- The US Army is overhauling its approach to talent management as it modernizes its force, turning away from industrial-age processes where soldiers were perceived as interchangeable parts.
- "The way the Army maintains its competitive advantage is by maximizing the potential of every soldier that we have," Maj. Gen. J.P. McGee told Business Insider.
- While industry outreach and feedback has been limited, the service has gotten a few good ideas from some companies and organizations like UPS, Google, and a symphony orchestra, the general said.
The US Army is modernizing, and that means changing the way it manages its people as much as it does developing new weapon systems for future warfare.
"The way the Army maintains its competitive advantage is by maximizing the potential of every soldier that we have," Maj. Gen. J.P. McGee, the director of the Army Talent Management Task Force, told Business Insider.
The service is pushing to create a talent-management approach for the information age, a modernized officer selection and assignment system not codified in industrial-age practices that see soldiers as interchangeable parts, but instead focused on the unique attributes and talents of each soldier.
"In the business world, people will say very explicitly that they are in a war for talent," McGee told Business Insider. "They don't say they are in a competition. It's not a game for them. It's a war for talent because it's life or death in terms of whether or not their company's going to survive. I think the Army needs to adapt that mindset as well."
The Army is overhauling its approach to talent management as it modernizes its force, and while industry outreach and feedback has been limited, the service has gotten a few good ideas from some companies and organizations, like UPS, Google, and a symphony orchestra.
"There's probably not a direct lift from industry into the military or into the Army," McGee said. "But there are concepts and ways of looking at problems and how to do things that could be really, really important and helpful for us."
With the ongoing talent-management overhaul, the Army is increasingly prioritizing preferences, especially with the new Army Talent Alignment Process that matches officers with desired positions in much the same way that medical-school students are matched with their respective institutions, but that creates a problem when it comes to filling positions in places no one really wants to go.
"UPS is a tremendously large company," McGee said. "It has got bases all around the world. They have easy-to-fill locations and hard-to-fill locations. Some of the interesting conversations were about how they try to manage that and incentivize people to go to hard-to-fill locations."
One option for the Army is a broader use of brevet promotions, a kind of honorary promotion.
"We see that as a way of recognizing highly talented individuals but also to incentivize putting officers in some of our hard-to-fill locations," the general said, adding that "there's always been a geographic component to preference and where officers would like to live."
In addition to emphasizing preferences, the Army is also making big changes to the battalion-commander selection process. The service is tossing out the legacy practice in favor of the more comprehensive Battalion Commander Assessment Program (BCAP).
The new BCAP will involve cognitive and noncognitive assessments to include written and verbal tests, a fitness evaluation, and a psychological assessment. There's also an interview with five senior officers. With this change comes the need for capable, competent panel members.
A lesson the Army learned from Google in another conversation was that it is important to track the successes of the people involved in the hiring or promotion process to determine if these people tasked with finding the right people for the job have the ability to do so.
At Google, McGee said, the company takes steps to "determine how well they can actually find the right people who are going to contribute to the mission. I find that compelling, and we're trying to see how we can do that with this battalion-commander-assessment program."
Something else the Army is trying with the BCAP is the blind panel interview, something the service apparently learned from a symphony orchestra.
Symphonies, McGee told Business Insider, will sometimes erect screens between the candidate and the interviewers. A performer will come in, play, pack up, and leave without a face-to-face exchange between the two parties.
The goal, the general said, is to address an "issue called introductory bias, where the minute you walk in the door, you shake hands with the candidate, you make your initial opinion of them in that first 10 to 15 seconds, and then you spend the next 30 minutes confirming every bias that you have."
The blind-interview process eliminates this challenge, creating an environment where interviewers can better focus on what matters most.
While the Army has learned a lot from the civilian world, it is also looking to recruit talent through its direct-commission program, which allows the service to bring in talented people from industry and commission them as officers.
With new authorities from Congress and under the leadership of Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville, a driving force behind the Army People Strategy, the effort to overhaul the Army's approach to talent management is gaining momentum.
"It is a tremendously exciting time to be in the Army," McGee told Business Insider. "And it is certainly a tremendous time to be a part of this task force."
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