Kegan's framework by conducting hundreds of interviews following Army participants from pre-commissioning at West Point through full colonels at the Army War College. These interviews were used to determine officers' stage of development.
As we learned, understanding "where officers are" developmentally had huge implications not only for modifying our approach to leader development, but also for how we select and assign officers to positions that demand increasing levels of psychological maturity.
Q: Is there anything you've seen of the second Gulf War that suggests increased leadership development since the first one?
A: From a purely research perspective, the second Gulf War offers up a unique opportunity, in methodological terms: a matched pair of two wars in the same country, fought against the same foe, but taking place just over ten years apart.
If you wanted to study leader development, or even organizational development, it would be hard to design a more ideal natural experiment. While it's clearly too early to draw strong conclusions, I am largely encouraged by what I see. Simply based on numerous snapshots from the front—conveniently captured and transmitted by embedded correspondents—I sense an organization and leaders largely comfortable with their current sense of professional identity.
On the other hand, the real enemy center of gravity is not Iraq's military units, but rather the political leadership and hearts and minds of the people. At the same time that some leaders are engaging enemy tanks in one location, others are struggling with peace-keeping and nation-building challenges elsewhere.
From young sergeants to senior generals, I observe leaders who have largely internalized all four central components of the re-professionalized military identity: 1) war fighter, 2) servant of the nation, 3) member of a profession, and 4) leader of character. No matter how this conflict eventually plays out, there is no doubt that this war offers the severest test yet for a young U.S. military struggling to redefine itself in an extremely demanding post-Cold War world.
Q: What are implications of your research that all organizations-—not only the Army—should be aware of?
A: Our research has several implications for organizations and those interested in leadership development.
First, when designing leader development programs, be clear about which component you are attempting to develop. Adhering to a traditional learning model is fine if you are primarily interested in improving your employees' knowledge and skills. However, should you decide, as we did, that the leverage lies much deeper, in the BE component, be prepared to think differently about what development really means and how to go about measuring and influencing it.
Second, consider psychological maturity when selecting individuals for leadership positions and contexts that demand more complex ways of being in the world. You may be surprised, as we were, that many of your leaders may be "in over their heads." (See Kegan's 1994 book In over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, for a broader discussion of this dilemma.)
Q: What are you working on next?
A: Following up on this research, I am currently studying how both life experiences and designed interventions contribute to our development as leaders. At this point it seems clear that it's not only the nature of the experience itself, but rather a complex interaction of an individual's readiness beforehand and sense-making afterwards that ultimately determines how much impact such events or programs will have on one's development.
Unpacking the mysteries of how we can all "get more" out of our life experiences is the central passion driving my research.
Identity in the Army
Identity, whether we are talking about the institutional identity of the Army or the professional identity of Army officers, does not occur in a vacuum. To a significant extent our identity as officers and as an institution is a reflection of how we are expected to function by the larger society of which we are a part. "Victory" in the Cold War resulted in significant change in both the quality and quantity of demands levied on the U.S. Army. With the Soviet Union gone, American society demanded more than simply trained and ready war-fighters. Over the past decade, our Army as an institution has been asked to execute a broad range of missions across the entire spectrum of operations. Such changes at the institutional level have required individual Army officers to adopt a wide variety of roles and operate in increasingly complex and ambiguous environments. Not surprisingly, such dramatic changes in the substance of what we do as an Army have sparked serious debate about fundamental issues of identity who we are, what we're about, and, perhaps most fundamentally, how we make sense of what it means to be a military officer in the United States in the early twenty-first century.
Figure 1 illustrates the multidimensional nature of this struggle. We will argue that central to understanding the issue of identity and identity development is the distinction between "content" and "structure." Identities at both institutional and individual levels of analysis consist of both content and structure. Consider for a moment the two types of individual identity depicted in the bottom row of Figure 1. In the left column is the content or "what" of our individual identities as Army officers. Content is the surface material—our behaviors, ideas, preferences, values, aspirations, and leadership style. The content of an officer's identity might include the seven Army values, or Duty-Honor-Country, or the principles of officership, or an amalgam of all of them. Indeed, the debate within the profession about roles and missions, and the associated questions about an officer's identity—am I a warrior or more?—is fundamentally about the content of an officer's identity. How we answer this important "content" question will have significant implications for such issues as how we train and allocate our resources, and whether we, as individuals, choose to remain in the Army. This is the way we customarily think about professional identity. Our focus in the present chapter, however, is not primarily on this aspect of identity. Instead, we will focus mainly on the bottom right quadrant of Figure 1, the "structure" of individual identity. Focusing only on issues of identity content will lead to an incomplete understanding of professional identity issues and more importantly to a lack of understanding of the process of identity formation and transformation. What, then, are these other identity issues? What is the "structure" of identity and identity development?
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The structure of identity refers to the way in which any particular identity, be it warrior or peacekeeper, or something else, is constructed. As Figure 1 suggests, it is the "how" of identity formation. For example, some officers will construct their understanding of the peacekeeper identity as a set of skills and behavioral roles that must be mastered to fulfill that identity. For these officers, if one has the requisite skills and can employ them effectively, then one is a peacekeeper. Other officers will construct the peacekeeper identity in a more complicated fashion. To them being a peacekeeper may mean more than merely meeting a set of role expectations. It may also entail embodying a set of societal values about the proper place of a superpower in a unipolar world. For these officers, the fixed roles and narrow competencies of a peacekeeper are embedded in a broader context of societal values about the rights of ethnic minorities and the centrality of democratic social and political institutions to the creation of just societies. The "how" of the skills-roles identity entails enacting certain behaviors. The "how" of the contextual identity entails locating oneself within a broad set of societal views about the place of the military in a democratic, multiethnic society. We will argue that these contrasting identities are not merely different in content. We will argue that the latter identity requires and reflects a higher level of psychological maturity than the former. It entails a more sophisticated and psychologically mature way of structuring one's identity than does the former. Failure to appreciate the fact that identities vary by structure (level of maturity and sophistication) as well as content will yield an incomplete understanding of our ongoing struggle with issues of professionalism in the Army.