Photo By Eric Pilgrim | Representatives from several different military and corporate organizations listen and...... read more read more
FORT KNOX, Ky. — Four years in, the Command Assessment Program has been garnering a who’s who of interest from among military and corporate giants.
During an Oct. 5 visit to Fort Knox, representatives from Space Force, the Air Force, the British Army, and several corporations that included Google and Amazon sat in a room at Fort Knox to learn about some of the psychology behind the Army’s senior leader selection process.
From the start, the heart of the program has been about the psychology, what Col. Bob O’Brien, executive director of the U.S. Army Command Assessment Program, calls a deep dive into the leadership mindset and capability of each officer vying for key command positions. While that remains the main fixture year after year, the program proves flexible enough to adapt.
“CAP is very much moving in the right direction,” said O’Brien. “The interesting thing about CAP is, no single CAP has ever been the same as the last. What’s really neat about this job is our whole team is able to move very nimbly to make adjustments and refine the system based on lessons learned.
“We seek input from every single person we come into contact with – our candidates, our general officers that come through to vote, from the field at large and from our cadre.”
The cadre consists of 482 Soldiers from around the Army who lead the assessments and, according to O’Brien, work to provide fair and consistent support.
O’Brien understands the intent of CAP better than most. He has been with the Army Talent Management Task Force for the last five years and has been involved in every CAP at Fort Knox since its inception, to include all of the pilot programs. He has held his current position for three years.
This is the first year a general officer was not appointed as the senior leader over CAP, which now makes O’Brien the senior leader.
“The program is well established,” said O’Brien. “It belongs to the Chief of Staff of the Army, and I think he was comfortable with the team that we’ve got and that we’re ready for the challenge.”
True to CAP’s flexibility, O’Brien said this year is no different.
After last year’s CAP, leaders recognized that much of the work of selection for attendance could be streamlined and performed using automation. So, Maj. Tom Maleiko, from U.S. Army Human Resources Command, developed an algorithm that does just that.
“The lieutenant colonels got invited to [Battalion] CAP using an algorithm that went in and looked at their personnel files and provided us a recommendation for who ought to be invited to BCAP,” said O’Brien. “In previous years we’ve used results of the Centralized Selection List board to build that invitation.”
The CSL, or command board, has a long history with leadership selections.
According to O’Brien, the board consisted of senior leaders who gathered each year to look at a candidate’s digital file, which contained past performance evaluations as well as an official picture of the individual. The file also contained a one-page administrative data sheet highlighting their past positions, deployments and other information.
“Each individual on the board would spend on average about two minutes or less reviewing a file and make a very important decision on behalf of the Army about that individual, whether he or she was going to be a commander or not,” said O’Brien.
O’Brien said the algorithm looks at the same information, minus the official photo, and makes a recommendation based on the same criteria. During tests, O’Brien and others decided not to leave the algorithmic recommendations to chance.
“We ran it through several checks to make sure we got the right people,” said O’Brien. “In one case, there was somebody that the algorithm did not look at that it should have looked at, and we added that person to the list.”
O’Brien said they then added an extra step to ensure every officer would have the opportunity to compete who wanted to.
“Because it was an algorithm that looked at the files, we offered candidates the opportunity to walk on,” said O’Brien. “If they could get an endorsement from a three-star general, submitted to the [U.S. Army Human Resources Command] commander, then we invited those candidates as well.”
Eighteen officers took advantage of the offering.
“That tells us our candidate pool using that algorithmic scrape was pretty accurate,” said O’Brien.
The other big change this year was to shift the CSL board meeting, previously on the front end of selections, and rename it a Job Performance Panel, or JPP, on the back end.
“That Job Performance Panel for the Army competitive-category leaders has the responsibility for establishing the Order of Merit List for the Centralized Selection List, which is different than in previous years,” said O’Brien. “In previous years, the CSL board provided a past performance score, and we added four additional scores to that performance score for a five-variable equation that calculated the order of merit score.”
O’Brien said the JPP this year will provide the scoring for the competitive-category Order of Merit List.
All of this happens very quickly, said O’Brien, because candidates will find out on site whether they have been certified to then later be placed on the OML for command positions.
“This is the first time they will walk away from CAP knowing exactly where they stand,” said O’Brien. “Then only the certified candidates will move forward into that phase of the Job Performance Panel.”
O’Brien said the responsibility to look candidates in the eye each night and tell them they are not yet certified falls to him and Col. Townley Hedrick, the CAP deputy chief of staff.
However, not making the certified list based on failing the height and weight standards, failing the Army Combat Fitness Test, or getting voted “Not Yet Certified” by a panel of senior leaders doesn’t mean candidates can never hold a command position.
“It’s not the end of the road for them,” said O’Brien. “That will only pull them out of eligibility for this fiscal year’s list. CAP is a very redemptive system, and we’ve got a very high rate of success.”
Of the candidates who receive news that they are not yet certified and choose to recompete, about 75% of the time they earn certification the next season.
O’Brien said a key reason for the high success rate is because of CAP’s feedback loop, which informs officers in detail why they did or didn’t make certification, and even how well they did compared to their peers. This information helps prepare them for future commands.
“When I was selected for battalion and brigade level command, nobody ever told me where I actually stood and what people were looking at. I had peers who didn’t make the list, and nobody could ever tell them, ‘This is why you did not make the list,’” said O’Brien. “CAP gives us the ability to understand people in a very detailed manner, and we’ve got an ever-improving feedback loop to help candidates understand themselves and build themselves a developmental plan so that they can achieve whatever they want to achieve.”
The growing success rate and in-depth analysis of individual leadership continues turning heads.
| Date Taken: | 10.17.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 10.17.2023 10:16 |
| Story ID: | 455951 |
| Location: | FORT KNOX, KY, US |
| Web Views: | 564 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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