Thoughts on leadership


Matt Baker
Commander, U.S. Coast Guard


Why diversity is an operational necessity

In late August of 2017 I found myself in an incident command post in Port Arthur, Texas, about 80 miles east of Houston. Hurricane Harvey had just unleased over 40 inches of rain on the area and most of Port Arthur was still under several feet of water. I was assigned to lead Coast Guard marine environmental response work. Home to the largest oil refinery in North America, Port Arthur was at risk of an environmental catastrophe. The team working on this mission included Coast Guard people from the local Marine Safety Unit, others surged in from other parts of the country, and state pollution responders from the Texas General Land Office (TGLO). As the flood waters receded, we sent responders into the field to scout for any signs of pollution.

In an effort to form a cohesive unit from the available responders, I split them into three teams, each with local and deployed Coast Guard people and TGLO people. By mixing the teams, each was armed with both federal and state authorities and had at least one person familiar with the local area. Thanks to great work by the logistics section, we had three federal government four-wheel drive SUVs to drive out into the flooded streets of Port Arthur. Three balanced teams, three SUVs, perfect. I thought this was a great plan.

The lead TGLO responder disagreed with the plan as soon as I briefed it. He said he didn’t feel safe going out into the floodwater in a federal government vehicle. I tried to assure him that our Chevy Tahoes were capable. He was insistent, stating that the TGLO people would only go in the field in their TGLO pickup trucks. I was a bit taken aback but he was completely serious. Unwilling to delay our work over a vehicular disagreement, I re-racked the responders into smaller teams that would fit in the TGLO pickups and sent them out the door. The federal Tahoes sat in the parking lot.

Later that day, a Coast Guard pollution response expert from a special unit reported into the incident command post and was assigned as my deputy. I was grateful to have his expertise on the team. He was far more experienced with pollution response than me and he was eager to get to work. We started planning what we would need for longer term response operations.

The next morning, I had a chance to do an overflight of the area on a Navy helicopter. The flight revealed no signs of a major oil spill, but I did get a sobering view of the devastated neighborhoods, some still under water. Where the flood had receded, I saw houses with piles of furniture, carpet, and ruined drywall stacked in the front yard as Texans started to dig out.

I was away from the command post for two hours. When I returned my deputy was nowhere to be found. My supervisor found me and explained that he had been fired while I was in the air.

While I was away, and without telling me he was going to do it, he had arranged a meeting with TGLO leaders to discuss shifting from post-storm response operations to the long-term environmental recovery mission. He wanted to start that work the next day. The Texas officials wanted to wait three days in order to give their people time to tend to their own homes and families. I don’t know exactly what he said, but my deputy apparently told the Texans the Coast Guard was starting the next day whether they liked it or not.

They certainly did not like it. A phone call was made to the Coast Guard higher headquarters in Houston. Shortly thereafter my deputy was told to pack his stuff and leave.

What does this story have to do with diversity?

The Coast Guard, like most other organizations, exists to serve people. Our customers are all the people that live or work on or near the water. Our partners are the federal, state or local government agencies that share the same responsibility. As a national organization connected to the world by the ocean, we engage with people from all parts of the United States and many other nations. Those people bring their own cultures and ideas with them. Our ability to succeed in our missions is dependent on our ability to successfully engage with all those people.

As I’ve discussed previously, successful engagement with all kinds of different people demands high level interpersonal skills. Successful operational leaders need to be deliberate about engaging with everyone, they must seek to reach individuals with the approach that works best for them, and they must remain curious about the people they engage with. My Port Arthur deputy wasn’t fired for a lack of technical skill. He was fired because he demonstrated a lack of empathy for people whose situation he didn’t seek to understand. Until we could overcome that interagency setback with the TGLO, Coast Guard operations were hampered by a lack of inclusive leadership skill.

We will engage with customers and partners the exact same way we engage with each other

Successful operations require leaders that can successfully engage with anyone. Diversity within an organization is an absolute necessity for people to develop those skills. The reason why can be found in the organization’s culture.

An organization’s culture is the set of values, traditions, and expected behaviors that are formally or informally taught to every member of the organization. The organization’s culture is hugely influential on its people’s behavior, usually more influential than top-level policy or senior leaders. If undesirable behaviors become part of the organizational culture, it can be very difficult to uproot them.

The organizational culture drives people’s behavior inside the organization, but even more importantly, it drives their behavior outside the organization as well. Whether leaders like it or not, people form habits through their interaction with coworkers. Those habits will carry over when members of the organization go out and face customers or partners. If operational success is dependent on demonstrating inclusive leadership behaviors with all kinds of different people outside the organization, it must have an inclusive culture on the inside.

The only way to build that culture is to recruit a diverse workforce so that everyone is exposed to people different from them on a daily basis. Members of a homogenous organization never develop the ability to work with different people. When they are put to the test in operations that require serving or working alongside people who are different, they will fail.

A diverse workforce prepares people to be operationally successful by working with anyone

I’ve heard many justifications for improving diversity in an organization, but I think they’ve all been incomplete. Diversity is not about merely having people of varying backgrounds in the room. The real operational necessity of diversity is the learning that happens only when people are exposed to other people who are different.

A diverse workforce teaches itself about all the different people it includes. We may not be able to hand-select an all-Texan team to respond to a disaster in Houston, but if we have Texans around all the time, their culture, experiences and perspectives can rub off on everyone else. Everyone else will be better prepared to work in Houston because they known someone from Houston.

Most importantly, the learning process that spreads awareness of other cultures and perspectives as people mingle also teaches people how to learn about different people. It teaches people that difference is not something to fear. It gives people the experience of being surprised by others as they get to know them. Those experiences form habits of curiosity and empathy that build an inclusive culture. With that culture in place, members of the organization will be well prepared to act inclusively when they need to work with new or different people.

That’s how it worked for me. I’m from Connecticut, but from 2004-2006 I worked very closely with several people from Texas. We were very different, but we learned from each other and made it work. I can’t be sure that in 2017, when my TGLO colleague insisted on traveling only in a TGLO pickup, I understood I needed to go with that plan because more than ten years earlier I had built relationships with people from Texas. I didn’t think back to 2004 when I was confronted with that leadership challenge. But I’m convinced that my experience working with people different from me throughout my entire career taught me to hear people out, refrain from judging their perspective, and meet them where they’re comfortable in order to get the job done.

Diversity is an operational necessity. Without it, any organization is doomed to fail as soon as it is faced with something, or someone, different.

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