Army Talent Management Leader Professional Development Briefing

it's my privilege to introduce Major General JP Magee the director of the army talent management task force to this and welcome you to this professional development opportunity to discuss the Army's ongoing initiatives to reform officer Personnel Management there's going to be a questions and answers session at the end of the formal period of this briefing just a reminder to you that it's being recorded so if you're not speaking into a microphone you're not going to be heard on the recording or by the folks that are listening on the outstations so if you'd be patient wait for one of the two gentlemen with the microphones here in the back of the room to come to you we'll get you into the recording without further ado general Magee thank you sir it's great to sir it's great to have your thanks for thanks for coming Brian's great to see you okay so I'm JP McGee I'm the director of the Army's talent management task force what I'd like to do is I've got about an hour with you today is I have given this more times than I can count and what I'd like to do is take about 40 minutes to explain this to you and then I like to fix that last 20 minutes just to answer questions then I will stay here even longer if you want to if you want to ask more questions but to try to be respectful your time but I'll stay here as long as you want to answer all your questions but hopefully it goes a little bit more smoothly I think if we run through without any questions until you get the end and then I'll take questions for as long as you've got nothing else going on today other than asking your questions next slide okay so we're gonna show you a video and then I'll talk you through these these slides and let's go right to the video okay people are the Army's greatest strength and our most important weapon system the army delivers the most lethal and decisive land force in the world as part of the joint force to be certain the Army's modernization efforts are not just about new equipment they must include the multi-domain operations concept at every echelon the six modernization priorities and a 21st century talent management approach based on decades of research and analysis in personnel management practices the current personnel system is based on a 1947 model of a mass-produced interchangeable one-size-fits-all officer corps in 1980 the army moved to a rigid structure of year groups based on time and grade and established the up or out system forcing removal or retirement of officers who are not selected for promotion the Industrial Age model of the 1940s and 50s focused on developing a large number of interchangeable officers with an emphasis on standardized career models and rigid timelines in fact an officer from the 1950s would be very familiar with our current system for managing officers an information age approach focuses on learning about the individual and taking their uniqueness into consideration for their development and employment with the intent of maximizing the contribution of every member of the army simply put better information about our people leads to better decisions about how to manage them in a way that recognizes everyone for their unique talents young men and women today want to be part of something bigger than themselves they want to make sure they matter they don't see themselves as interchangeable parts in an industrial age system the foundation of the Army's ability to dominate in land combat depends on our skill to attract and manage the best talent giving us a decisive advantage over future adversaries talent management encompasses acquiring developing employing and retaining the Army's greatest asset it's painful to enhance readiness by maximizing human potential the Army is moving out rapidly in four areas first the army talent alignment process matches officers to assignments this process empowers commanders and individuals to play a more active role in the assignment process the foundation of a talent management system is a thorough understanding of the knowledge skills behaviors and preferences of every officer in the army the army talent alignment process enabled by the software aim2 moves us forward dramatically to gather this information second we are building a culture of assessments the army does not have a comprehensive assessment framework for officers talent assessments provide a common lens through which to identify an officer's knowledge skills and behaviors the Army is developing prototypes and pilots to determine how to use assessments to gather data about officers talents assessments provide the army with better information for development assignment promotion and selection decisions third we are developing options that enable officers to have flexible career paths last we are significantly modernizing the way we promote and select officers in all of these endeavors and with the nine new authorities granted by the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act the Army has been given the flexibility to determine the characteristics of a future talent based system talent management enables the army to stay competitive attract and retain our nation's best talent great organizations have the ability to make predictions about the future and enact the necessary changes before they're needed applying the soldiers talents where they're needed most gives the army the agility to meet the challenges of 21st century warfare the army talent management approach will maximize the potential of the Army's greatest strengths its people so that one of the big ideas that are framing what we're trying to do within the Army's talent management task force so the first thing is this idea that you hear the chief talk about it's a transition from an industrial age to an Information Age and what that means in the realm of personnel and specifically how this nests and with all the other modernization efforts that the army is doing so you know we're developing a new fighting concept called multi-domain operations we're looking at acquiring technology and seeing the fight in a different way that's the mission of army futures command but at the center of all this is our people because you know people are the most important asset that we have within the army and so let's talk about the approach that we all grew up with coming up in the army and what we're trying to move to so we grew up with a very industrial aged approach okay it's really formed on two pieces of legislation the 1947 officer personnel Act in the 1980 defense officer personnel Act yeah defense that my defense office Personnel Management Act so those two pieces of legislation are really sort of you know embodiments of industrial air practices and what does that mean when you're a large organization it means as an institution what you need to do is you need to bring in a significant number of people and then as an institution you get them to sort of a minimum competency level of acceptance and then at that point you can jam them into any position across the entire sort of institution so an infantry captain can go almost anywhere and do these jobs interchangeably and then you because you're not enabled by technology have to manage this large cohort of people and you do this without any IT systems effectively and so you have to do this in this very rigid timeline approach okay when these things were when these laws were written they're actually very forward you know approaches for how to do it but but now things have changed a lot okay one of the big things that's changed is we've got an information technology that can help us to manage our people you know much much better we've got a place where we can put this information and again look at officers in a more discreet fashion so if you take an Information Age des proach what you say is an institution brings in a significant number of people understands their uniqueness uses that for their development to get them to be really really excellent and then uses them to employ them most effectively across an entire career that has a lot more within it and that's all got to be enabled by 21st century IT systems that can help you do this okay now we're not there yet but that's the vision of how we're going and that's that transformation and so you know if our goal is talent management where we are still sort of stuck right now is the idea of performance management and quantity distribution as opposed to true talent management okay so that's that's one of the the key dynamics as we're working through as we're trying to go what to move this forward so we talked about having the right officer in the right assignment at the right time overtime as being critical to this and also that the idea with talent management is that you've asked yourself the question who's the best officer in this room the only possible answer is well what job are you looking for and it's this recognition that different officers might be highly skilled in different fields and it's a responsibility institution to start figuring that out developing them and putting them into a place where they can contribute maximally to the mission of the United States Army one of the things that we don't have right now that is an impediment cuz people will come up to me and they'll say JP we already knew talent management we sort of you know have done this mine you know I've been I've been talent management as I've come up I would say we do this with small subsets of the officer corps so if you're one of the 302 active duty general officers I think your sort of talent manager like they've got a plan for you they understand who you are if you're an orsa or a FeO generally the smaller groups but it doesn't happen for the vast majority of the officer if you're sort of a middle-of-the-road armored or infantry officer at the rank of say major you're not really talent manager you're sort of put into a position you're just sort of moving along and so when I say the first thing we need to have is a granular level of knowledge about the knowledge skills behaviors and preferences of every officer within our inventory and then we can start using that information to better to better manage that entire cohort and I say that what that will impact is not really the top 5% but really will have a significant impact in the management of that six to sixty percent that's sort of however we choose to define that and I'll talk about some of the ways we need to what we need to do that the guidance from the chief and the secretary have been very clear to our team okay it is not to take the current system and make it better on the margins it's to create a new and better system and so what we talked about is not a 10 percent change but a 10x change so what's an example of that if you took all Ford engineers and you took him to an off-site and you said the average miles per gallon for a Ford automobile is about 50 miles per gallon we want a 10% change they would go to an off-site they would try to figure out how to tweak some hoses and some valves and do some things with the engines and they would get you to 55 miles per gallon okay if you took that same group of Ford engineers and say Ford's goal is that the average the average mile per gallon fuel efficiency and every one of our vehicles is 500 miles per gallon that 10x change they would have to do something very different they'd have to look at what's a relationship between an engine and the wheels they'd have to look at what the chassis is made of they have to look at driver behavior just as a side note on a car only 55 percent of their fuel efficiency comes from actually the engine so they'd have to look at it fundamentally differently and that's the task that we've been given in the Army's talent management task force we're not changing things on the margin we're going trying to move and make decisive change across the way that we manage our officer corps and then the other piece of this is we talked about changing cultural norms because some of the things we're gonna talk about are things that aren't acted that are new to us in terms of those of us who've been in the officer corps for about 30 years or so or less but if you go back in our history some of these things are things that we've done in our past and and they have done very successfully so we'll talk a little bit about direct commissioning coming forward you know going ahead in 1942 the army was able to successfully direct mission in a hundred and two thousand officers in one year in order to meet the needs to fight World War two so again that's not something that any of us have lived with but we recognized that we needed infused civilian talent and technical skills into our military and use it to win a war and it turned out pretty well so again not something that we're used to but something our army has done so that's what we talked about changing just a cultural norm as opposed to changing the culture of your army why is this really important well it's really important because people define our army and we have probably lost our position as being the premier human development organization in the world and that's what the chief aspires to any what he talks about when he talks about what we want to be as an army okay it also gives us a decisive advantage against our near peer adversaries okay so we start looking at what combat is in the future we talked in our talk about large-scale ground combat operations and so you know in the national security strategy which drives us that way we start looking at adversaries who have populations that are larger than ours we had looked at adversaries who have an economy who is larger or equal to ours who have closed if and then at least narrowed if not completely closed the technological gap we need to as an army take advantage of every advantage that we have and one of our critical advantages is people and we don't win future wars by sort of squandering the the great people that we have in by antiquated both antiquated management practices and not maximizing the full potential of the the people who come in and join our army okay the other piece of this is you are experiencing today the slowest rate of technological change that you will experience in your lifetime okay so as fast as everything has happened over the last 20 years think about a time not that long ago when you didn't know an iphone was okay it is only going to accelerate and how the army starts to be able to develop the agility to fold some of these warfighting you know some of these skills from the civilian world that are happening in the field of technology and bring them into our ability to fight ground combat operations is gonna be absolutely critical because they're gonna start playing at create a key role in what combat looks like in the future you don't do that the system that effectively says you know we're gonna run this in a very conveyor based approach that you know if you haven't been in the Army for thirty years you can't be a general I mean all of these things that that make us not be able to take the strength of our nation and make it a strength of our army these are things that probably need to change over time so we can remain competitive then the final piece of this is that you know we are certainly seen a change in generational norms okay so what does that mean that means that today across the United States having a dual income family is the norm okay and that is a that is a critical step to being able to squarely be in the middle to upper-middle class we've got a competition to get in good schools is significantly harder than it was 20 or 30 years ago and if the Army's lifestyle is increasingly divergent from that your spouse can't work and you know your kids aren't you know well educated so they're not competitive we start putting ourselves at a significant disadvantage for the people that we retain within our in terms of retainer and most talented because the simple fact of the matter is the most talented people in our army have the most options and so we need to remain attractive to to these people who you know our most held officers who have you know all sorts of options that are out there and we do that by starting to take things like preference into account more robustly and to start giving some more flexibility and ownership of their careers as as a first step okay next slide so I'd like to use this as an example of how we manage the officer corps today what it means to mean when we talk about transition from industrial to information age and some areas of potential sort of immediate or very soon impact we can start making across the army okay so this is the career forecast of the way we run our attrition based model within the officer corps today so I'll focus largely on the active component but on the left-hand side of that screen what you'll see is every year we have to bring in 5000 active duty officers a year ok that's a thousand from West Point a thousand from OCS and about 3000 from ROTC just so you know ROTC needs to produce another 2,500 Guard and Reserve lieutenants to be able to fill out that fill out the force ok so just the raw numbers of them having to meet their mission means that they can't be nearly as selective as they would like to be and they also can't be as directive in terms of what fields of study that we do because really there's this huge impetus for them just to be able to bring in the right numbers to be able to get to our goals for retention down the down the road so you all sudden start having these sort of mismatches of things so here's my first of a couple pieces of personal trivia for you what is the number one degree that ROTC produces you know across their across their graduates criminal justice 10.8 percent of the ROTC graduates that we commissioned every year come with a criminal justice degree and I have nothing against criminal justice degrees but I would argue in a world that is largely becoming defined by technologies that we may want to have stem degrees a whole lot higher on that and you don't actually don't hit a stem degree into here at the 7th degree at 3.8 percent in its general engineering for the for the officer corps ok so so one of the reason but one of the reasons we did is because the tremendous number of people that we need to bring in and and the then we need to bring in that many people because at year 11 and you can look their major what we need to be able to do is the first selective cut and make 2150 majors so the interesting thing is is that we need to get rid of by year 11 56 percent of the officer corps that we bring in okay so we need to get rid of 50 percent of them already but think about what we do to manage what that's sort of what that sort of that 50 percent that we retain what that sort of looks like okay so has the army spent any time to say here are the talents that we want to retain for the long term within our army okay here are the skill sets that we need to propel us forward over the next 10 15 years and let's backtrack and try to find out who those junior officers they're who at least have the potential of having that okay we don't do that do we survey the officer corps in their first couple years sort of find out what their propensity is to continue to serve and why they may get stay in or get out of the army we don't do that either okay we don't do any of that do we do any sort of incentive program to identify that among those 5,000 officers that we commissioned there may be some that we want to retain more than others and we would do something as an institution in order to retain the most talent within our ranks we don't do that as well what we effectively do is we bring a whole bunch of people in and we say we sort of hope enough get to year 11 so we can do some form of selective cut to major and as long as we've got Ron numbers we're sort of good as long as we can do an arbitrary so 80% cut from captain to major we're fine cuz we're all focused on quantity not the talents okay and that's one of the areas where I think increasingly we need to change start shaping that so we're actually going out and retaining those officers who are gonna provide the most benefit for the army over the long term and then developing some sort of incentives to be able to do it and again incentives aren't always cash right they may be assignment of choice they may be different sort of flexibilities you could provide it's not just about throwing money at people but at least we could start doing some force shaping things in order to make sure that we're retaining the most talented or at least our best bets on those officers who have the opportunity to contribute to our long term mission there's a gentleman named Tim Kaine he wrote a book it's called bleeding talent and it effectively says that the army does a horrible job of retaining this most talented and they all get out I would say it's even worse than that I would say that we don't even spend the time to identify what those qualities are we want to retain and so we don't know whether we're actually retaining talents or not within our army because we have not done those things again that's what it means to run an organization in a data poor environment instead of a data rich environment ok and just so you know if you're a large company or organization if you're a large company in particular that right that manages your people that wait you know you're called bankrupt ok because if you go out to the civilian world today what they will say and they use this term every single time they say we are in a war for talent ok we don't say that we don't even think we're in a competition for talent we don't think we're in like a you know a fair game for talent but they describe themselves as being a war for talent in order to make sure that their companies remain competitive and don't go out of business and they don't have the luxury of sort of bringing in so many people that they can do these things and so I think it's very interesting so we start we're now starting to talk about going into that you know engaging in the war for talent in order to be able to be successful so I talked about the first you know a couple years of an officer's career but let's go now to the right side of that equation or that that's sort of cascading slope there and let's talk about the way we look at Colonels I would argue in the future the most important role the important rank that we need to optimize in terms of creation is the rank of colonel first up we bring we promote a fair number of Colonels and we also now have the flexibility to have Colonels stay in and extend you know past 30 years to be able to to work on specific missions and Colonels provide the you know the military long term sort of expertise on the army staff on a combatant command staff up at OSD they have a they have an ability to be able to really contribute after you know after years and years of service I don't think it's about making general officers because the dirty little secret is the every year the army only produces about 400 general officers and three years after those 40 general officers are created half of them need to be out of the army anyway if they don't get picked up four two-star they're out after three years and I've sort of done so I think Colonel is is is where we need a really focus on making sure on the other end that wing we've got the most highly talented and diverse skill set within our kernels frankly if you have that then picking generals is going to be pretty easy but then you've also got these these great leaders that you can then keep in the Army and the army longer but again at the end of this wing we do the exact same thing we did in the beginning of it so what do we do to identify those Colonels who have the best talents and the most relevant talents to the accomplishment of the Army's mission what do we do to try to incentivize that to try to say and not all of them but the ones who have those sort of unique talents we just sort of say hey look you've made a colonel and you get to stay three years until you're fully vested and you get your full retirement at that point you can say or you can leave and you know we really don't do anything to identify those people within our ranks who are the most talented who we want to have stay in and continue to contribute because at the end of the day hey look if we're like 101 percent on Colonel's we're good right because it's pure numbers it is pure numbers and it's not anything beneath that that's what you start to see if you start becoming an Information Age organization next slide please next slide when you get a chance okay so you are all army leaders and go back one you're all army leaders you should understand that when you start talking about talent management we are adopting a new you know operational approach to our management of people it has its own definitions just think multi-domain operations or AirLand battle you didn't get to define your own terms you don't get to do the same on this one with within the army so there's the definition what talent management is it encompasses the pillars of acquire develop employ and retain of our people and we say as an army that talent is the unique combination of knowledge skills behaviors and preferences and we sort of foot stomp the preference piece because that is really really critical and it's a it's a big change you will hear some people say knowledge skills attributes the army has made a deliberate decision to go with behaviors PK and and frankly the behavioral versus attributes is a big psychology sort of discussion and different sides of the field of psychology we'll never disagree on this but the bottom line is we said that we are more interested in whether you're an officer who behaves ethically than if you're an officer who has the attributes of an ethical officer so we have we have decided that the definition is knowledge skills be and in preferences and that's what the army seniors have have agreed upon so you should use that terminology when you're talking about this with your with your subordinates next slide so how do we start moving this gigantic you know system this gigantic organization of the army from where we are today to where we want to be tomorrow so first off you gotta identify where we are we've got this Industrial Age system based on conveyor based approached in terms of your timelines for your officers career yeah that was commissioned in 1990 from West Point and I think any career map that I saw back then I think I was off no more than six months over the last thirty years in terms of what my different milestones would be it implicitly says that an infantry officer needs developed at the same rate as like a cyber officer or develop at the same rate as a transportation officer even though we know those fields are all pretty unique and different increasingly so okay but but the system has a lot of you know great qualities about it okay and we try to list out what those strengths are fair scalable predictable developmental resilient and then some of the increasing gaps that that we have seen I like to say that that what we wreck secutiry 'el aged process you can have in terms of the management of people like I know no one else who does a better job the United States Army the managing an enterprise at this scale as well as we do and there's tremendous amount of work done by AG professionals to make this system work every day but it is a bit like showing up at a but with on a bicycle for a motorcycle race because things have just progressed and there are other new technologies that can help us do a much much better job and their mindsets that can change as well so let's talk about where we want to be on the right hand side so that's an information age de proach at the center of that is that the core of it is some idea of flexible career paths okay and then underpinning this whole concept of how we manage our people are three things is a management process I think we're increasingly moving there with the whole army tile alignment process which I'll highlight to you and the next piece is we need to have greater organizational alignment okay so I'm gonna ask you a question I'd love to hear your answer what organization and Indian works and we ask another question well I'll be back up here so for logistics and material what individual and what organization is in charge of the army for our logistics and material considerations and management and see general Poorna okay who's in charge within our army of all training and Doctrine TRADOC commander okay who is in charge of managing the Army's people absolutely not okay so it's I mean so as I've looked at this I didn't realize that studies in this job let me tell you all the different organizations that have a outsized role in the management of our people and I'm gonna give you I think seven but I'm probably gonna miss a couple so g3 training which does the funding for a lot of our officer sort of initiatives g3 FM which says all the force management which is under the g3 so they get guidance from there you've got the HRC commander you've got the g1 of the army you've got the asam nra you've got the cat commander who has all the proponent C guidance and six hundred - three in terms of career paths and then all the branches work for him and for your armored aviation a lot sort of stuff and then you've got all the functional areas all of whom work for somebody else okay so we've disaggregated the strategic management of our officer corps and our people to all these different organizations so it's very very hard for us to achieve a unity of effort and anything that we do with our officer corps okay so this is one of the reasons amongst many why things like MIT spits and spits remember that member they were supposed to be tree like battalion commanders that never happened you remember we said training battalion commanders surely the exact same as a tactical battalion commander that didn't happen we talked about the AfPak hands being something that's a key priority and we're gonna do that that that never happened because we don't have anyone or any organization that's and there's not really not a very effective alignment between all of them as where as we're looking at meeting the Chiefs strategic guidance and direction in the sector's strategic in guidance and direction and it's been further exacerbated by something that we've just recently fixed which was there was no routine touch point back to the chief or the secretary in terms of how we were doing and meeting their guidance in terms of the management of our of our officer corps okay and I should have set up front I talked about the officer corps we've been given the task of making changes within the officer corps as a first step towards then doing changes for the noncommissioned officer corps and then eventually the civilian workforce but I think we're small enough that we can you know we can we can work that piece but again there has been no mechanism by which we we went back and informed the the chief and the secretary how we were doing with this critical function so that's just recently changed general McConville has established a new routine update to him called all things people we're getting ready to do one for him for him next week where we say okay here's the guys who gave us we're on glide path or we're not so we can remain you know consistent with his vision and make sure he understands where we are we're in doing that so I think those are three underpinnings for AF for a new system and I'll highlight a couple of the descriptors there that I think are really important as well okay so you can see we brought over the key sort of strengths of this but we need to be able to adapt to disruptive changes we need much greater flexibility we need a manager officers based on talent here's the other thing we need to start leveraging technology okay so if you take a look at the technology systems the IT systems that we use to manage our people specific care officer core most of them were written in code in the late not 80s to early 90s and have been updated since then and it is it is it is not a stretch to say that we have almost zero predictive capability in terms of any decisions that we make about the officer corps with the long term with the long term effect is going to be so what does that mean that means when the secretary like you did about six months ago says I want to change the policy and I want to make all company commanders not be 12 months mandatory minimum but 18 months mandatory minimum we have no modeling or system this is will sir you know if you do this it's gonna increase the queue lines for you to go on a command on these sort of installations it's gonna mean CGS see is gonna be backed up and we're gonna have people who aren't able to go to CGS see we can't say seven years down the line this is what's going to happen for your battalion commanders and how we pick battalion commanders we don't have any of that okay and and that is a huge gap in our in our IT systems in terms of how we manage manage the ops core it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the officer corps today is managed off Excel spreadsheets and not much else okay because we've got this tremendous ability to see where we are today we've got a pretty decent bill see where we've been in the last you know 20 30 years even that's sort of hard for us but really no ability to see for and again that is not a good IT system to help us do that and that's what makes something like talent management tell me I was possible because it helps us make start making decisions in a data rich environments of a data poor environment so I'm going to talk you through some of the initiatives we've doing because we've been told by the chief and secretary grab subsets of the officer population run a pilot a prototype with them see how it goes and then scale it rapidly to the rest of the army if it's a success and I'm gonna talk you through how we've done some of these so the first one is the Army Town alignment process I'm actually gonna dedicate a fair amount of time here in a couple minutes about what that looks like so that's the new system by which active duty officers are being assigned next I'll talk to you very briefly about assessments ok so everyone in this room is familiar with an assessment it's called the APFT ok every six months you do an a PFD and as a consequence of that if you took the average 40-year old soldier and baseline them against any 40 year old American citizen you would find there were three things that we are extraordinary on that's their ability to push-ups in two minutes our ability to sit-ups in two minutes and our ability to run two miles okay that's because we run an assessment every six months and our physical ability to do those three events and you know whether you do it in queit or you do it in Korea and you really got the same you've got the same objective assessment of what that means and you all understand the difference between a 297 out of 300 on a PFT or a 210 and it means something to you okay but most of the way we manage our off score today is based on evaluations it's based on what your boss's boss thinks of you and then that subjective piece is in it and I think that's always going to be central to the way we manage our officer corps but what we're saying is we need to start folding in other information that's more objective so we can get a better view of the officer and then figure out how they need to be developed and then how they need to be deployed how they need to develop and then how they can be employed so if you show up at like your basic commissioning courses you know OBC or the captain's career course and you're a really good writer and you can demonstrate through an assessment you're a really good writer why do you need to go through all that crappy writing courses if you're already good that why couldn't you do something else to better use your time these are the sort of things that assessments can help us with they can also help us see us where where where officers need to you know develop themselves so what we see is integrating into professional military education at the captain's career course CGS see in the War College these opportunities to do assessments worth in the first ten years it's largely being used for the development of the officer hey McGee you're a lousy public speaker eh McGee you don't have a whole lot of these sort of skills start working on these things over time and then as you become a field grade officer and become more senior we start folding that information in terms of how you're actually going to be employed what jobs you may be able to go into and and how you can best that best be used the other value that allows us to do is beyond the development of the individual is diagnostically as an institution we can use that to further our PME so we can look at transportation Corps officers at the captain's career course and say wow they really have a problem with like writing or mental flexibility and you could start seeing how then your curriculum could change to address identified weaknesses within a cohort of the officers as we're going forward one of the first steps forward with this is that the captain's career course every captain is now required to take a GRE we're making them take a GRE so we can start figuring out who are the right officers for us to send to advance civil schooling which is significant investment by the United States Army and the future of an officer so assignment officer can you that information sort of say hey look you're a great candidate to go to advanced civil schooling or you might not be a very good bet for us to send for someone like that we're also integrating in there a cognition test into the campus career course so we can start seeing how officers you know how they operate on a cognitive and non-cognitive ability to better assist their development okay so the next the next piece of this is a flexible career path in August of 2018 that 2019 NDAA was signed it gave us nine new authorities that were mentioned there one of those is the ability for an officer to be able to opt out of a promotion board for up to two years if you're doing something of significant value to the army you can self nominate yourself you just open up for the first time for this lieutenant Colonel's board and you can say I would like to not be considered for promotion for one or two years in order to give me some give myself some some more time so who does that apply to that is just think captain to major that might apply to someone who goes down to Fort Rucker and wants to be an instructor pilot and once spent a couple more years as an instructor pilot to develop his or her skills as a Navy before they go back to the forces like an s3 or an EXO and someday a battalion commander instructors up at West Point who have to go to get a van civil schooling and then a utilization they could roll back their consideration for either major lieutenant colonel Fayed choosen that sort of path in order to give themselves more time when they leave West Point a chance to get katie qualified as a major imagine a ranger company commander who also wants to get a top-tier advanced civil schooling master's degree from from a premier organization something like that but it has to be if you're doing something of significant value it's our first step to figuring out how we can establish a system that opens up the windows for a timeline for an officer and then allows officers to sort of decide when they want to hop in for promotion boards or not so the inverse of the opt-out is the opt-in and were exploring options to develop that right now and then the final one is promotions and selections I will talk about that a lot more with the battalion commander assessment program we're gonna we're gonna initiate in January and some of the great work we some the interesting work that we've done that and that's so far but but certainly there's a whole lot of work on how we can improve our promotion process and our selection process beyond what we have right now just understand legally that the promotion system has a lot of legal requirements to it and there's some flexibility selections for the chief though is a much wider sort of peace he has a lot of authorities in order to make a uniquely army selection process for selection for key bill it's like battalion command brigade command not quite as much flexibility when you're talking about promotions because there's a lot of lovak that that governs at it so next slide so I'll hit these NDA authorities very very rapidly but the first one is repeal the age limit ly used to say you couldn't bring someone in who effectively had they had to be younger than 42 because they had to be under 62 by the time they have retirement ages after 20 years of service another piece of trivia for personnel Asst during what war did the army adapt 62 as their mandatory retirement age anyone come on just guess a conflict what's that Korea's good guests no Civil War that's exactly right so the Army is carried forward 62 is a mandatory retirement age since the Civil War I know it's a hurry I know I'm a heretic for saying this but maybe we've learned a little since about 1863 or it's 1864 about the management of people that is directly tied to to the idea of direct commissions so we now have the authority to direct Commission and officers up to the grade of oh six that was presented the chief and secretary last year they said that is open to all branches all functional areas I pushed back and said sir certainly you don't want to direct Commission infantry officers and gentlemen League Times said that he looked foreign armies make fantastic infantry officers you find one who wants to come join our army we will consider bringing them in and making our force better firm so it is open for all branches all functional areas and it's going to be one of the areas we focus on this year we now have the ability to set to do brevet promotion so Brevard promotions look like this you have a position if it's a Colonel's position let's say lieutenant Colonel's can compete for a position that's I've been identified as a brevet Colonel position and if the hiring Authority picks that Lieutenant Colonel to be - for that for that position that lieutenant colonel goes to a quick board back here in the Pentagon gets promoted to the rank of colonel and holds that rank until he or she departs that position okay and so in the cycle that's opening right now within the army town alignment process we have 225 positions identified four for Brevard promotions and we will scale up to 770 use the full authorization it's something the Navy's been doing for years in their seals and their nuke forces and we're we've just been given the authority of do it we've got a merit-based promotion list that's just half of the most recent majors promotion listen I'll use this to draw what it means to transition from information from industrial to information so Congress said hey look you don't need to go off date of rank anymore for your execution your promotion Allah says what had happened the past is a board would meet they would establish an order of merit list one to 1,000 and then as soon as it came time for us to actually promote people we reverted back to date of rank as if date of rank had any relevance to how well they had done in that in that you know in the previous 10 years or so okay and they said you don't do that anymore so we went to this consideration we said well should we just go straight order of merit list 101 thousand and we said well we don't want to do that we want to do that for two reasons we thought it would break down the spirit of competitive cooperation that we enjoy within the officer corps so we all know that like we're not really in competition with each other but there's a sort of friendly competition and - we thought officers who were promoted later on in the whole process we get stigmatized so they show up in the unit and you know you could just see commanders saying look I don't want any officers showing to my unit who got promoted off the 1st of July in the second half of those lists and so we said that's behind out the right answer so we said well let's identify it let's do a hybrid let's identify some who are gonna be promoted off the order of merit list and some who will be promoted off of the date of rank and so we sat down and we started working through with the people who are gonna execute this and we said well what percentage do you think we should we should do and the answer came back they say let's promote the top 15% let's promote the top 15% of every list and make those guys be the ones who are promoted based on that based on merit and I came back and I said I don't want to do 15% but I would really really like to do 17.1 2% cuz it's my all-time favorite number and they said okay let's do 17 point 1 - I mean I gotta that makes sense to me and I said oh I'm sorry I just changed my mind I would love to do 12 point 1 3 now 12 point 1 3 is now my favorite number I love it and they said okay we'll do twelve point three like stop talking just like let's find a number and go with it and I said like you're missing the point twelve point one three 15% 17.1 - these are all arbitrary numbers and today you can take the mathematical distribution of the order of merit list scores you can run an algorithm on it you can find those those scores that are actually identified top clusters of that group and so that's what we're going to do every board that meets now is going to have a mathematical it's called k-means clustering analysis done of their scores those who are clearly identified as the top cluster will be promoted off the order of merit lists and then we revert back to data rank the first time we do this with a full board the majors list the range was some some categories we're at 9% some we're at 19% but it's where the numbers take you as opposed with something arbitrary like 15 percent or 17 point 1 2 percent I talked a little about the opt out of promotion board I want to re-emphasize that that is because you're doing something that's of significant value for the army that's not just because you're a sub performer in your field and you don't want to get looked at for a promotion board and that's why the proposed the approval for that has to go all the way the assistant secretary the army for that to to be approved we now have the ability to allow from captain's to Colonels to remain on active duty service from up to 40 years if they've got unique skills and they run through that process the Secretary Army has now been granted an alternate promotion Authority where he can identify subgroups of the officer corps and he can say they need to go through a different promotion board think of those officers maybe who we bring in direct commissioning and they're brought in his majors and we want to look at him for we want to look at him for like lieutenant colonel but they only have a couple years worth of OE ARS so they're looking at a different population or maybe like lieutenant Colonel's we sent two PhDs would be another example of that the last two are about the management of the IRR and the management of the guard in terms of some discrepancies when when states recognize and when the active duty yeah recognizing again the biggest authorities give me the army and the services since 1980 and frankly there's sort of a piece of this that says look we're giving you all these authorities we're very interested to see how you're gonna expand and use these as some significant first steps towards changing your management of the officer corps okay next slide okay so I want to talk to you rapidly through the Army Town alignment process which i think is what many of you are interested and I think we'll get a lot of questions here okay chief and secretary approved of these principles a couple things to emphasize everyone is being moved into the atap process okay no longer is it an HRC rep and assignment officer calls you and says hey captain Smith you've got three jobs that come in open for this next cycle which one do you want to do you have increased transparency so you see every job that you were available to take within your at your time the specific guidance from the secretary the army was get the assignment officer out of the middle of the process this is now a conversation between an officer who's moving and a unit that is hiring and we have pushed the hiring authority down to brigade commanders and and above okay and so this is now a very different way of doing it again talking about 10x change in terms of how we we hire officer corps we have try to loosen up the professional development requirements so also know if you're in fear you can go light to light you don't you know we can do things like go out of the captain's career course and go to an ROTC assignment you don't need to go right to a unit so we've tried very hard to to loosen up many of those things that have made our mark our sort of assignment process artificially constrained and again we've got increased transparency and and an HRC effectively only kicks in if there is a failure of the market to find the proper match this is a first step towards incentivizing officers and unit participation and sort of incentivizing officers to go to locations one of the things that we've done is we've linked these private promotions with hard to fill locations so all of a sudden if you have to go to a place like JRTC or NTC or Korea some places that are hard for the army to fill you can be available and eligible to be brevet promoted if you go to an assignment in there next slide I will talk through this very quickly but they're really sort of three phases setting the conditions execute the market and clearing the market we've already set the conditions the important thing for you to understand is the jobs that come open in the assignment process are found through a standard way that we've always done this and it is all based on readiness okay so this isn't every job in the army is open we still go through the standard process of saying that you know the Army has only so many movers and so many jobs and we prioritize what jobs to be filled I only say this because people come and say hey look you know everyone's gonna want to be a speechwriter in Hawaii instead of being an m4 battalion s3 that's not the case you know we will make that you know in terms of readiness we will make being a battalion s3 a critical job and has to be filled within the within the army but when the marketplace when the regulated marketplace opens up as it is right now where is allows it sees individual movers to see every job that's available across the army and it's see and allows the units to see every officer that's available to move and it is and then it allows a conversation to happen and then allows individual officers to be able to preference where they want to go and units to be able preference their candidates okay if you're talking to anybody who's involved in this my piece of advice to you if you're a unit or an individual is to preference deep because the whole thing is set up for you to be able to get your preference as an individual moving officer and that's the side of the equation that has the the individual officer preference weights is is more heavily away than anything else in this whole process so make sure you go deep but then also you've got to get used to the fact that like you may be getting your twenty seventh out of two hundred preferences which isn't half bad but it's different than when you were given like you know five five assignment choices and you got to pick one of them okay this is very very different but the transparency is significant so then when the market closes we're gonna clear the market we're gonna run an algorithm that that matches it again individual preference is weighed then we're gonna stop we're going to run the numbers we're gonna check and make sure that there are any significant issues with performance distribution or anything else we're going to see that we make sure we don't disadvantage any units and then we're gonna go final with the decisions that they come out of this entire process next slide so what are the games quickly the officer gets transparency his individual his or her individual preference gains gains more more more weight and an improved ability to manage your your own career in terms of units units get transparency they get to build their own teams and then we think it's gonna give you a boost in readiness here's the big thing what the army now all of a sudden has though is a central repository for information about our individual officers who have to self describe themselves in the back of their o RB as well as what we want to have in terms of knowledge skills behaviors from different positions and from that we can start doing all sorts of really interesting analytics that will help individuals over time and will help the institution out as well and so it is for the first time us moving all this stuff all this information into one environment for which we can better manage the outscore it's a critical piece of moving from dad data ported data rich next slide okay I bet Hank made our assessment pilot I will talk you through this okay so I think you've already heard the chief talk about it he is decided that we are going to launch a new way of picking battalion commanders I will talk you through this fairly quickly but what it came to us was hey take a look at how we select for battalion command patanè coming as a critical position within the army it is a battalion commander plays a critical role for the accomplishment of the mission as well as the effect that a battalion commander has on his or her subordinates within the army so what's the very best way we could pick battalion commanders when we analyze the current way and we said well you know when you're a battalion commander when you go through that board 25 board members review about 1,450 files and so when you do the math on that it means they review every file in about 57 seconds ok which why we've got those tweets there because what that means is when they're looking at your oer they effectively look at your senior rate your block check your first and last sentence of your of your piece and they move back to the next oer so what we like say is there's in terms of your promotion or so there's more information contained in most tweets than is relevant information within your oer s and we said is there a better way that we can do this is there a better way that we can bring additional information in that would be relevant for such a critical position the other piece of the reason why Batang commands so so important it's one that it's one of the true you know significant cuts that we make and from battalion commanders and through this process is who we make Colonels and general officers okay and so this sort of key idea was you know does more you know if we brought in more relevant information would we make better decisions as a as an army okay so let me give you a graphical representation of this no stall wars would you please would you please stand up okay thanks so I need to make a decision on Colonel Stallworth I am her senior rater okay I see only so much up here under the current system that is the only piece of information that is going to determine whether she gets promoted in the next rank Colonel Calvin would you mind standing up okay Colonel Calvert is one of her peers or subordinates he probably has some pretty important information about criminal Stallworth that we want to know about Colonel Stoll work before we make a critical decision about so how do we fold that information so now we've got you know two points of information coming together Colonel Jacobsen you might stand it up okay you represent the information that we get through cognitive and non-cognitive assessment and some screening done by psychiatrists and so on all of a sudden we've got your senior rater insight you've got your pure and subordinate insights and you've got an impartial set of assessments done that give us a much better idea of where the kernel Stallworth is the best candidate to be put in that position of responsibility at the core of it that's what the battalion commander assessment program is is trying to do okay and it's this idea of triangulating and bringing all this other relevant information that we as an army should fold in to making this really important decision you know sit down okay next slide so what do we do we grab the alternate list of infantry and armored officers and we made them report down to either 26 of them and we ask them report down to Fort Benning so we can run a pilot program on what this would look like okay so the first thing happens we sent the invitation to 26 and three came back and said I'm not interested in doing it like I don't want to be the tank mater okay so that's fine it was good to know we set up a grading a grading scale that said we were gonna score three events cognitive non cognitive assessments we're gonna make him do graduate skills diagnostic test which is online sort of grammar test and then make him write an essay an argument of essay and an essay that we chose and we're gonna make him taken a PFT so we made those are the three scored events we've reestablished the the order of merit list but then we added a bunch of other events to gather information to help us make this decision so we had them sit down and do a psychological test that went through that was a personality indicator and just general sort of psychological assessment they vanta sit down with a with the psychologist for about an hour to talk through the results of that we sent out this thing called the army commander evaluation tool which was a sort of streamlines 360-degree assessment which then we could fill out about 10 minutes and effectively says if you know so we found those peers and subordinates that we sent this to we went through and found out you know who had been one of your peers or some warrants we sent them the questionnaire and then they very rapidly how to sort of answer a couple questions about you know this individuals leadership style and then really most importantly would you recommend this person to be a battalion commander and we gave him a free-form to be able to to fill that out in terms of making any sort of comments I will just tell you that overwhelmingly overwhelmingly like the 95 percent the comments were positive to neutral on very few cases were they actually negative and then we did an interview process and it was a blind board interview process so the candidates came in after getting some information from the psychologists and taking a look at some of the information that had been anonymized okay so it was it was candidate 1 2 3 & 4 they reported behind a screen and then there was a structured interview that happened with 6 general officers asking them questions ok and this was all just sort of a pass/fail at the end of that the panel members were asked to do a pass/fail vote on whether they thought those officers should go into into battalion command so I'll talk you through the results next slide so with the new oml okay what we found out is the average oml shifted about eight positions so about 20 about 30 percent shift because we had about 23 and they shifted 8 all be capped candidates said that the b cap was a better process for picking battalion commanders men even recommend we do it on top of the standard CSL so CSL worked out all seven general officers who and the panel said that this is a better way to pick battalion commanders within within our army but really are some other things that came out there were a little disturbing to five of them failed okay so two failed for height weight three failed for being deemed by the panel board as being not not not that not fit for command and they just thought they would be the wrong people to to put and then we also took primaries we're very high in the primary list and we threw them in the second iteration of this and see how they would score against the the alternate list and one might think they would take one two three and four they took two three seven and 13 yeah out of out of 27 on that one and so again when you bring in different and relevant information you come up with different different different choices on this what the chief has decided is that in January a notes I noticed about to go out to about 815 officers because the lieutenant colonel central selection board has met we have gone a straight oml 815 officers will receive invitations to come to Fort Knox between the 15th of January and the 12th of February and they will show for a five-day period will they'll be run through this assessment process which is modified a little bit based on the lessons that we've learned here an order of merit list will be reestablished and that's how we're gonna pick our primary and alternate you should know that a number of factors will be weighed but the the heaviest weighted criteria has been your manner of past performance as determined on how you did on the order of merit list coming out of the central selection board but a lot of other factors are gonna be used in this in this weighting as well and there'll be a board process similar to how I how I describe it to you next slide okay I think I went over I apologize again I can stay here as long and answer as many questions as you would like but down-and-dirty that is that is where we are right now so what questions do we have yes so we have we have people or listen on the outs matches bumping up against Manning guidance under what circumstances will matches in the marketplace be broken this is a great question so the way you ask that question is a little bit off though okay so during the initial setting the conditions for the market we have already established the positions that the Army has decided to fill okay so let's just say your CAC and the active component lending guidance says CAC is gonna be manned at 80% and they have a hundred open billets they're gonna CAC finds those 80 positions they send that list HRC HRC validates those are the right 80 positions to fill those are the ones that are gonna be moved into the regulated market place in aim to to get an assignment for okay so so that's that's the first piece of it it's not every job that's available comes up with just the ones that have gone through that process and then the things that can break a match okay because I probably didn't emphasize this enough if at all is that a one-to-one match from an individual in a unit will not be broken unless it's an exceptional circumstance like it's EFMP or if it's like a merit armories couple program or something like that we're trying to do all that work early in the system but the general and the philosophy is the market matches are maintained and you know one-to-one is obviously the most important but you can have two to two or two to four and those market matches are not going to be tweaked with unless there are some of these things like you're not qualified because of security qualifications you've got a EFMP issue or something like that but it may be to your point it you have to maintain those matches otherwise the system doesn't have a whole lot of validity now here is one piece that we've been mindful of is you know we're making these sort of calls about jobs about nine months before people fell if people show up because we're doing this in the summer cycle so we have given the local commanders at the at the posts the ability to tweak with up to ten percent but we're gonna track those numbers and so the guidance is if you are slated to go if you're picked and chosen to go to a brigade that the goal is 90 percent of the officers who were picked to go to that brigade are gonna go to that brigade and they're gonna stay at that brigade for for at least nine months and after that the senior mission commander can do it now you know over nine to ten months things can change like new operational readiness requirements become people and get sick or ill things can happen that would cause some change but we don't want to be much more than ten percent if it happens it's gonna trigger a flag okay great question I probably should have probably covered that earlier what other questions yes sir Lieutenant Colonel Livingstone I question about Army filling joint billets so right now most a lot of the joint billets are like former battalion commander or former brigade commander billets I'm from a smaller form tional area we don't have those kinds of and so sometimes we run into complications filling joint billets that are designated because that's sort of a standard measuring stick across the services is there any thought now into how this might play out you know if we look at matching the right officer and the right billet at the right time will it be limited in some way or expanded in the joint world so it is expanded joint world and the man who has been working this is Colonel Michael Casares I will let that him to hit that in some detail so this is you're you're going the first step is you're gonna see all of the joint assignments and I think that's a change from your assignment officer giving certain people certain elements of the population usually based on your mop the ability to get a nominative a joint or an OSD assignment so step one is you're gonna see all of those jobs listed and you're going to be able to contact the incumbents and you're going to be able to sell yourself based on your resume so that's how we see the competition happening for those jobs does that answer your question [Music] from what I understand some in the joint hiring decision makers are gonna be looking for a minimum level I don't know I don't know if that will change in the future or not okay so so I think the big change here is that previously we had one dimension that we were looking at and it was performance and so what you're saying is hey they only wanted to consider top performers and that's kind of what I was saying that your assignment officer was only showing those jobs to a certain subset of people so what we want to change with talent management instead of managing people based on past performance only we want to give you the hiring agency the ability to hire what seems to be that average officer who has a unique knowledge skill and behavior that qualifies them for that job and so that that's where we're going Michael let me let me sort of reinforce that so I think all of us are familiar with what happened when the army tried to fill the s fab mission remember the security force assistance brigades okay and this is really a grating a great embodiment of what happens when you try to go from data port data rich so the chief staff the Army's time says fans are important we want to man this with high quality officers and let's just talk about captain's and we said as an army only top 10% captain's can go in there well if you're running this by only one dimension which we generally tend to do that means they do took a review of all your last Oh ers and we said only those who are in the top 10% based on this mop score you get whether you know it or not you've all got a mop score and it's a quantity it's a quantitative measurement of how how likely you are to be promoted in the at your next board the flood that was and I can say this because I commanded a security force assistance brigade is that when you're looking at captain's you're really looking at company command positions within you know how they did is company commanders within the Army as captains and so what we found is we found the top 10% or top 15% of company commanders and we said this is the crew from which we're gonna pick us you know advisors so like again I commanded a security force assistance Brigade and I can tell you the skill sets that you need to be a great company commander are really different than the skill sets you need to be a great adviser and I had some great company commanders who would be lousy advisors and I have some great advisors who would be lousy company commanders but when you run this enterprise in a data poor way you only have one you know measurement by which you can look at them and you're always going to be in a constrained environment but let's talk about what this could be like in the future what it could be like in the futures you could say hey I want to find officers who would be good advisors okay let's say just for their performance just as a financial screen I want top 50% officers okay just just as a rough sort of look at their own arse but I want to have someone who has a high degree of cognition and a high degree of cognitive flexibility maybe someone who's tested and measured well for cross-country cross-cultural fluency and then someone who in his own self-described behaviors says that he or she likes to travel internationally and go to foreign countries because what better manifestation of what really you enjoy then how you spend your own time and money and now because of aim - we've got a place where we can see all those things and so now also when you're searching the search parameters for the people that you want to bring in to be advisors you get a very different set than just saying give me the top 10% of all your company commanders and so you get better advisors on one side of that but the other thing is those people who wouldn't so you get a mission let you get a lifting the operational effectiveness of your advisory mission but for those people those officers who are really really good company commanders you know they don't get jammed into a position where they are always gonna be frustrated not doing very well and they can work on some other skill sets maybe Center imperative and civil schooling maybe you sent him to an NTC or JRTC and they infuse their skills into the force but that's what it means I think when you start doing that and so to your point from the joint now you can see not just who you know who the sort of arbitrary screen is there may be at in the lower or the middle echelon some people who will be really really good joint officers who could contribute to your mission because of what they bring to the fight in terms of their own knowledge skills behaviors and so that's what I think you're getting out an opportunity to see were there questions yes sir good afternoon colonel Rob Parker thanks for your time with us today it's a look at the roles in a tap slide specifically under role so you know it talks about being aware of nepotism right was wondering if you take a minute to describe what kind of safety sir safety mechanisms are in place to preclude us from going down that road as an army yeah so they're really sort of three things that people are concerned about and I think we share the concern okay about you know having this hiring Authority go this way so one is nepotism to his performance distribution and three is diversity so let's just talk all three because because that is that is one of them okay so all answers yours directly so nepotism so my first question to you would be how do you know nepotism isn't happening to the current system and what mechanisms do we have to check against it the answer is we have none and then that we routinely and systematically check now we have an ability to actually check this in these conversations as we're trying to figure out how to do these we are always in this conflict between is this something we want to regulate so we can set a bunch of rules about nepotism and what that looks like or is this something we just want to be able to illuminate so we can see how commanders are doing in terms of exercise in this authority that they've been given on the idea of nepotism we decided that for this first iteration we're gonna try to illuminate that because when you really start trying to define nepotism it gets a little bit tricky like how many times can I go work for Rob Parker before it's nepotism and if you're a brigade commander should you be able to hire maybe three people out of 40 that you work with before or is that five people out of four and so we just sort of thought let's see how this goes and we can take a look and do a run now that we've got the data commanders are specifically advised to make sure that they are open up to hire in all sorts of talents also in terms of doing this with smaller subsets when we did this in the green pages for the engineer Corps what we found was that engineer officers who were given a hiring Authority entered into this process thinking they were gonna hire their own people but when they saw the totality of the talents that were out there they made dramatically different decisions because you know colonel hansen I could have served together a number of times and I thought for sure I was gonna bring him onto my team but when I see everyone who's out there I'm like well he's really good but the person I need is someone I hadn't even met before and I just interviewed this person I came up with a very different hiring so that's one diversity of something we're also going to keep an eye on make sure you're not hiring people who just sort of look like you or don't look like you or whatever whatever it is to be able to do that and then the performance distribution and again that went out and the X order as well and commanders we evaluate and how well they do that and and we've got a billet look at that and the other is performance distribution as I sort of mentioned we're gonna after we do the initial slating we're gonna stop and make and make sure that we don't you know really hurt in locations that are tough to fill because it remains a geographic component to where people want to serve within the the army and so we're not going to zero out you know the brigade that's down at Fort Pole we're going to take a look at what that what that actually looks like ok but but Rob those are those are those are three concerns that we have and we're gonna take a hard look at that as we're executing this okay what are their questions yeah please sir Colonel Brian Chapman I'm an Army FeO being in a small functional area how many of the new authorities have been implemented or can be used to manage if you had shortage in population 0-5 those sixes and things like Breathitt promotions or extending a Mardis would would help to fill gaps that are in the Force to the Brevard promotions we're about to do you know who are given 770 positions this first marketplace regulated marketplace has identified 225 positions the extensions past 30 years is something we're still working to try to figure out what we bump into this issue of we're trying to extend people but we're already over strength in terms of kernels for the army so so we're working that right now to try to figure out what that what that looks like but I think a place like fail where you've got a unique skill set and there not a lot of people coming behind you with those I think it's it's right for opportunities for stuff like that okay a quick question about I'm trying to understand I understand the preferences between officer and units and how those marry up one two one two two two etc how does the algorithm come in is that I'm not a super-strong math guy are you saying that's how we calculate the whole pool or hot as or is there some way of looking at the individual relationship between officer and unit so I will start this off and then I'll turn over to the Patek colonel kozara who has been working this much so it is it is based on the medical matching model so the way that people get chosen from medical schools but it is strongly based on preferences okay and the preference is weight you know it's a measure of weight preference between the units and the individuals but the individual preferences have a stronger weight than the than the unit preferences in terms of how we do this matching as were as we're going forward you want to follow up Michael sir I would just dovetail first off because we're short on time there are two great videos out there this is based on the national medical resident matching program which won a nobel prize for being a very fair preference matching system we've changed it to the army talent alignment algorithm which also has its own video on youtube if you google that but basically we picked this it's called a officer proposing delayed algorithm and what that means is it there's really no gaming the system which is why we chose this so it doesn't advantage or disadvantage first movers the markets open for sixty days if you get your preferences in on day one or day sixty no advantage or disadvantage it also allows no one to game the system hey I'd really like that job but I don't think I have a shot at it so I'm gonna make this other job my number one preference this this allows people to reveal their true preferences and and without any gamesmanship they would alter alter what their what their revealing as their preferences so there's a couple a couple reasons we picked the algorithm right there but I think the the videos are really illustrative and you get it immediately one of the thing I forgot passed out we did pass you out a handout okay I'll take a question but we did pass you out a handout I would strongly ask you to take a couple minutes to fill that out was really important as you put your DoD ID number in there we're not gonna come track you down unless you want us to I'm not gonna I'm not gonna have any objections to anything you say but it allows us to say hey lieutenant Colonel's think this captain's think this so I would ask you to put put all that information on there and then as you leave you know hand out to our team in the in the back one of the questions about yeah mr. crenell Jason Davis from dat three-day wavy so we've heard the complaints from the force on the old system for the current system in two years or after a few cycles what do you guys predict will be the complaints about the new system and then what can we do to help the town management task force with messaging from the DA staff yeah I think the first thing you're gonna find is some people are gonna be like hey I thought my preference mattered and like it didn't matter okay well that might be because you're not a particularly attractive candidate and and frankly I think we're gonna start gathering some that information right like I mean if you have to be forced if you had to be forced into a job you know two or three assignment cycles that's a pretty clear indication about the overall value of the skills that you bring to the army I think the immediate message and I hit it a couple times because we've never run it on these numbers before is it's important for an individual to preference deeply and then for in you know it units to preference deeply as well as long as that happens there's going to be some form of a match I do think one of the things that we've seen which is really positive is that officers are reaching out to mentors now that they have all these sort of options and choice and they're saying like how do you see me where do you think I should go and so anecdotally we're getting a lot of feedback about how this is driving conversations that haven't previously happened when it was much more sort of centrally controlled by HRC and you got a couple options and and you went forward but that is one but I think just the messaging is for people to understand how this whole system works how their preference is weighted and and I'm sure there are gonna be a whole bunch of unanticipated I mean you know we're gonna the the the data analytics and the AAR process we've built that into this entire process prior process can be really interesting what we find out but I don't Michael can you think of anything we're anticipating seen in the next year to two years in terms of a major or significant issues no sir I think you had it I mean you just have to that there's one market that has 757 officers in it so somebody is going to get their 700th Joyce so I mean you just need to be more accustomed oh hey this is great I got my 57th choice I mean there's just a change in culture then people are gonna have to used to the other thing is the other I knew you're gonna I know you're gonna have a question it's gonna be a hard one to the the other thing is interesting so I have these conversation with some people who've been you know in the personal management world for you know for a long long time and they'll say stuff like hey JP you know and in in my experience all you all officers want to do is go to a post and what I point out is in your entire experience that's the only choice you've given to an officer right like because you don't get assigned to a unit you get assigned to a post and the senior mission commander there is the one who assigns you down so I think some of that stuff is gonna be really interesting to see about about when when officers are given the ability to go actually to a particular unit as opposed to a particular post how that starts shaping preferences and start start bringing this information just for the record I wanted everybody to know that I had to ask a question because this road just one the spring but award I got into aim to today and I was going down through all of our open requisitions and I was taking a look at the section where we're able to put in you know specific qualifications for the job ksps and I found myself particularly for the crew that we have really placing a premium on certain master's degrees right this issue associated with information age army the Chiefs push over the last two palm review cycles advanced civil schooling funding has taken it in this short just put it lightly gang ID there's no better way for me to say that that said if you could establish the the data-driven foundation for what folks are asking for inside aim to there may be more ammunition inside the TT peg deliberation in particular I was just wondering for your thoughts on them sure sir I think that is I think that's a great point and I think it is one of a number I mean it is it is already interesting so so I agree with you I agree everything you said and I think we're gonna start getting really good insights about the the mismatch between the skills we wish we had and the available inventory of officers I think and start driving things like of certain degrees and incentivizing officers to do that and again that's a data rich already we're seeing things that I think are really interesting that we hadn't even considered so the ramifications of it so for example you know we have now been able after a couple runs of this to talk mathematically about which posts are most preferred in which or at least preferred there's sort of a cut-off point where you know they're more preferred than least preferred and one of the ones is on the other end of the least preferred side is Fort Bliss so I was having this conversation with the with the commanding general out at at at Fort Bliss General Patrick Matlock and he said he said look I can't wait to see this data because I'm gonna take this information and I'm gonna go to the leaders at Fort Bliss and and in El Paso and say look you're not an attractive you know you know you're not a destination of choice you're not a postive choice so we need to do something together to make El Paso and the surrounding community and Fort Bliss a more attractive place to be and so and that's the institutional level and the individual but Sir I think I think what you just mentioned is going to be important but I think it's going to be one of a hundred other things that we see as we as we finally have like a coherent data structure from which we can learn this because what everyone's always told me and again I can I can say these things I don't fully understand but when you start actually getting a cohesive framework to gather your data you start off you know get trying to think you've got some you want to get answers to certain questions and then you find out you're not even asking the right questions because there are these linkages amongst the data and I think that's just one of them so that wasn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be and from a younger generation perspective is there any protections to put in place for say units with niche skills like going to the 82nd and hey we only want majors that are jump masters is that gonna close the window or there are areas in there that that will leave that option open for for people to get into those type of units that they want to hunt down so you know so again you know you want to go to the 82nd and you're a high quality officer I think what this allows you to do is I have a dialogue with that brigade commander who has hiring authority and you get a chance to say here's what I'm a great fit to come to the 82nd I didn't you know I didn't go to jump unit before but here are the reasons why but what we are doing increasingly is we're eliminating all these restrictions that would say you couldn't go there and so now you've got an opportunity to actually see what those positions are compete for them and you can have that dialogue with a hiring authority of the brigade commander to make that happen sir Lieutenant Colonel Jones you kind of mentioned that there will be a number of officers that won't get their choices and that will end up being at the bottom of the pool or whatever so I was just kind of wondering what's that feedback loop for those officers that aren't doing so well since we have now all these metrics and all this information how will they give the information to them so they can actually you know improve their chances or yeah it's a great question so let me give you it so you see these questionnaires we just passed out I will I will give you one of the pieces one of the one of the data is that we've we've brought together shouldn't be a surprise to you but 75% of the officer corps that we've asked this question to and I think now the data sets about 1,600 officers so it's fairly stable at this point like the members aren't going to change but about 75% of the officer corps that we survey think of they're in the top 25% of the officer corps okay so we clearly have an issue with visibility in terms of where we are I think when we start bringing assessments into this and certainly in the first ten years of an officer you're starting able to see these things and you start getting this feedback and it's objective it's not just my opinion of you it's actually a you know of a fair measurement of your of your skills I think people will start getting a better feel for for where they are and I think that starts driving maybe different either career choices or fields that they go into and I think there's a whole lot of value in that because I don't think right now officers really see themselves accurately in terms of their own skills or even how they sort of rack and stack within their career field what else sir ya see at one point other branches competing for billets that are enough different branches billet for example you know being the g6 out at Fort Carson it was hard to get people to come out and become Brigade at sixes and serve in that billet but you know there could be an infantry armor office or even a Lotus tition they can fill that Brigade a six bullet and compete for it yeah we haven't we haven't gone that far I mean I would still see a brigade s first off I don't think there are any billets that are hard to fill at Fort Carson as far as I can tell but I well interesting a Fort Carson super popular much more popular than like Hawaii which again you wouldn't know I mean I would've always thought I was more but but I think Fort Carson because it's still low-key in the content United States certainly as you become higher ranking I think people start having kids and they want to be really want to stay in the United States before Carson is very very popular but you know we haven't really looked at that yet I think you know right now is we're seeing this you'd still want to have a signal officer doing that doing that role now I thought you were gonna go in a different direction you know we sort of code different jobs post like Brigade s6 and so right now if there are these bildt's that are open there they're only or a chunk that go to every officer I think you could see we could see expanding that in terms of how they manage that at a at a lower level but not not as you're sort of describing at least not anytime soon that's not something we're looking at okay any other questions okay well I really appreciate your time apologize for going 20 minutes over is very hard for me to do this in an hour and you guys had great questions I will stick around here if there are if there are any questions and I will just end with with like whether it's a couple thoughts that I think is really important for us to all to understand you know we have a chief of staff of the Army General McConville who spent three years as the g1 and two years as the vice okay at least in my time in the army I don't think we've ever had a chief who is understood the people side of the army better than general McConville there is a reason why he says this is his number one priority because he understands the system and he understands how we need to make it significantly better to retain the right talent to win future Wars and at the end of the day that's what this is all about and then the final piece of this is you know I have I have seen this in lots of different fields as well but everybody loves change until that change impacts them it's just true we all hate change and if you tell me you don't I hate change I'm not sure I'm gonna believe yet but as we're doing this make sure I mean understand that we're doing this for the reasons of making the army more competitive more ready for future for future fights and then make sure you spend the time to understand the reasons why and mentor your subordinates on on how this is going forward and then as we go forward we are always open to your inputs and how to make this better okay like I don't think we have every answer I think we are we are clear on a direction that we're moving out but we rely upon your feedback to make this whole system better okay thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: The U.S. Army

Views: 6,206

Rating: 4.8796992 out of 5

Keywords: Talent Management, Soldiers, LPD, Officers, U.S. Army Talent Management Task Force, leader's professional development, U.S. Army

Id: 0C8WG4Z5fTw

Length: 81min 7sec (4867 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019