Bad Duty

Last week I saw a tweet that made me recall a Coast Guard unit I’d heard about years ago, and haven’t thought about much since. The location of the station was bad, but it was a bad station for a lot of reasons unrelated to location. It made me think in real terms, not from a leadership and management textbook, about how we can help our teams get through all kinds of "bad duties".

I would read the hell out of soldiers' anonymous ranking of all the major military bases like the NFLPA does for football teams https://t.co/s5ioRv2O6X

— Aaron (@BobbyBigWheel) April 6, 2023

That tweet was in response to a TikTok of an Air Force member reacting to getting orders to Minot Air Force Base, which apparently is not exactly a sought after location. For those that might not know, in a previous life I was in the Coast Guard. One of the many draws of the Coast Guard, as compared to other services, is that there are not many bad places to get stationed. Sure, some places are better than others, but the nature of the service typically puts you close to water, and there are a lot of cool places along the US coastline. At my first unit, though, I was stationed with someone who had experienced probably the worst unit I’d ever heard of, in any service. He started his career at Casco Cove Coast Guard Station, also known as LORAN Station Attu on Attu island in Alaska.

Attu is as remote as it gets, it’s at the very end of the Aleutian Islands, far closer to Russian than it is to Anchorage, which, if I recall, is where those stationed on Attu flew in from.

There was a Navy presence there for some time, but as far as I know, by the mid 00’s it was just the Coast Guard unit. Attu’s biggest claim to modern fame is as the site of the only land battle on US soil in WWII. The island’s only points of interest are the remnants from the WWII Aleutian Island campaign, and wreckage from pilots and mariners who had the misfortune of trying to approach the island in bad weather (also the weather is always bad).

I’m sure it’s an interesting place to visit for WWII hobbyists, Arctic explorers, and general adventurers, but it was a crummy place to get stationed to say the least.

The Coast Guard knew this, and threw in a few perks for people stationed there. Members received isolated duty pay, and the unit required all members stationed there to take a couple weeks of rest and relaxation away from the unit every six months. The isolated duty pay was a good chunk of change for a CG member, but I don’t think the average person would take the deal if they could do their day jobs on Attu for that extra pay. The R&R leave was there purely to avoid driving those stationed on Attu to insanity. Attu was an infamous place, rife with bad, sometimes illegal, behavior. Most people at the unit did not request to be stationed there, so the unit was full of people who wanted out ASAP, and who were constantly looking for “critical fill” opportunities at other units so they could end their misery. Those that did seek it out tended to have “interesting” personality types that sought the isolation.

The unit was responsible for running and maintaining a component of the LORAN navigation system. GPS came about in the 1980s and 90s and the equipment required to run GPS quickly became cheaper than LORAN equipment and made LORAN obsolete, but the Coast Guard continued operating LORAN stations into the 2010s.

So not only was Attu a bleak, remote place to be stationed, the unit was responsible for maintaining a component of a navigation system that was no longer used by the vast majority of aircraft and ships. Insert your inspiring leader of choice, I'm fairly certain they wouldn't be equipped to keep up unit morale and effectiveness in a place like LORAN Station Attu. I think it’s illuminating that location wasn't the only major reason Attu was considered a bad duty station. The work itself was mostly useless and unrewarding, especially immediately prior to the station’s closure in 2010.

Lazily using a common trope voice: we all have our LORAN Station Attus in our own organizations, don’t we? Sure, you’re not sending people off to Siberia without their families, but there are tons of people in even the most cutting edge organizations that are doing mind-numbing, thankless tasks that keep the lights on in ways that are never fully appreciated by leaders. And let’s be honest, the occasional drive-by from the CEO saying how much they appreciate the work that you’re doing does not count as appreciation (in my view it's quite the opposite, but maybe that's the cynic in me). In my consulting career I had projects where:

• Analysts were manually copying data from scanned, sometimes handwritten legal invoices into spreadsheets in support of a project where we were trying to tie out the dollars and cents of already awarded legal damages
• Analysts were combing through invoices about the maintenance of assets temporarily taken over by a federal agency to look for extra expenses that violated one of a laundry list of policies in an effort to reclaim a tiny percentage of the money already paid out in reimbursements

Neither of those projects were fun (if you think they sound interesting I implore you to find some new hobbies), and neither of those projects got much more than a passing glance from senior leaders. They were revenue gravy trains, but they weren’t interesting at all, they didn’t provide development opportunities, and they weren’t part of the strategic plan for future work in the organization. The people that were working on those projects hated them, and they could not wait until they could move on to another work opportunity. There’s essentially nothing in the work of value to the workers, unless you’re one of the types that believes that employees need to do tedious work as a rite of passage.

These kinds of boring, thankless tasks often appear in what may be otherwise interesting jobs. It’s the person maintaining the servers that manually deletes and reloads critical data once a month because nobody has had the time or resources to automate the task or expand the storage to remove the need for the procedure. It’s the staffer diligently organizing and filing paperwork for the future audit that may never come. It's the bartenders and servers mopping up after a night's work, and making sure the cash and receipts tie out to the register. No matter how many times your leadership handbook tells you to articulate the value of the work to employees, and to make the employees feel valued, you can’t make these kinds of boring or repetitive tasks interesting enough to get serious continued buy-in from employees. Programming is often full of maintenance tasks that look like this, so I have a lot of experience doing tedious work and assigning it. I’ve also lost valuable employees to other opportunities because they disliked some of the tedium. This is bound to happen, you can't placate everyone, but I’ve found a few ways to help everyone get through the muck, and hopefully to keep your people from disengaging completely.

1. Acknowledge that the work you’re asking them to do sucks. Do it often. Even apologize for it.
2. Do not try to find a silver lining. The people working for you are smart, and they can tell if you went through some effort to invent a value proposition. Sometimes tasks simply suck, they know it, don’t patronize them.
3. Do some of the sucky work. Enough of it that it’s noticeable. You think you’ve already paid your dues? Doesn’t matter. If you’re telling people to do chores, you also need to do chores.
4. Give them a short-term out. If the task will exist in perpetuity, rotate the task to other team members. If the task can be automated away, invest in the automation. If the project is short term, pencil them in for the coolest future project you have on the books.
5. If it’s a compliance item, do not behave like the task is critical to the organization. They know the difference between box checking and value addition. Required != Critical.

This is not a required list or an exhaustive list. I know of many situations where 4 would not apply, for example. The one that almost always applies is 3. I'm sure you've heard some version of "this task is not a worthwhile use of my time" or "I'm too senior for this, my skillset is better used elsewhere". Maybe you've even said it yourself (I have definitely said some version of the first one). As I've grown in my career, though, I've realized it's always a cop out. You're never too senior or seasoned to be above the work that your team is doing, and you can always find a half hour to devote to getting your hands dirty.

One thing I really appreciated about the Coast Guard was that junior and senior people were all on the same page that “cleaning the unit toilet” was not a desirable or mission critical task. They didn’t try to pitch it as “an opportunity to improve workplace facilities”. We should apply the same thinking to all undesirable tasks, whether they involve a computer or not.