Hiring: Hands-On Group Brainteasers
Entrusting mid- and low-rank officers with critical battle decisions forces the marines to pay close attention to the skills of the people they invest with responsibility. Installing effective decision makers at lower levels is a requisite when pushing down authority in any organization, but even companies that consider themselves committed to decentralization rarely make the hiring and training of managers as high a priority as the marines do. At large companies human-resource departments are typically disdained; at small companies hiring tends to be hit-or-miss, and training, if there's any at all, is usually an afterthought. In contrast, the most prestigious slot for a marine officer of almost any rank--the job that is hardest to get and that most clearly marks you for a likely rise to the top--is one in which he or she is entrusted with the selection and training of other marines.
Many of those slots are at the marine camp in Quantico, Va. Driving down the long Quantico camp road, you first pass through a country-club-like sprawl of lush, rolling hills. But these gradually give way to flatter, harsher-looking terrain composed of a thousand shades of drab, until you finally find yourself surrounded by barrackslike buildings. But Quantico never quite descends to the scoured-out look of a military base; rather, it resembles an unusually uncharming college campus, which in some ways it is.
A marine officer candidate's first Quantico experience--unless he or she is among that minority who've attended the Naval Academy--is the unique hell known as the Officer Candidate School (OCS). "School" is a misnomer; marine OCS doesn't exist to teach or impart anything to its hapless victims. Its role is to screen out those who might lack the right stuff; it is essentially a 10-week, 7-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day job interview. OCS commander Colonel John Lehockey is the first to admit that that is a ridiculous amount of time to spend evaluating a prospective manager. "It's not nearly long enough," he says with a sigh. Though the already carefully screened candidates are put through a grueling treadmill of physical and academic challenges at OCS, the most-scrutinized quality is what the marines constantly and almost casually refer to as "leadership." "It has no exact definition," says Lehockey, shrugging. "It's our job to recognize it."
Whatever it is, OCS brings leadership to the fore by, among other things, subjecting candidates to a series of what might loosely be called brainteasers. A growing number of businesses, Microsoft most famously among them, have made posing difficult riddles and problem-solving scenarios a part of their job interviews. The marines up the ante, though, by making the problems intensely hands-on. In one exercise the candidates are told to get a wounded comrade across an ostensibly mined artificial stream using a rope and boards. In another they have to get themselves over a seemingly unscalable tall wall. Instructors watch dispassionately from catwalks above. "Which ones step up to take the lead?" asks Lehockey. "Who asks for input from the others? Who recognizes when a plan is failing and backs off to try another?" Solving the problem or not doesn't even enter into the grade. When the smoke clears, roughly 25% of the candidates are washed out.
The Marine M.B.A.: High-Speed, Chaos-Proof Leadership
The ones that make it become the property of Colonel Lee. Lee has a rÉsumÉ that seems to encompass the military careers of 10 busy men. And he is keenly aware that of the dozen or so schools that marine officers might attend in a full career, he has been given command of what marine officers seem to concur is the corps' most important: the Basic School, a six-month course that turns raw lieutenants into functioning marine officers. "There is no school like this in the other services," he says. "Or anywhere else in the world."
What sets the Basic School apart from other training institutions--and in particular, from an M.B.A. program, to which the Basic School in some ways roughly corresponds--is that it unabashedly favors breeding generic, high-speed, chaos-proof leadership over imparting specific skills. "Experts and specialists are a dime a dozen," sniffs Lee, dismissing in one fell swoop a century of business-management theory. "What the world needs is someone who can grasp the workings of an entire organization, understand people, and motivate them." This point of view is reflected in the way the corps embraces cross training. In the business world a company might make a point of having managers sit on assembly lines or take customer complaints a few days a year. In the marines, no matter what an officer's area of expertise, he or she can expect to be transferred periodically into a position entirely outside that area. Marine lawyers are given infantry units to command; infantry commanders are placed in charge of supply units. In the short term, concedes Lee, the almost-random shuffling around robs an organization of the efficiencies that would be obtained by allowing people to develop better skills in one job. In the long term, though, he says, the organization gains because it will have developed a body of plug-and-play managers capable of joining any team in almost any role in response to almost any crisis.
How do you teach generic leadership? There are no rules, no checklists, no set processes that apply to any but the most rote of situations, says Lee. Instead, the Basic School tries to hone decision making the way a chess master does: through exposure to as many scenarios as possible, so that the brain learns to recognize patterns it can apply to entirely new situations. That's how Lee solved his ship-securing problem, and that, claims Lee, is how all good managers solve the toughest challenges. Sea stories are the very best way to get those scenarios across, he says. At the Basic School, nearly 300 hours over the six months are set aside for captain instructors to break off with small groups of lieutenants specifically for the purpose of sharing such stories. Call it an oral, informal case-study method, in which people's lives are staked on the outcome.
