For my federal folks in particular, we’ve entered into another fiscal year.
With just a few hours to spare, Congress managed to squeeze out a continuing resolution, so we’re all still employed and enjoying our regular pay – for now. By the time I post(ed) this, about two weeks remain until the peak of the next wave of congressional uncertainty…
This blog persists without regard to congressional funding, so this month’s post is on Professional Pacing.
While this blog series is from the perspective of an Air Force officer, I still try to keep in mind that the audience is not limited to only military members. That said, the approach I’d like to take with this post examines expectations of progression for an individual.
“Expectations” is the key word.
I get the sense that many people feel overwhelming pressure to be further along in their careers than they currently are. While there are plenty of examples of people doing exceptionally well, there are so many untold or unrecorded stories of people more moderately progressing through their careers that are also important to frame our expectations.
I know I’ve been in a rush to grow up (read: I’m guilty of enduring the feeling I’m trying to assuage in this post), but every once in a while throughout my career, I can take a moment to pause and appreciate that some things need the time to be taken. Hopefully this post serves as either a first-time notice or as a reminder that life happens at a rate of one second per second and not everything is as urgent as we sometimes are convinced it is.
Framing
For this post, I’m going to frame expectations using three concepts from the book, Turn the Ship Around! by retired Navy captain L. David Marquet.
The three concepts are:
Competency: Simplified, an individual’s skill level with regard to tasks.
Control: An individual’s agency; their ability to influence others to act in a desired way
Clarity: An individual’s understanding of their organizational goals.
I’m also going to frame using levels: Entry, Early, Middle, Adept, and Expert.
A final note before getting into the meat of this post, this is all heavily generalized.
Entry
At the Entry level, people have more enthusiasm than understanding about anything involving anything. Entry level employees are not expected to have much – if any – competence, control, or clarity.
The primary functions of an Entry-level person include training, helping, and asking questions.
When I first entered the military, it was through the enlisted corps’ Basic Military Training. The concept of this training is initially to ‘break you down’ before ‘building you up.’ Agency (or control) was basically zero or merely through extension of the relevant training instructor’s given control. Competence was intentionally reduced to zero in order to establish a sort of ‘fresh’ slate of specific competence. Nothing you did from your own thinking was correct; you did things the way they were taught or you were wrong. Clarity might be less than zero, but all focus is on surviving the present, so there is little to no time to consider why anything was the way it was.
While non-military experiences are likely less extreme, it makes enough sense for the Entry level individual to be taught ‘the way we do things around here’ and understand who is in charge. At this level, though, it is less likely that people ask why any of the things are done.
The Entry level stage can last anywhere from six months up to two years.
Early
At the Early level, individuals have had enough time to develop a little bit of competence, may or may not have gained any clarity, and may have developed some informal control/ influence but likely not much formal control.
The primary function of an Early level person is to complete given tasks at a tactical or operational level with little guidance. Chances are good that there will be ‘enough’ oversight to ensure that work is satisfactory.
While I was enlisted in the Reserves, I spent most of my time supporting my boss, continuing to attend training, and taking care of simpler jobs on my own. Even with some more complicated work that I could do alone, a supervisor was required to double check my work to make sure I had done it correctly. I couldn’t really direct anyone but airmen junior to myself aside from safety concerns, and even then, it was for very simple things. The impact of the work we did was also only sometimes apparent. I understood that our work enabled aircraft to return to service between flights, but why that was important was less obvious to me at the time – and I don’t know that I cared too much.
As I neared the enlisted middle tier, I slowly began to pick up additional types of work: post-job analyses, summarizations of work done during weekends, occasionally sitting in on post-flight debriefs, and distributing expectations (from my supervisor) for our team during the weekend.
As an Early level officer, control is much higher, but it’s my experience that your level of competence and clarity vastly enhances your ability to understand (and less likely to abuse despite being way more able to abuse) your control. It pays to be curious and ask a lot more questions to gain that clarity than to try exerting your control in this phase of professional progress.
In the Air Force, this Early tier lasts between eighteen months and five years for enlisted personnel, and two to six years for officers.
Middle
At the Mid level, an individual’s level of technical competence is likely to be as high as it can be on average. Control is likely enough to act fairly independently within your own team. Clarity is also likely high enough to support understanding what teams need to be engaged without directions to do so from higher supervision.
The primary functions of a Middle level person may involve training Entry and Early level people, executing daily operations, and likely specializing in either competence or clarity. If you are in a more technical role, your competence becomes your primary focus, while managerial roles require a greater focus on clarity.
I entered the Middle enlisted tier about a year before commissioning into active duty. While I still attended refresher training annually, I spent most of my weekend duty time as a Staff Sergeant doing the work we were assigned to do and helping to run my supervisor’s team as an extra brain that had a decent understanding of what we were trying to accomplish even when he might not have been on hand for direction.
I’m not quite in the middle of the officer tier, yet, but the closer I get, the more I can see how intensely the non-technical demand for competency (mostly soft skills and integrating varied teams) will impact my ability to continue progressing professionally.
The Air Force enlisted middle tier sits between 4 and 14 years (early E-5 to average E-7 pin on), while the officer middle tier sits between 4 and 10 years (earliest O-3 to earliest O-4). Note that the earliest an enlisted member can swear in is at age 18, while the youngest officer must have completed college (21 if they’re on the younger end, but typically 22. Since I was prior enlisted, I commissioned a bit older at 26).
Adept
At the Adept level, a professional has maxed out their expectations for competency. They can learn new things, but as far as everything they ‘ought’ to know? Adepts know it. Clarity is high, but clarity is not necessarily what an Adept is primarily valued for. Regardless of the Adept’s understanding of Why something needs to get done, they know How and What to do. Generally, they are given the control and independence to do what needs to be done.
The Adepts in your workplaces have seen a full cycle of an office/ workforce generation and understand what the impacts of organizational change have been. They have seen entire teams rotate and have a sense as to why, but are not necessarily inclined to care unless trends emerge that tip them off to history’s threat to repeat itself.
Adepts, much like the Middle tier, are responsible for daily operations but also guide the efficiency of operations. They may be either or both a forcing and directing hand in the strategy of their organization.
While I have not yet entered this level in my professional life, I can look back to my tournament organization days for samples. After hosting small-scale tournaments for nearly four years, I pretty much understood everything there was to understand about doing so, but there was nothing for me to improve upon within the realm of strict tournament organization. The only way I could progress was horizontally via recruiting more tournament participants – scaling up from local to regional. Doing so would have increased the floor of necessary skills to be minimally viable as a regional tournament organizer.
The Adept tier depends much more on the work you do. Within the Air Force, most early Adepts will appear on the backend of the Middle tier, perhaps around eight to 12 years. However, Adepts can span from 8 to 16 years. This latter number is the time of service most Air Force E-7s, E-8s, and junior O-5s have.
Expert
The Expert level has the highest likelihood of maxed out competency, control, and clarity. These individuals have the greatest grasp on their fields of work and are able to ask important questions that do not begin to have well understood – if any – answers.
Their primary functions tend to be of their own choice and they often command the pay or other compensation to reflect it. In an organization, they are chief officers and final/ required signatories on critical documents. They may be instructors, but more likely, they are strategists. Where the Adept may or may not have vectored an organization’s strategy, Experts certainly define that strategy. The question with Experts is not “how hard?” nor “in what direction?” but rather “to what end?”
Unlike the Adept, the Expert’s clarity demonstrates a next level of holistic perspective that ties the applications of multiple disciplines together, either directly from a single individual’s fount of knowledge or indirectly through a network of Adepts and Experts.
Experts can do what the Adepts or lower levels can do (and likely faster or more efficiently), but their time and energy is much better invested in those difficult, usually strategic tasks.
Experts can emerge early, but time and experience often serve to produce better Experts. While a Staff Sergeant or junior Captain may demonstrate incredible and unique competence, they are not as likely to have the breadth of experience to share high levels of clarity. The term “idiot savant” comes to mind.
Experts in the Air Force appear throughout E-7 up and O-4 up, ranging from 12 to 20 years.
Live Life at Your Pace
I hope this generalized post can provide some relief in those that often put too much pressure on themselves.
We all can only progress through life at one second per second (please keep any comments on the theory of relativity to yourself!) and that includes professional progression. While there is always cause to enhance your progress, my point is not to beat yourself up for establishing unreasonable standards for yourself.
Manage your expectations well and you can keep your own stress level down and easily manageable.
72 Airman's Writings 