Mission Critical. Michael Abrams
and Stalling Out
One evening, Robert* received a call from the chairman’s office at his employer—a major, publicly traded conglomerate. The chairman was hosting a dinner for returned veterans, a rare opportunity others would eagerly accept, but Robert had recently returned from a tour overseas as part of the reserves and was feeling drained at work and at home. He had been working for the company at the same level for seven years, and yet Robert found himself a fish out of water upon his return, focused more on his family than on work that he found unstimulating. Most employees would leap at the opportunity to gain visibility with their company’s chairman. Not Robert. “I know I could do really well three levels up from where I am, and the same is true for many of my veteran colleagues,” he says. “But I’d stopped taking an upwardly mobile posture. I had just reoriented to anticipate spending time with my family and going fishing on the weekends, instead of looking forward to my daily work. I didn’t understand that I could move up at work and still enjoy my life.”
He politely declined the invitation to the chairman’s dinner, accepting only after some coaxing from his team. The result? Robert found himself in charge of the new veterans employee resource group (ERG), the biggest leadership role he’d taken in the company, and he has since been promoted. The dinner jolted Robert out of complacency in the company and handed him an outlet for his leadership abilities. But it took some serious pressure from his manager to get Robert to the dinner, and few veterans have that kind of impetus in the civilian workplace.
Robert’s reluctance to grab visibility or advocate for himself illustrates a phenomenon we charted among a majority of veterans: that once in the door, 57 percent of our survey respondents report no aspirations to rise above the positions they currently hold, despite the high rates of ambition among vets. Like Robert, many interviewees and focus group participants report that, instead of focusing on upward mobility in their professions, they keep their heads down at work. They tell us they look elsewhere for fulfillment and a sense of accomplishment, whether in their family life, their involvement in religious or civic communities, or service organizations. One veteran, who has two young kids and has been deployed five times, tells us, “I could easily do the next ten years in my current position because, if I signed up to be a vice president, I’m not sure what impact that would have on my outside life. My first priority right now is my family and making sure I connect with them, after putting them through so much over the course of my military service.”
Among the remaining 43 percent of veterans who aspire to a more senior position, fully 39 percent report feeling stalled in their careers. “I love my corporate team, which is why I’ve been okay as an individual contributor as long as I have,” says John,* a former US Army officer who commanded a company of 141 soldiers during his time in the military. “But I don’t know when they expect me to move—they haven’t asked me yet.”
Because the military provides clear pathways of progression for those who enlist and for early-career officers, with regular promotions every two years, corporate hierarchies look like a maze to nearly all of the veterans we interviewed. Additionally, those accustomed to receiving orders from higher-ranking officials, and responding to them with swift action, await clear direction both in terms of their career and project goals.
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