by Tom Montano
“Wow, so are you guys actually Soldiers?!” The crowds at Mount Vernon asked me this over a dozen times that winter Saturday after our colonial battlefield tactical demonstration. I was wearing my Revolutionary War era blue jacket and cotton pants, espontoon in hand, while taking pictures with fans. Then while boarding the bus to Fort Myer to enjoy the rest of our President’s Day weekend, several of my Soldiers reported that they had been asked the same question. As I looked around the bus, seeing groups of tricorn hats and white wigs stand in stark contrast to the typical soldier garb of camouflage patterns and patrol caps, it was fairly obvious why people were so surprised.
For just over 12 months, I served as a Platoon Leader in The Old Guard: Company A, 3d. United States Infantry Regiment, also known as the historic Commander in Chief’s Guard (CinC). Tracing its lineage back to George Washington’s company of personal guards, the Commander-in-Chief’s Guard is a company of active-duty infantry Soldiers that embody the heritage and lineage of the 3d U.S. Infantry and the Army’s historic past. In practice, that means CinC Soldiers don colonial uniforms, wigs, and tricorn hats, we march with Brown Bess muskets, and we conduct ceremonies and tactical demonstrations according to the blue book developed by Baron von Stueben in the late 18th century.
For most young infantry Soldiers, wearing a colonial uniform and conducting ceremonies is far from why they enlisted in the Army. Rather than spending most of their time running around in the woods, shooting guns, or jumping out of airplanes, our Soldiers spend a significant amount of time perfecting their uniforms and practicing their drill and ceremony. They do get a chance to attend career-enhancing schools such as Air Assault or Ranger School, qualify on assigned weapon systems, and conduct small unit live-fire exercises; however, there exists a large mismatch between their initial expectation upon enlistment and their circumstances serving in The Old Guard.
Although important in all military organizations, providing meaning for Soldiers becomes essential when leading in a unique non-traditional organization like The Old Guard. Through this experience, I have learned that it is the leader’s role to provide meaning to our Soldiers. By providing them that meaning, the CinC was able to overcome our Soldiers’ expectation mismatch and create a purpose that drove not only measurable collective success but individual satisfaction as well.
Meaning Explained: Coherence, Significance, and Purpose
The Army defines leadership in ADP 6-22 as “the activity of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.” Absent in the doctrinal discussion of leadership is any mention of meaning. Although purpose, direction, and motivation are important, focusing on the concept of meaning is both a simpler and almost always overlooked element of leadership. The most helpful definition is provided by Dr. Michael F. Steger who writes,
Meaning is the web of connections, understandings, and interpretations that help us comprehend our experience (coherence) and formulate plans directing our energies to the achievement of our desired future (purpose). Meaning provides us with the sense that our lives matter (significance), that they make sense (coherence), and that they are more than the sum of our seconds, days, and years (significance).
The concepts of coherence, significance, and purpose exist as necessary components that together create meaning in our lives. Through an analysis and implementation of these three concepts, leaders within CinC were able to create meaning for our Soldiers.
Coherence
According to Jeffery Hanson and Tyler VanderWeele, professors in Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, coherence is “the intellectual perception that one’s life, values, and relation to the world express an intelligible pattern and are part of a context or narrative that makes sense of one’s existence.” To simplify this for an Army context, coherence means that what Soldiers are doing needs to make sense to them. Additionally, the purpose and significance behind what those Soldiers do must also match with the coherent narrative that the leader describes.
For example, the Army’s mission statement is to “To deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of conflict as part of the joint force.” For most combat arms and combat support units, the Army’s mission statement drives their own subordinate mission, and the two flow together seamlessly. However, for a non-traditional organization like CinC, using this or a similar statement to drive meaning would be nonsensical because it does not match with our Soldiers’ lived experience. To combat this, and in contrast to most conventional infantry companies, CinC opted for a much different cognitive narrative, one that focused on taking pride in mastering all the tasks asked of us to perform.
I’ve noticed that leaders often fail to provide a narrative that resonates with the experience of junior service members. For example, I witnessed firsthand a senior leader tell a junior Soldier that their failure to adhere to the unit’s staff duty standard operating procedure was the reason why the United States was going to lose in an upcoming conflict with China. Although the leader attempted to provide meaning through explaining the significance and purpose of the Soldier’s task to the bigger picture, they failed to demonstrate how there was any sort of reasonable connection between the two. The seemingly non-existent relationship between staff duty responsibilities and success in great power conflict fails to meet the Soldier’s reasonable expectation that their actions would have a tangible result and thus, precluding any sense of coherence.
Significance
Often, leaders struggle to properly explain the significance of their Soldiers’ actions. If they do, they often do so in a nebulous or fanciful way that does not impress these young men and women. Leaders–especially those in a non-wartime environment–have always had this challenge, but as the demographics of the all-volunteer force change, explaining significance is of more consequence than ever before. New research demonstrates that Gen Z workers care less about salary and tangible rewards and more about doing work that they believe to be impactful and important. As more of the force, especially initial entry Soldiers, is comprised of Gen Z, a leader’s ability to convey the significance of their 9-month rotation to the Korean Peninsula, their Combat Training Center rotation, or their precision in a military ceremony becomes an essential tool at a leader’s disposal to create meaning in their Soldier’s military experience.
Each year since 1961, the Military District of Washington puts on a military performance called Twilight Tattoo, in which CinC Soldiers perform as actors that tell the Army’s story to the American public. During basic training, spending hours in the heat conducting rehearsals and memorizing lines is certainly not how these Soldiers imagined they would spend their time in the Army. This could easily lead to a loss of significance.
To remedy this, we emphasized the importance of crowd interactions after events that are open to the public, usually with middle and highschoolers who attend the performances. Instead of just telling Soldiers these shows were important “to tell the Army’s story”, we opted for an approach that highlighted that these shows are most likely the only time the average person interacts with Army Soldiers and that these meetings have the chance to make someone’s day or their vacation to D.C. After explaining the deeper significance of their interaction, I saw my Soldiers’ performance and also their individual job satisfaction improve dramatically. During these conversations, I would see junior Soldiers who were otherwise reserved and quiet confidently explaining their job in the Army, posing for pictures, and answering the public’s wide variety of questions. Once, I heard a junior specialist in my platoon, who often struggled with and complained about the mission set, expertly explain with enthusiasm to a captivated group of middle schoolers all about the history of our unit, its uniforms, and our tactics.
Closing with Purpose
For CinC, the purpose we preached was to be experts in the myriad of tasks that we were asked to perform. Those who came to believe the narratives that what the unit did had significance and that their actions would have tangible outcomes were also the ones who most readily accepted that our purpose was expertise. I found it no coincidence that the Soldiers who were the most proficient in their drill and ceremony and who demanded that others in their formation maintain that standard of expertise were the ones who were more successful when it came time to earn the Expert Infantry Badge. Their belief that their purpose was to be an expert drove them to success in all areas.
In the military context, leaders often start at purpose and neglect to establish the first two principles of meaning. By doing so, the connection between the purpose provided and the “so what” that Soldiers ask themselves can often be severed. Only after a leader establishes a coherent narrative and then explains the significance of why success matters can they then provide purpose and direction. Purpose is the component of meaning that is most closely associated with the traditional, doctrinal version of leadership. It focuses on setting goals to achieve a desired future endstate. When a leader includes coherence and significance, the purpose provided seems less like an arbitrary, external motivator and more of a commonly shared direction the organization is striving to achieve.
Often, we are told as leaders to explain to our subordinates why they must complete a task, especially ones that seem unenjoyable or tedious. Leaders are told to “start with why” or, from a doctrinal perspective, give commander’s intent, endstate, or purpose. What’s often missing in the day-to-day slog for junior enlisted Soldiers is the “so what” behind the things we ask them to do. Through providing a coherent, no “B.S.” narrative that explains the significance, and purpose of their experience, leaders create a virtuous cycle that can result in Soldiers with increased job and life satisfaction. As the Army continues to attempt to solve its recruiting and retention crisis, leaders who can help Soldiers find meaning through their military experience, no matter what it is, can create an environment that yields numerous benefits to include personal wellness, job satisfaction, and organizational success.
Thomas Montano is a Captain and infantry officer currently serving as a staff officer in the 3d United States Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard). He previously served as a Platoon Leader, Company Executive Officer, and Battalion Staff Officer in 1-77AR 3/1 Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas.
