What Does a Big Institution Do to the People Inside It?

TL;DR: A retired Army lieutenant colonel argues that the worst damage to an institution is what happens to trust when the rules for getting ahead change. You can see the same thing at any big employer, and you can protect yourself without waiting for it to get fixed.

Matthew Robinson went into the Army in 1981 as a private, did basic at Fort Leonard Wood, took his commission in 1988 and retired a lieutenant colonel in 2010. He writes at Fragmentary Orders, and his post Institutional Damage is partly an argument about current Pentagon leadership. I’m not refereeing that fight. The part worth your time is the thing underneath it, because the same thing lives inside a hospital system, a school district, a Fortune 500 and a federal agency, and it gets sick the same way in all of them.

What makes an institution worth working in?

Robinson joined an Army still crawling out of what he calls “the disorderly drug and alcohol drenched years.” What got built out of that wreck was a deal. “Promotion depended upon a demonstrated ability to operate at the next higher rank,” he writes. A lieutenant got to be a captain by already making captain-level calls. “Performance outweighed race and connections.” He doesn’t claim it was clean. He says soldiers had ways to seek redress when they ran into prejudice, and that the Army stayed apolitical the whole time he was in it.

Look at what that deal buys the kid at the bottom. A 22-year-old with no money and no connections can do the math on his own future. Show the skill, move up.

Nobody has to like you.

Nobody has to know your uncle.

Every big outfit runs on some version of that deal, written down or not. People eat low pay, shit hours and paperwork that would bore a tax attorney, because the ladder is believable. Take the ladder away and they’re just eating it.

Robinson names three harms

Robinson names three harms. Take the uniform off them and they describe any shop that’s been through a bad reorg.

Lost experience. When senior people get shoved out, what they knew walks out the door with them. Nobody wrote it down. The people were the writing.

Promotion tied to conformity. Once getting ahead depends on fitting the current mood instead of doing the job, the smart ones notice in about a week. They stop telling the truth upward. They start guessing what the boss wants to hear, and the boss, who also wants to get promoted, starts guessing what his boss wants to hear, and so on up the chain until the whole building is people nodding at each other and nobody has looked hard at the actual work since the last reorg.

Eroded trust. The trust goes next, Robinson says: in peers, in leaders, in the system itself. His sharpest line is about the voting booth. A soldier now has to wonder, he writes, whether the command “will extract some sort of punishment for pulling the wrong lever.” Sit with that one. You don’t have to share his politics to recognize the feeling. It’s the moment people quit managing the work and start managing how they look, and the work goes to hell while everybody’s busy.

He’s fair about it, too. He grants that politics has always had a hand in picking generals. His complaint is size. “I never witnessed such a wholesale reordering, especially one done on such diaphanous grounds.” Diaphanous. A man who started out as a private, reaching for a word that means see-through fabric. You don’t pick a word that careful unless you’ve been mad about something for a while.

What can a reader inside any institution do with this?

I wasn’t in his Army, and I won’t speak for anybody who was. What I can do is carry what he wrote down to the person two or three levels below the decisions, the one who finds out about the reorg from a calendar invite.

Know which deal you’re actually on. Forget the handbook. What got the last three people promoted where you work? If that answer changed in the last few years, your plan should have changed with it.

Write down what you know. If experience is the first thing an institution burns, your knowledge is only safe once it lives somewhere besides your head. Your own notes and files. The phone numbers of the people who actually fix things. That makes you portable, which is the point.

Keep a skill the institution didn’t hand you. The Army gives a soldier a rank, and the rank only means something inside the Army. A skill means something in the parking lot. You want both, and you want to know which one is holding your weight.

Don’t confuse the institution with the work. Robinson gave the Army twenty-nine years and he plainly still cares about it. Caring about it and leaning on it are different things. You can do the work well for the people who depend on you and still keep a lifeboat in the garage.

People who work for themselves build small institutions too

Because a lot of us left an institution to get away from exactly this, then built a smaller one around ourselves without noticing. A platform that rewrites its rules overnight. A client who pays for agreement. An audience that punishes the truth. Same deal, smaller building, and the person at the bottom of the ladder is you.

The cheapest protection hasn’t changed. Your own list, your own site, and what you know written down somewhere nobody else can delete it.

Robinson left in 2010 and he’s still writing about the place. Somewhere at Fort Leonard Wood this week there’s a private doing the same math he did in 1981. Show the skill, move up. Nobody’s told the kid yet which lever counts.