126. Sound-Up Governance Episode 2 with Lieutenant Colonel Jamahl Evans

Today's episode is the second of three crossover episodes with Sound-Up Governance, a new podcast that's part of the Ground-Up Governance platform (www.groundupgovernance.com). In this one, Matt Fullbrook speaks with Lieutenant Colonel Jamahl Evans of the United States Marine Corps about what duty and accountability mean in his world. 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Matt 

Welcome back to Sound-Up Governance. One of the most common conversations I have with boards of directors and senior executives is about to whom they owe a duty. On the surface, it seems like a simple question, but most of the time, everyone in the room has a different idea of what "duty" even means. So the question of where your duty lies takes a lot more work to explore than most people expect. And when you add in the difference between duty and accountability, plus when and to whom you can delegate duties and accountability. Let's just say it gets tricky, fast. This week's guest is Lieutenant Colonel Jamahl Evans of the United States Marine Corps. In addition to his extraordinary military career, Jamahl is also a corporate governance enthusiast. As you might imagine, duty and accountability are baked pretty deep into everything that goes on in the Marines. But before we dive into that, I'll let Jamahl explain exactly what his job is because it's pretty neat.

Jamahl 

I am currently a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Marine Corps. And what I do in the Marine Corps is financial management. I'm a financial management officer. That's what we call a Military Occupational Specialty, or MOS for short. In that capacity, I'm responsible for the planning and execution and oversight of my command's budget. Now, that's just the MOS piece. As I like to tell my Marines, your MOS is your job. Marine is your profession. So for me, my profession, and my first duty is being a Marine. And that means ensuring that my Marines and I are deployment ready and combat capable at all times. The section that I manage - my full title would be Assistant Chief of Staff, G-8 Comptroller - so that's a section and we've got about 14 Marines in there. So those are the Marines who are directly responsible and accountable to me to make sure that we're doing our financial management functions properly. Outside of that, external to us, are adjacent staff sections, and subordinate commands within the organization with whom we have to work to manage resources: make sure that we're that we've got enough resources and that we're using the resources we have properly.

Matt 

Now, I'm going to assume that many of you listening are as ignorant about the hierarchy of the Marines as I am, where exactly does the rank of Lieutenant Colonel fit in the organizational chart?

Jamahl 

So as a Lieutenant Colonel, I'm what's called a field grade officer, and there are three levels to that. So it's Major, which is what I was before, Lieutenant Colonel, what I am now, and Colonel, what I aspire to be promoted to in future. Beyond the field grade ranks, are the General or the flag officer ranks, so Brigadier General, Major General, Lieutenant General and Four Star General. So right now I am, what you would consider - although I'm senior to several other ranks - I'm still right smack in the middle of the of the officer and organizational hierarchy. So every promotion, you're getting greater responsibility. And they are also greater opportunities to which you can be assigned. So as what's called a company grade officer - those are junior officers: lieutenants, and captains - you're going to have significant responsibility already. When you become a field grade officer. What's interesting is, now you are a little further away from the junior Marines, and a little more responsible for organizational management. Beyond just making sure your Marines are trained, making sure they're taken care of making sure they're showing up on time and doing their job, now you are responsible for really understanding organizational policies, regulations, understanding what the what the mission of the organization is, and how your unit relates to that and ensuring that happens in the best way.

Matt 

Before our interview, Jamahl already knew that we were going to talk about duty and accountability. You'll notice that so far, he's being pretty careful not to use those words, instead referring to "responsibility." I nudged him a bit on that and asked him to tell me to whom he's accountable in his job and whether that's different from his duty. This is where things start getting really interesting.

Jamahl 

So to whom I am accountable in the immediate, that would be my commanding general. That is the senior officer who runs the organization. It's a Major General who runs Second Marine Division. So that is the first officer to whom I immediately accountable because it really is his budget that I'm managing. It's not me making solo decisions. It's not Lieutenant Colonel Evans going "I feel like buying this!" No, it is based on the mission of the organization and the intent of my senior leader, which would be my commanding General. So that's the immediate accountability portion of it. Broader, or writ large, when I think about to whom I'm accountable, personally, there is, first of all, the Constitution of the United States. We actually take an oath as officers, and our enlisted Marines take an oath as well. But we take an oath and in our oath is the Constitution of the United States. To support and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So that wraps up the nation, and accountability towards the nation. My authority and my mission come directly from the President of the United States, so I'm accountable to the President of the United States, as well. Then you have United States citizens: the American people are truly the shareholders because it's their tax dollars I'm managing. It's their tax dollars, for whom my senior officers, President, Congress, we're responsible for that. So we do have to take into account and I've done it on several occasions where there were decisions that I had to make when working with partner nations. And I had to make tough determinations because I am managing taxpayer dollars.

Matt 

Okay, whoa. We're still only talking about accountability here and already for what's essentially a middle manager in a huge organization, Jamahl is accountable to his boss, and the President of the United States, and every taxpayer? Seriously? And if you thought the complexity would stop there, you were wrong. Let's add duty into the mix.

Jamahl 

You would think 20 years in the Marine Corps, I've got a good solid understanding of duty. And I did I had a good personal understanding. Then I got curious about well, what is the actual definition of duty? And the definition I came across was "a legal or a moral obligation." And I didn't, while that's true, I didn't feel that was the full story. And think when when it comes to duty, there is an intangible step of building a sense of duty. We can understand what duty is, but there is a step of building that within an individual. Some individuals just come to the organization with it. Some individuals don't. And I would say that the short answer to your question: Duty is having the knowledge, feeling, belief that you should do what you're supposed to do to the best of your ability, because that's the requirement. Accountability is a bit more on the reactive side. It's how do you explain what you've done? How do you take responsibility for what you've done? Who else shares in that responsibility? So that's where I would see the difference. I would see duty as being a bit more on the front end of actions and accountability on the back end.

Matt 

Okay, wait, pause. This is amazing stuff. If you're anything like me, you think of the Marines as being the definition of tangible structure, discipline, order. I mean, if you ask me for the first word that comes to my mind, when you say the word "Marines," it would probably be "duty." But now I'm hearing that duty is something almost soft and squishy, something that comes from the inside, rather than being imposed on you from the outside. Am I hearing that right?

Jamahl 

And that was the second thought that I had, after I considered how I would define duty. The second thought being, well, how do you instill it? How do you ensure it? How do you develop it? How does it come about? Like you said, there's some external factor that plays upon you to help build a sense of duty. And the thing I thought about was, okay, well, if I were in an organization, what would help drive my own sense of duty? Because I came to the Marine Corps with a sense of duty. And I thought of one thing or a multitude of things, but I keyed in on one thing that I think helps build that. I think the principles of an organization can drive a sense of duty, and that's your external thing that comes into play. And how it works is when when people see your principles, and I don't care if it's in a slogan or motto anything, there's got to be a connection. And the connection that has to be established is: I either possess the characteristics of those principles already, or those are principles that I want to possess, I want to display those.

Matt 

So cool! It's like duty, this thing that the dictionary defines as a legal or moral obligation, might actually be more of a special sauce, where the ingredients are a person's internal drive character and beliefs, plus the purpose and values of their organization. So I wondered: if accountability is basically a set of responsibilities imposed on a person by an external or organizational structure. And duty is something that comes more from inside you, there must be lots of ways that duty and accountability could come into conflict. Like if your moral duty and beliefs make it hard to carry out an order from your boss, for example. In a case like that, what is Jamahl hope his Marines will do to address the conflict?

Jamahl 

In my office, I have established with my Marines, we do not use the word "hope". And they find it interesting they find it, you know, they find it funny. But we all know that it's a common theme in the Marine Corps, that hope is not a course of action. So when you talk about anybody who's having kind of a dilemma, or a conundrum, I don't have a hope for them. What I do is engage to see what kind of actions we can take to improve the situation. So to answer your direct question, the first thing is, there historically can be dilemmas between what the organization needs to do and how they need to do it, and what the individual thinks about it. So the first thing, which is one of the foundations, is that a Marine does not have to follow an unlawful order. So if you, as a Marine or as any service person, believe that an order you've received is unlawful or illegal, you do not have to do it. However, if an order is lawful, you might not agree with it, you might have a personal feeling, but you're still going to do it, you have a job to do. And if you've been given given a lawful order, then you execute! Now here's where the development comes into play, to minimize the dilemma that you hypothesized. As we grow within our organizations, it's on the mid-level and senior leaders to ensure that there's quality understanding, quality training, quality conversation, quality voice, making that time for your junior personnel to ask you those tough questions. And I tried to get my Marines to ask tough questions early on. That way they can experience and understand a glimpse that what your perspective is, at your level doesn't encompass the entire picture. And you have to understand that there are threads between what you functionally do and what we organizationally decide.

Matt 

Like most important things in life, this is a complex problem. When duty and accountability collide, or when your personal beliefs are in conflict with what your organization asks of you, sometimes you have to, you know, just trust your boss and do the work. But Jamahl is also telling us that it's important for organizational leaders to give their team a voice, a platform, and an opportunity to better understand how they fit into the bigger picture. But again, we're hearing something that kind of doesn't match my own perception of a military organization where everything is super structured, and everyone has to do the same things at the same time. You know, predictable and repeatable. How can you have both that and an environment where everyone has a voice and some influence and problem solving?

Jamahl 

Senior leaders have to create space for that to happen. If you're running a completely robotic organization where people just do a thing, and there's no room to either question, consult, understand, develop, grow, then you're going to have people doing robotic things. No military can be at its best when it's just "do the exact thing that I tell you and that's it," because you will have a group of people who will do one thing and will stop. So just like any other organization, we do need to increase the bandwidth for creative thinking, innovative thinking, especially when it comes to problem solving. So those types of behaviors that we want everybody doing the same way in the Marine Corps, we want everyone to be in shape. We don't even want it, we need it. That's a requirement. You're required to be in shape. Two months ago, I ran three miles. I don't like distance running, though I do it as well as I can...I do pretty good. But we want our Marines staying in shape. We want our people healthy, and not just physically healthy, mentally, and emotionally healthy. So it's on again, senior leadership to engage and be aware that that's happening. Shifting over to the behaviors where we want to expand and have that bandwidth to learn and to grow. That's where your innovation piece comes in. Where we want Marines thinking about developed solutions to problems, branch scenarios. "What would you do?" is a great question. "What would you do?" It's a very easy thing to sit down with your personnel and go over a scenario, something that happened in your career, "Hey, this, this happened. What do you think you would do in this situation?" You have that conversation. The next step, in that is the daily activities, daily tasks, daily operations, giving your people that space to make decisions at their level.

Matt 

It surprised me a bit to hear Jamahl talk about the importance of not just physical health, but also mental well-being in the Marines. But now that I think about it, it really shouldn't have surprised me at all. It can be an extraordinary, stressful and dangerous job. And it made an impact on me to hear him talk about it as part of the duty of being a Marine. The duty to care for your own physical and mental well being, but also that of the people around you. How does that actually play out in the real world of the Marine Corps?

Jamahl 

When you place a focus on engagement, treatment, development, recovery, and then success, you establish a continuum that's understandable by your junior leaders. One of the things I think the Department of Defense is great at is messaging the need to be aware. Messaging the need to be aware and see signs. And we've had a lot of messaging over the years. But it's something that is important, because we're talking about the health of the organization. So what gets a message down to mid-level and junior leaders is "here are different signs, things that you should be looking for. If you've never had to deal with this before. Here's something that could trigger in your mind a something might be wrong." I have had the experience of walking past a Marine and getting a greeting, they say "Good morning, sir." I'll say "Good morning." And sometimes I'll say "how are you?" A lot of people don't like that greeting because you really just say it and you pass the person and you go. But about three times in my career I've said good morning to a Marine and I've looked and I said "how are you?" And they will respond with "fine" or "okay". And it's just something in the eyes. And three times I've had to pull the Marine aside and say, "seriously, I know I'm not your commanding officer, you don't even know me. But are you good?"And then those three instances I've hadn't read, say "no." So then I would stop what I was doing, call whomever I was going to meet whatever meeting I was going to say, "Look, I can't make it, I have a situation." And I'll take that Marine into the office. Now sometimes that results in one hour, two hour conversations. But so long as that Marine leaves with something functional to get them to the next step. I'm not going to cure everything. I'm not trained to cure everything. And I don't have the time to cure everything. But what I can do is show you where the door is, and open it and say, "Look, you can step through that door. If you can do nothing else, you can step through that door, because we may be side by side, fighting against an enemy. And I gotta know that you're good." And it's not just for junior members either. It goes for our senior members, and I'll share one more story when I've worked... I was a Major and I worked with a Lieutenant Colonel. He was he was my Commanding Officer and I was his Executive Officer. And I noticed the level of stress that he was fighting. He wasn't losing it or anything like that - he was completely capable. But you can see fatigue in people. One day I heard him come on deck. And he was walking his office was after my office. That way I catch all the people that want to try to go and see him. So I hear him walk into his office, and about three or four different Marines approached him with a with an issue, something they had, "Sir, this or that." So they walked by my office. I said, "Sir, do you have a moment?" And the way he normally did it he would just say "yes." But you could see the fatigue in his eyes. So he came in, I said "Sir, do you mind if I close the hatch?" And he said, "not at all". So you close the hatch - for your listeners a hatch is a door. Naval terminology -  and he sat down on the couch in my office, and he said, "What do you have?" And I said "nothing, sir, you just looked like you needed to have a time when nobody's asking you to do something." And he smiled and looked at me, he goes, "You up for tacos?" I said, "Yes, sir." So we went and had lunch. So sometimes we have to look out for senior leaders in the same way to look out for junior people. So it just, it just takes compassion, awareness and engagement.

Matt 

There it is! Even in an organization as structured, complex and disciplined as the United States Marine Corps., Sometimes it's important to just go and have tacos with your boss. I learned so much from my conversation with Lieutenant Colonel Jamahl Evans and we covered a lot more ground than what you heard in this episode, so you'll hear more from him in the future. If you have a question, story, or insight you’d like to share, please send a note or a voice memo to soundup@groundupgovernance.com, and we may feature you in a future episode. On the next episode of Sound-Up Governance. I talk with performance strategist, investment guru and corporate governance enthusiast Lisa Oldridge about businesses, companies, customers, and how they all fit together. Until next time.