Learning to Love West Point

I spent Tuesday with Maj. Tony Burgess, Maj. Nate Allen, and the team responsible for a remarkable site, CompanyCommand.com. As an unrepentant ex-hippie and reluctantly lapsed pacifist, I was surprised how impressed I was with the Army’s style of business. This was a warmer and more collaborative environment than almost any I’ve encountered in the corporate world. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was.

Tony and Nate started CompanyCommand.com because company commanders need to talk with one another. Every Army officer serves as a company commander so that she or he will have hands-on experience leading soldiers. But there is surprisingly little guidance given to company commanders once they have gone through their training. And there are no horizontal communication channels. So Tony and Nate created a site at the heart of which are open, unmoderated discussion boards where company commanders can raise issues, ask questions, and share their insights. The site has succeeded well enough that the Army apparently is looking at ways to use it as a more or less formal resource.

When walking with Tony through the West Point campus, every cadet saluted him. Tony saluted back, as expected, but also gave everyone a “Hey, how’s it going?” or the equivalent. Not the “Sir Yes Sir!” interchange I was expecting.

The two meetings I had were models of collaboration and enthusiasm. Officers spoke with respectful awareness of rank but simultaneously with obvious affection. At one meeting, the ranking officer had also had several of the participants as students in his leadership courses, and it was clear that they admired and liked him. The conversation was frank in every regard, including in its occasional criticism of the Army, but was also good-natured and funny. The participants always went out of their way to credit others for their contributions to the project and to the conversation. “That’s a great point” they’d say before adding on to it, or “We implemented that a couple of months ago and Steve did a great job with it.” This seemed unforced and totally natural: a team of people who like one another and who are focused on the same goal.

It struck me that this team of hierarchically-arranged soldiers was so truly collaborative perhaps in part precisely because of the explicitness of the hierarchy. In a corporation, rank is informal and thus is negotiated in every meeting. People position themselves by jousting with others in subtle ways, for explicit jousting is considered pushy. In the Army, your rank couldn’t be more explicit. You’ve got stuff sewn into your clothing denoting your precise position in the hierarchy. Thus, there’s no need to joust, and teams can be more genuinely collaborative.

Believe me, this is not what I – wearing a tie dyed tee under my professionally-ironed blue pinstripe shirt — was expecting to learn.

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