One of the most important challenges facing the Australian Army at the beginning of the 21st century is to ensure that its leaders of the future are appropriately trained and educated to face a military environment that will be uncertain, complex and multidimensional. This article argues that a key leadership and command challenge facing the Army at the beginning of the new century is the integration into the land force of recruits born after 1977—known as the ‘Net Generation’. It is the members of the Net Generation that will be the officers and ‘strategic corporals and privates’ of the future, and they are the ones that will be charged with the great responsibility of fighting in a decentralised battlespace.
This article outlines some of the main characteristics and aspirations of the Net Generation. The essay goes on to suggest that, in the future, the development of junior leaders from this demographic group is likely to be best achieved by the use of mentoring and by the associated development of an improved organisational climate, rather than by the tenets of a traditional command-and-control culture.
The Characteristics of the Net Generation
In 1995, Graham Glenn, in Serving Australia, his report on the nature of Australian military service, reaffirmed the role of service men and women as ‘managers of violence’:
Those who join the Services make a professional commitment quite unlike any other. They undertake to maintain the security, values and standards of the nation against external threat. They train for the application of extreme violence in a controlled and humane fashion, whilst accepting the risk of serious injury or death in the achievement of the mission ... In short they undertake to train for and, if required, undertake duty beyond the bounds of normal human behaviour.1
Although the unique nature of military service means that the armed forces are not a laboratory for social experimentation, the Army cannot afford to become isolated from society and must seek to maintain a responsive organisational culture. As the social commentator Hugh Mackay has pointed out, since the early 1970s nearly every Australian institution or convention has been subject to either serious challenge or radical change. As a result, ‘the social, cultural, political and economic landmarks which have traditionally been used as reference points for defining the Australian way of life have either vanished, been eroded or shifted’.2 With respect to the Net Generation, the ADF in general, and the Army in particular, is not immune from these trends.
What are the characteristics of the Net Generation? According to the writer Don Tapscott, key features of Net Generation behaviour include interactivity based on participation rather than observation, a tolerance for social diversity, a propensity for challenging conventions of authority, and acceptance of economic insecurity and career change as norms.3 These social trends tend to run counter to the Australian Army’s culture of ‘top down’ leadership. The current Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Peter Leahy, has laid down the leadership challenge facing Australia’s land forces of the future as follows:
Because of conditions of strategic uncertainty, an Army that looks only at today will not be the Army we require tomorrow. We are facing not just the challenge of equipment modernisation and information networking—important though these are—but a deeper cultural challenge: that of learning to be ready to confront unpredictable operational conditions. And this is a challenge that will eventually have far-reaching effects on our doctrine, training and force structure.4
The Role of Mentorship
It is important to note that many members of the Net Generation appear to give little regard to the structured formality that is associated with the traditional concept of military organisation, which emphasises the imperative of hierarchy and the rule of discipline over discussion. In contrast, many individuals of the Net Generation prefer a leadership and command style that is based on a ‘decisive transformational methodology’. The main features of this transformation methodology are the roles played by emotional inspiration, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration. As a result, mentorship is an important consideration in Net Generation thinking about employment and career development. The ADF in general, and the Army in particular, will not be able to ignore the role that mentorship will need to play in shaping the professional military experience and expertise of Net Generation recruits.
An important feature of mentorship is the role played by a situational style of leadership in which a leader concentrates on harnessing the abilities of his or her followers rather than simply issuing orders. A central element in situational leadership theory is a concentration on relationship behaviour—that is, on the leader’s providing guidance and support to the subordinate as the foundation of experience. Situational leadership, supported by careful mentoring, seeks a ‘partnering for performance’ between leaders and subordinates. It is an organisational approach that is more individualised, informal and is based on a greater belief in trust than the largely collective techniques used in the mass armies of the first half of the 20th century.
In situational leadership and mentoring, organisational climate is as important as organisational culture. Whereas an organisational culture tends to reflect ingrained traits of behaviour, the creation of a climate in an organisation concentrates on appropriate ‘thinking and doing’. An organisational climate tends to embody the members’ collective perceptions with respect to key areas such as the level of autonomy that can be achieved by individuals, the character of trust, and traits such as cohesiveness, support, recognition and fairness. The relationship between organisational climate and individual effectiveness in the ADF is arguably already established. The aim is to create a high-performance climate that fulfils individual aspirations and career satisfaction. However, in the future this approach will require greater emphasis to attract Net Generation members to a military career.
Important elements in creating a high-performance organisation involve an emphasis on innovation and initiative. In the Australian military realm, the requirements of high performance have manifested themselves in the doctrinal philosophies of mission command and professional mastery in tactics and operations. These approaches give subordinates discretion in accomplishing objectives according to the direction and intent of the commander. Initiative and trust underpin mission command, and it is this climate that must be encouraged to attract the ‘strategic corporals’ who will emerge only from the Net Generation. Senior leaders must define their intent, and trust subordinates to execute it creatively. What is missing in mission command at present, however, is consistent institutional adherence to its decentralised features. In the information age, it is all too easy for a commander to reach down and intervene in a subordinate’s decisions. While no senior officer can be expected to tolerate incompetence, commanders need to avoid micromanagement and the creation, by default, of a risk-averse military culture.
Many successful commanders tend to be those who display the characteristics of a powerful intellect and a well-developed sense of human intuition. Members of the Net Generation possess intellect, but there must be some doubt as to whether many of them are at ease with the notion of human intuition. Many members of the Net Generation have grown up in an atomised environment dominated by information technologies in which the emphasis is on simulation and virtual reality to formulate and develop responses and reactions to circumstances. The world of the Matrix films, in which the real and the virtual interact, is a metaphor for the post-1977 Net Generation. Self-discovery for many Net Generation members is achieved through simulation of real-world events, rather than real-world experience itself, still less by an imagination honed by immersion in history, literature and the classics.
The impact of one-dimensional technological education and computer culture on Net Generation decision-making may be that junior military leaders—both officers and non-commissioned officers—from that demographic group will lack intuitive skills. It is, after all, intuition that often provides a leader with a critical advantage in the uncertain and high-stress environment of combat. The capacity for Net Generation officers to develop intuition and military coup d’œil will largely depend on their military-education experience in ‘learning through doing’ and by shedding the legacy of a technocentric civilian social environment. In this respect, there is a clear role for mentoring in the tutelage of junior leaders in the Army’s future leadership programs. The more a military organisation mentors its future leaders, the less will be the tendency of the former to micromanage, so creating risk-averse behaviour when on operations.
In encouraging a climate of mentoring, there might be grounds to remove, or at least modify, the current requirement for summative judgments of junior officers at the rank of captain and below through an annual Performance Appraisal Report. This document is the assessment tool used to rate an officer’s performance and provides the basis for selection in career streaming and for suitability in future appointments. The document provides the formal feedback mechanism from superior to subordinate, but does not permit a ‘subordinate to superior’ nexus or exchange of views. Changing the Army’s emphasis in performance assessment from a philosophy of reporting to one of mentoring would allow junior officers increased latitude that would help to hone their intuitive decision capacity through ‘learning through doing’. In this respect, the Army might consider encouraging a more relationship-oriented style of leadership that exploits the Net Generation’s desire to be treated as trusted colleagues and team players. Such an approach may, however, challenge some of the underlying tenets of the current Army officer reward mechanism that is based on the performance appraisal reports.
In a managerial sense, the officer assessment system represents a closed rather than an open system. As the writer Peter Senge has pointed out in his examination of ‘learning organisations’, it is openness and the ‘norm of speaking openly and honestly about important issues and the capacity to challenge the leader’s own thinking continually that allows an organisation to focus on doing what is right instead of who wants what done’.5
In the Australian Army of the future, it is arguable that empowering the Net Generation could be better achieved by instituting 360-degree (subordinate to superior) reporting, commencing at sub-unit command—that is, at the rank of major and above. Such a process would assist in establishing better feedback mechanisms in order to achieve a form of ‘leadership through partnership’ that is based on shared commitment and open communication. More importantly, such an approach would have great symbolic importance, in that it would signal that the Army has embraced the ideals of a 21st-century ‘learning organisation’ and seeks to develop future leaders based on an understanding of social change. After all, competent and respected commanders have nothing to fear and much to gain from formal, 360-degree interaction with their subordinates.
Conclusion
If we are to create a mobile, agile and versatile 21st-century Australian Army, it must be characterised by adaptability and relevance. With respect to recruiting, training and retaining members of the Net Generation, such an approach will demand changes to both our military culture and our organisation. The identity of the Net Generation has been shaped primarily by social diversity and by unparalleled access to information technology. The Australian Army needs to consider adopting a decisive transformational style of leadership and organisational change in order to entice Net Generation individuals into military service. Three measures that might be considered are the removal of summative reporting requirements for junior officers, the establishment of a mandated mentoring program for junior officers and the implementation of 360-degree reporting for officers at subunit command level and above.
Modern leadership, especially on a decentralised battlespace, requires a more personalised relationship between leader and follower. This relationship should not be seen as representing a ‘New Age’ or postmodern aspiration, but should be seen in the context of establishing improved warfighting command in future units that will be composed of the Net Generation. Achieving collective organisational goals must be underpinned by collaborative rewards based on individual motivation. The youth of the Net Generation is likely to demand a greater share of interaction and commitment with society’s organisational leaders in every profession and walk of life. Increasingly, many Net Generation members tend to view themselves as partners that are empowered to interact and serve in a cause rather than act as blind subordinates in an old-fashioned hierarchical force.
In order to exploit and develop the qualities of the Net Generation, the Army’s leadership needs to blend the best of the past with the requirements of the future. Such a transformative approach would encourage innovation and agility and inculcate competence. The next generation of the Army’s leaders will have to operate in an operational environment characterised by change, uncertainty and great risk, and it is imperative that we consider the necessary cultural and organisational changes sooner rather than later.
Endnotes
1 Graham Glen, Serving Australia: The Australian Defence Force in the Twenty First Century, Department of Defence Publishing, Canberra, 1995, p. 61. Emphasis added.
2 Hugh Mackay, Reinventing Australia: The Mind and Mood of Australia in the 90s, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1993, p. 17.
3 Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, McGraw-Hill. New York, 1998, p. 78.
4 Lieutenant General Peter Leahy, ‘Opening Address at the Chief of Army Conference’, Canberra, 1 October 2003.
5 Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline—The Art & Practice of the Learning Organisation, Random House, Sydney, 1990, p. 274. Emphasis in original.
