Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Q:
What were your duties in that position?
A:
The assignment duties for anybody in officer assignments are much the same from the
standpoint of being interested in career development, taking care of the person, putting the
"P" in personnel, so to speak; managing requirements, fitting the right person to the right job,
and making the whole personnel reassignment system work.
This also has to do with being able to build and have data and people's records at your
fingertips, plus a lot of time on the telephone in dialoguing with people, plus doing your own
analysis trying to figure out who the right person is for the right job.
Then there was the nonroutine, when something happened, and that happened a lot, where
somebody might be relieved or somebody got ill or was in an accident or the things that
cause a person to be curtailed, to go off to school or selection for a certain nominative job.
When any of those kinds of things come up--then you have to break the routine and go
address that situation. Then there are ripple effects back on the rest of the system.
Now those duties are shared by everyone, whether assigning lieutenants, captains, majors,
lieutenant colonels, or colonels. The farther you go up the ladder, the smaller the number of
folks you manage. So, in the Colonels Division, very specifically, we were talking about 300
engineer colonels. I was their personnel manager, and that's a rather small sample compared
to many others.
I was a lieutenant colonel at the time, so unlike many places where you have a major
handling a major or a lieutenant colonel handling a major, here was a lieutenant colonel
handling colonels.
That was done by design. The idea was that the colonel in the United States Army is a very
important person, has risen up high in rank to where most folks finish their careers. The idea
was that they wanted the colonels to be given a personal touch as far as addressing their
personnel actions. Very definitely the Army did not want them to be treated like "part of the
pack," as in "all lieutenants are going to have to do this."
At the end of 19, 20 to 30 years of service, first of all, there's not much more development
that takes place. People all still do develop individually, but basically formal education
development has been completed and it is now the period of maximum contribution.
There aren't many colonels, so most of them are in very responsible charge and by
themselves, so they are the senior executives of the Army. By that token the system--the
Army--wanted them to feel very personally taken care of by the system. So, all of the
assignment officers, except for the Chief of the Colonels Division, were lieutenant colonels.
Our business was still really one of matching the right person to the job, but there was a lot
more dialogue and a lot more interaction, almost like somebody who works at a headhunter
agency, who is working for the firm and for the individual too, trying to make a match. You
really have to convince both of them that it's the right kind of assignment.
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