Intro
Ben Kohlmann is the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, a former F/A-18 carrier pilot, venture investor and was a key figure in the reindustrialization movement. I first met him in-person judging a defense tech hackathon aboard the USS Hornet in Oakland. I wanted to ask what someone with that background does when the job is to improve how a large institution finds, develops, and retains people.
When Ben took over personnel policy for the Department of the Navy, he asked questions you’d expect any new leader to ask: Who’s where? Which roles are short-staffed? Are the people we most want to keep choosing to stay?
The answers were scattered across 164 HR systems. Ben’s team eventually pulled together spreadsheets, but the exercise showed why getting a reliable view of the workforce had been so difficult. Individual systems had solved problems for the people who built them. None could show the whole department where its talent was going.
One example we discussed was promotion. A pilot might have valuable language, cyber, or intelligence skills, yet the standard aviation career path may give them few ways to use those skills and still advance. And when a promotion board reads an officer’s fitness reports, phrases that sound almost identical to an outsider can carry very different signals. Ben explains where software can help reviewers make sense of those records while leaving the decision with people.
Each layer of a hierarchy has to decide what’s worth passing up. That keeps leaders from drowning in information, but it can also mean the best idea never reaches the person who can act on it. Ben’s question is one any growing organization can ask: How do you preserve clear responsibility while still hearing from the people closest to the problem?
In this episode
The request for basic workforce numbers that exposed the cost of 164 separate HR systems.
Why traditional promotion paths can overlook people with skills the Navy needs.
What the Navy Innovation Unit could offer civilian specialists who want to serve for a period of time.
What fighter pilots’ debriefs can teach civilian leaders about trust and useful feedback.
Why asking to see an early draft can change what people are willing to bring you.
Watch the Full Conversation on YT:
Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:11 What the Assistant Secretary oversees
02:40 Why the Navy has 164 HR systems
04:47 What it takes to unify personnel data
06:59 What companies borrowed from military hierarchy
10:21 What the military can learn from Silicon Valley
12:14 Finding talent outside the standard career path
15:40 Fitness reports, AI, and promotion boards
18:00 What military performance reviews measure
21:03 How technology could help promotion boards
23:09 Retention and the case for faster promotion paths
28:14 Bringing civilian specialists into the reserves
32:50 How the Navy Innovation Unit is designed
37:06 From the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum to venture investing
42:04 How fighter pilots earn trust
45:01 Defining what winning looks like
46:25 Moving from annual reviews to quarterly feedback
50:38 Skip-level management and the chain of command
52:34 Why Ben wants to see the rough draft
55:49 Leadership lessons from Admiral Nelson and John Boyd
1:01:14 American initiative and improvisation
1:03:06 What a credential actually proves
1:06:18 How Ben would measure success in the role
1:08:15 Building for America
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