The Case For Equivalency...
If you are reading this article on Sat 01 April having found
yourself seeing red and being hot under the collar today at the news that the
MOD is going to issue ‘equivalent rank’ tabs to Civil Servants, then you’re
probably not alone. The author ensured that
the ‘MOD press release’ was intentionally designed to both see how many people
could fall for something without doing their due diligence and is a good
reminder that we should not take all we see for granted. For example both the
people quoted have names that mean “April Fool” when translated (e.g. Major Fool),
while working for the Director Fuel Operations, Operational Logistics (FOOL)
team must be fun! More seriously though this was an attempt to touch in a light
hearted way on a serious issue that inspires even stronger views from some
quarters than having beards in the Army or wearing denim in a RIFLES mess…
The subject of ‘equivalent rank’ is a uniquely MOD issue but one that raises questions about integration, talent management and getting the very best from your people. Historically the British Civil Service has always enjoyed a rank structure since its inception in the 19th century – staff were appointed into different ranks at the same levels of broad responsibility as their military peers and promoted at the same timescale too – a War Office Executive Officer had the same rough workload as their Army Captain peer even though they may have completely different roles and outputs. They would promote to Higher EO at the same rough time as the Captain would promote to Major This meant that it was easy to determine both for messing purposes and for report writing and line management purposes where Civil Servants and military would sit in the others hierarchy and make sure a more junior individual was not managing a senior.
The problem with this eminently sensible scheme is that the ending of direct career management for the Civil Service and introduction of promotion through interviews meant that suddenly civilians were promoting far more rapidly than their military peers. It is entirely possible for a junior civil servant to promote from EO or HEO up to Grade 7 in a two-three years. This has caused discomfort among many in the military community who do not see this as a good thing or that it is possible for someone to gain experience in this time and be credible at that level.
The counter to this view is that firstly people promote
because they have demonstrated they meet the requirement for the job they are
applying to do. Interviews are testing and require you to show to an audience
how you’d handle a complex situation and demonstrate against open competition
that you are the right person for the job. While an Army Colonel may mock the
Grade 7 who has promoted after 5 years in the MOD, that same Grade 7 will have
applied for a role and sat at least four interviews (assuming they joined as an
EO) and come top each time. They’ve applied for and sat for more job interviews
in the last five years than the Army officer will have done in her or his
entire career. The armed forces promote at up to 1* based on reports written on
you by others, but you do not interview or prove your own capability to a
promotion board. A Civil Servant is assessed by independents every time they
apply and they need to be able to stand out from a very competitive field.
Simply put, the reason that Civil Servant got to Grade 7 in 5 years is because
they are very good at what they do.
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Civil Servants deploy globally on Operations |
Speed of promotion is also curious because in peacetime the
regular military dislike it intensely, believing that it isn’t possible to have
a full career unless you’ve done a minimum of 7 years at one rank, or certain
jobs in another. By contrast, the moment a good war starts and all bets are off
and people promote incredibly quickly. In both World Wars the Army quickly
promoted people – for example Robert Hardyman enlisted as a Private in August
1914, commissioned as a 2LT on 28 July 1916 in the Somersets and by 6 June 1918
was an Acting Major who took over the Bn in action and was promoted to Acting
Lieutenant Colonel, when as the CO of 8 Somersets he was killed in August 1918.
He was 23 years old. He served for 4 years rising from Private to Lieutenant
Colonel and emerged as the CO of his battalion without enough length of service
to qualify for a Jubilee medal in modern times.
If it’s possible to do this in wartime, then perhaps we
should ask the question why we are so averse to the concept of people promoting
quickly in peacetime? The Armed Forces seem intensely mistrustful of career
models that permit this, but equally if you’re doing well at one level and have
the reach to achieve the next, why not go for it? Some people excel at all
levels, while others do really well when they reach a level that plays to their
own natural strengths and abilities, so may promote quicker. Why not use talent
to its full potential rather than hamstring it by time served?
The problem for the Civil Service is that sitting in a room
you face a hierarchy which is mistrustful of you because it cannot place you or
your credibility. Every military meeting held involves people establishing a
pecking order in the opening sentences, so that within the first minute you
know who is senior and who is the person you need to outshine to maximise your
chances at the next board. Civil Servants confuse people because they don’t
have the rank tabs or titles that translate well, and so can be difficult to
establish their credibility.
This matters because often the person in the room with the
most experience on the subject at hand is the person in civvies (and often in
clothes that would look out of place in any self-respecting mess). It has been
interesting in the past to attend meetings where a highly experienced civil
servant has been all but ignored, but their military underling making a similar
point is listened to with near reverence. It would be fascinating to conduct an
experiment in which people attended meetings and introduced themselves as a
Civil Servants, then attended another meeting and introduced themselves as a military
officer using their equivalent rank but make identical points– at which meeting
would they get more traction with their military colleagues?
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The end result is that the situation has emerged where all too often, despite the great work of the Civil Service, they are seen as second rank players to the military. It is common every year to see messages thanking soldiers, sailors, air(wo)men, reservists and civil servants for something. It feels a bit like reading the round robin Christmas letter bragging about how Tarquin did so terribly well at something this year, and neglecting to mention except in the briefest of terms the unwanted bastard step child. Just for once it would be nice if the Civil Servant was the first word, not the afterthought in messages from senior leadership! Again, it sounds minor but if you always put the civil servants as the last to be mentioned, you build a culture where people assume that they are less important than others. Words matter, and so to does the way in which they are expressed.
This may sound all terribly minor but it does have a purpose
– if you want to get the very best from your people then you need to reflect on
how they can collectively work together to excel. This means looking at ways of
building a working environment where the Civil Servant is treated as an equal
peer and partner and whose experience is recognised and validated. To that end
perhaps it would be appropriate to introduce some form of recognition badge or
slide with the same combination of stripes that the military have to help
position an individual’s experience. This may help people understand that the
person they are speaking to is actually pretty senior in their own
organisation, happens to be good at their job and is probably worth listening
to as someone who knows what they are talking about.
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MOD Civil Servants deploy internationally alongside coalition peers |
There is likely to be strong resistance to this idea from
most military types reading this article – how dare those upstart civil
servants expect a military rank etc. But this isn’t what is being proposed
here, rather it is about recognising the grade and experience the person
already holds. All a rank tab is really is a piece of cloth with some symbols
on it – it confers no power of its own, no authority, yet when donned by
someone it magically endows them with the power of, quite literally, life and
death. There is a near totemic obsession with the use of rank tabs as a way of
preserving a military hierarchy and it would be fascinating to see if the armed
forces could work in the same way without rank tabs or titles. This of course is
the alternative option and that is to ban the use of all military ranks and
titles in mixed meetings. Rather than use the power of the meeting hierarchy
development tool, let everyone turn up in civvies and introduce themselves by
their first name only and see what happens…
The fact is that the MOD Civil Service is a bloody brilliant
organisation that struggles to the recognition it so rightly deserves. Across
the globe you see Civil Servants working alongside their military peers to
deliver operational success. Wherever British troops deploy, there will be a
Civil Servant alongside them, from the RFA sailors in Task Groups to the POLADs
and other advisors deployed in HQs. The modern deployment of military power
could not work without the civilian input yet at times they are not easily
identified or recognised. The time has arguably come to look to ways to even
the score and ensure that everyone in defence gets the same recognition and
respect based on their experience and role.
There used to be a court uniform for the Civil Service with 5 grades denoted by variations in the gold lace.
ReplyDeleteThe Institute for Government identified 11 grades in the MoD from Admin Assistant to Permanent Secretary. ( Much less than the number of army ranks)
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/grade-structures-civil-service
So it should be possible to create a coherent set of grade badges civil in nature that could appear on ID badges and as badges on uniform items.
Dare I suggest some combination of filing cabinets, pens, inkwells, cups of tea, Computers, maybe with SCS walking on water :-)
Many years ago I worked in a multidisciplinary team within HQ RAF Logistics Command. It was headed by a Group Captain and comprised five branches responsible for the engineering/supply support of various equipments. Four were run by Wing Commanders and the fifth by a Grade 7 engineer. Despite my lowly grade I used to attend the weekly Execs by virtue of being the resident business development gopher, along with the CS Commercial and Finance officers. There were two incumbents of the Grade 7 post while I was there, both of whom struck me as competent guys at least on a par professionally with their RAF counterparts but it was obvious that being the only civilian head of one of the core business branches carried the ex officio status of butt of wit. I never got the impression that they were taken entirely seriously. That merely reflected the culture in RAFLC, where the rank/grade equivalencies explicitly laid down by MOD were systematically subverted to the disadvantage of Civil Servants so you had people being reported on by someone who was in reality their peer. And yes, I had the experience of answering a question on a supply matter from an engineer Wg Cdr who immediately turned to the Sqn Ldr supplier (rightfully my equivalent in status) in his office with us and asked him if my response was correct. The Sqn Ldr confirmed that it was. In both these instances, everybody in the room knew the grade of the civilian being undermined.
ReplyDeleteIt's also worth mentioning the complacency that existed at the most senior level over the perceived competence of the engineering discipline, including the maintenance of airworthiness, which was firmly in the hands of RAF personnel. In contrast the capability of the supply specialism, from which the RAF had just jettisoned almost all its highly experienced, non-mobile civilian range managers when it relocated the function from Harrogate to Wyton, was seen as highly suspect. Not to worry, though, range management was only a civvy role so obviously a whole new set of people could be recruited locally and brought up to speed in no time. And yet..... In due course I became involved in the delivery of a Through Life Management Plan for the team I worked in. The pioneer in this field was the Nimrod IPT and the software they'd contracted for was mandated for everyone else to adopt. Because of this I was given a log-in to their much-vaunted, best practice TLMP. I went in to take a look at it and I was perplexed. Surely I was missing something fundamental, because it appeared to be almost completely empty. Suffice to say that when the Haddon-Cave Review into the loss of Nimrod XV230 was published I read it in its entirety and none of its findings surprised me.
About 18 years of my MOD career were spent in organisations where Service personnel, predominantly RAF, held the whip hand. I never worked in London so I'm not qualified to express an opinion on the relationship that exists in Main Building but my experience led me to conclude that generally speaking the Services are mistrustful of civilians whose personality doesn't accord with what they expect in one of their own and that they start with the presumption that a Civil Servant won't measure up to what they believe (in some cases, grossly deluding themselves) to be their own superior standard. I was privileged to work for some excellent officers who didn't see things that way but I've known enough of them who did to make me doubt that advertising someone's status will make much impact on deeply entrenched prejudices.
The example used (Executive Officer to Grade 7) should be put in context. If that officer is working in a project team, he/she does one job, say Commercial or Finance. But any engineer in the team has to be able to do every job in the team. Not just engineering, which may require cross-training across diverse disciplines such as quality, risk, avionics, hydraulics and airframe, but also commercial and finance. So, while the EO may satisfy the very narrow criteria for that grade/discipline and advance in a few short years, the engineer cannot possibly. (That is discrimination). The imaginary Colonel is not so much looking at why the admin Grade 7 has advanced so quickly. He's wondering why the most junior engineers are the most experienced, and able to pick up any job at the drop of a hat. He's wishing he had more of them, because the same criteria is not applied to Colonels either..
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