Good news for America’s intelligence professionals and military forces: USCENTCOM didn’t manipulate intelligence in order to present a rosy picture of successes and progress fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). That’s according to a 200-page report issued by the Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG). The report is nearly 500 pages long.
If you’re interested in organizational leadership at all, it’s truly a valuable piece of work shedding light not just on the findings themselves, but on the entire intelligence gathering, analysis, reporting process and the CENTCOM intelligence apparatus. There’s a tremendous amount to learn in the report. One topic stands out, however: communications.
So what went wrong? According to the DoD IG report, the biggest problem was command climate. It’s easy to imagine how a poor command climate can affect the readiness of combat arms organizations, but leadership failures have equally devastating effects on supporting organizations, which of course bleed over to those being supported, the customer.
According to the report, new CENTCOM J2 leadership Army Maj. Gen. Steven Grove and Vice Director of Intelligence Gregory Ryckman “inherited a difficult command climate . . . .” Ultimately, Grove and Ryckman took some positive steps that, over time, improved command climate, something neither easy nor quick to change.
It’s apparent that communications failures are largely to blame for the debilitating command climate and, thus, a good deal of the problems. That’s not surprising. The CCJ2 was enduring “a stressful environment, a rapid pace of work, workforce reductions, crisis production, and an ambiguous relationship with DIA intelligence analysts assigned to the combatant command.” To survive in that sort of atmosphere, organizations have to have strong, trusted, candid, tactful communications processes; otherwise, very quickly rumors augmented by paranoia run rampant. Organizations divide into tribes and cliques. And trust among colleagues collapses. Suddenly, everything is a conspiracy meant to undermine the most noble efforts.
In best IG style, the report offers nearly 30 recommendations for better organizational communications and processes, and they’re all well-worth reading, no matter how large or small your organization is. The report discusses with examples and before and after characterizations topics like feedback and follow-up, review processes, organizational identity, the effects of organizational changes, and more. Any leader, indeed, any employee, can glean a great deal of wisdom and perspective from this IG report.