U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Kevin Tanenbaum
Successful leaders understand the value of command guidance and task prioritization. Through 17 years of war, sequestration, and military force reductions, our armed forces are consistently asked to “do more with less.” It is the job of commanders and supervisors at all levels to separate the mission essential from the extraneous in order to give both themselves and their subordinates ample time to rest and recover.
Devotion to duty versus determining priorities
The advent of “social media-based leadership” has given commanders the potential to rapidly issue guidance and disperse information in a way that is both immediate and effective. Facebook, WhatsApp and text messages enhance the speed of emergency announcements, recalls, and correspondence. Unfortunately, the ease with which we can distribute information has Pandora’s box-like ramifications if abused, as Dayton Ward illustrated in the January edition of the NCO Journal. When the Field Grade Leader called for articles about work-life balance, the diversity of responses in the comments section was astonishing. On one extreme, readers commented field grade officers are “always on parade.” These leaders claim they attained their positions because their work is their life, being a high-performing military member is a lifestyle choice and the job does not end start with reveille and end with retreat. Readers also claimed that, as long as the tasks being requested do not meet the Eisenhower Matrix criteria of being “urgent and important,” the responses could wait.
Perception and reality: Why we’re willing to sacrifice our subordinates’ time
Any good officer wants to be perceived as a hard charger. The work we produce becomes an extension of ourselves. If we are known for submitting excellent work on time, then we expect to be given gradually more responsibility and visibility while also being given higher marks on our evaluations. Competition is one of the driving factors in our sticktoitiveness. If we can’t get the job done, the boss will find someone else who can. Naturally, this pressure forces us to work longer and harder, but it also means we have a choice in whether we task our off-duty personnel in order to perpetuate that cycle.
During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to observe how great leaders task troops, and I’ve also learned from managerial gaffes I made as a company grade officer. As a lieutenant in my first leadership position, I didn’t hesitate to fire off text and Facebook messages to squadron members after the duty day. I was frustrated when I didn’t get a timely response, believing that everyone had a cell phone, and a response would only take a second. In retrospect, much of the “time sensitive” information was neither urgent nor important, but was a result of a self-imposed timeline and a need to be seen as an officer who gets results. I had not considered that Facebook was an off-duty escape for some of my airmen. The tools I could have been using to build relationships and rapport became avenues for workplace communication. Luckily, I had strong NCOs who would tactfully ask what the office priorities were, act in accordance with those priorities, and professionally push back if I started to go down a low priority path late in the day. The mentorship was invaluable. As a supervisor, I wanted to give my Airmen their deserved downtime. As effective followers, they wanted the team to operate efficiently during the work day to ensure that we avoided burnout.
Using experience to recognize what’s important
I learned about the value of keeping a work-life balance from one of my field grade mentors while deployed. On the night prior to our senior ranking officer’s (SRO) departure, I was barraged by several messages asking about his travel arrangements. Our SRO, a former deputy group commander and soon-to-be retired Lieutenant Colonel, was “old school” – unable to be contacted by Facebook (forgot his password) or phone. After dutifully relaying back the answers (through me) over a few drinks, he was asked to provide his personal email so they could continue corresponding with home station about more “important” information.
The advice he gave me put the whole experience into perspective: if home station waited until “beer thirty” to ask the questions, they probably weren’t that important and weren’t worth spending free time fretting over. We talked about how business was handled in an Air Force that didn’t rely on smart phones and text messages for last minute tasks: people left a message on an answering machine and you’d get back to it when you could. Carl Forsling discussed this topic in an article for Task and Purpose in 2016.
Achieving balance
Having a clear idea of what the boss values, realizing what is urgent enough to break the sacred bonds of off-duty time, and having the self-discipline to untether oneself from work related social media is a starting point for having a work-life balance, and it’s something with which I struggle daily. There’s only so much time we can devote to work and family. Eventually the line in the sand needs to be drawn between devotion to duty and taking care of yourself. If you communicate your priorities with your family, formulate expectations for your career and revisit that line periodically, your personal life doesn’t have to cost you your career and your career doesn’t have to cost you everything else.
James McCarthy is a Senior Director and Flight Commander for the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System’s 12thAir Command and Control Squadron. He has previously served as Executive Officer and Fighter Allocator for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s only multinational flying squadron. James spends his free time with his wife, Christina, at their home in Warner Robins, Georgia.