Sea Control - Sea Control 257 - Embracing Cognitive Diversity with Rachel Foote & Charlotte Mundy

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Links1. "Embrace Cognitive Diversity," by LCDR Rachel Foote, USNI Proceedings, December 2020.2. "Teams Solve Problems Faster When They're Cognitively Diverse," by Alison Reynolds and David Lewis, Harvard Business Review, March 30, 2017. 3. The War Room, U.S. Army War College podcast.

Hey folks, Jared here. I've talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about it. There are two existing Sea Control feeds out there. The current feed is labeled simply Sea Control and includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. We are working on a new logo, so once that's finished, we'll finally have a better differentiator for you. But Sea Control, Simsex Flagship Podcast, that's where you want to be. So please subscribe, rate, and review. Today, Anna McNeil makes her triumphant return to the host chair and she's joined by the Coast Guards Commander Charlotte Mundy and Lieutenant Commander Rachel Foote to discuss cognitive diversity. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast

Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hey folks, Anna here. Thanks for tuning back in to Sea Control. Today we're talking with Lieutenant Commander Rachel Foote and Commander Charlotte Mundy about cognitive diversity as it applies to the seagoing services such as the Coast Guard. We're very grateful to one of our regular listeners who tuned in for our host introductions episode, Sea Control 214, and heard me mention the value we place on hearing from people with diverse perspectives.

He pointed us towards Rachel's recently published article, which captured the concept perfectly. You can find Embrace Cognitive Diversity in the December 2020 edition of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings Magazine And a link to it will be in our show notes. Rachel's with us today to explain cognitive diversity. What is it? Why is it important? And what can or should we do better as a service to leverage the unique perspectives of our teams?

To give additional insights on how cognitive diversity applies in the shipboard workplace from a commanding officer's perspective, we're thrilled to have Charlotte join in the conversation. As a reminder, all views expressed are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. And as always, we want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends on the SimSec Podcast Network and our second podcast feed, The Bilge Pumps. Commanders, thank you for speaking with us today.

Would you please tell our audience a bit about yourselves and your background? Hi, Anna. Thanks for having me here today. I have been in the Coast Guard about 12 and a half years now. I'm currently in Valdez, Alaska at the Marine Safety Unit, serving as the Response Department Head. Before that, I was in contingency planning and force readiness at Sector Lake, Michigan in Milwaukee. And prior to that, I was at the PAC-D-11 Command Center. And then on Coast Guard Cutter-Washie, I was a deck watch officer and commissioning crew there. I originally started out in the Coast Guard as an operations specialist, but only did that for a few months before getting picked up for officer candidate school.

Before I joined the Coast Guard, I had several degrees in music, of all things. But more recently, I completed my law degree, a jurist doctor, and passed the bar in Minnesota. Thanks for having me on. This is such a great opportunity to talk about such a fun topic. So I've been in the Coast Guard almost 22 years. I enlisted back in 1999 wanting to do environmental pollution response, but somehow I got a little bit sidetracked on the way and have since been stationed on seven ships and have over 11 years of sea time.

I'm currently the commanding officer of the Coast Guard Cutter Vigorous, a 210-foot medium endurance cutter home ported in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I've also been on another two-time at Diligence as EXCO, and my staff tours have included the Office of Cutter Forces, Office of Programs and Budget, and some Command Center time. I also have non-traditional entry into the Coast Guard. I've got a master's degree in horticulture and a bachelor's degree in agriculture. From back before I joined the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard also sent me to grad school for a master's in public policy.

Rachel, can you tell us a bit about cognitive diversity? What is it, and what brought you to write about it? Cognitive diversity is a recognition that diversity is actually a very wide concept. I'm going to pull some definitions of diversity here from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Diversity itself is the condition of being diverse. So that suggests we need to look up what diverse is. So diverse is differing from one another or composed of distinct or unlike elements or qualities. And these are pretty wide-ranging definitions. They can encompass a lot of different things. However, when we think of diversity, we tend to think of things that are easy to measure or easy to discover. So race, gender, those are pretty obvious just looking at someone, usually.

There are some things a little less obvious, but still within a couple of questions, you can find things out. Ethnicity, religion, even sexual orientation. But this is not all that diversity can be. Diversity can also be things that aren't easy to measure or capture. And that is generally what cognitive diversity is. it's a broad term for those things that aren't so easy to determine from briefly interacting with someone or asking a couple questions. One definition of cognitive diversity that I'm pulling from a Harvard Business Review article by Allison Reynolds and David Lewis, their article

is, teams solve problems faster when they're more cognitively diverse, and that definition is differences in perspective or information processing styles. So that's cognitive diversity in a nutshell. And I became interested in cognitive diversity when I realized that even the Coast Guard's definitions of diversity inclusion and our diversity inclusion policy do recognize different backgrounds and thought processing. And it's in there, it's in the language. But still, when we have diversity inclusion councils or celebrate diversity, it tends to be things like Women's History Month or Black History Month. I'm really glad we recognize these characteristics, so don't mistake me there. I think that's really great, but I just think there is more to it than

that, and I don't think we are necessarily having those conversations about the great wealth of categories that diversity can encompass at our units. So I wanted to try and intentionally spark that discussion by writing this article. How does cognitive diversity relate to the concept of intersectionality and identity? Really, it intersects because it truly is unique to yourself. And so it is part of your identity that you can't necessarily predict by other factors. So there are going to be commonalities of gender or upbringing or things like this that are going to contribute to your perspective your information processing styles so to speak but there's more to it than that it really is how you interact with the world interestingly enough in the business world when

studying teams researchers have found no correlation between team performance and diversity of gender, age, and ethnicity. However, they have found that better results are achieved when teams have members that don't all think alike. And so that's an interesting piece is that we could actually build better teams by finding people that are those individuals that don't all think alike. If we think about this, it makes sense because we probably have all experienced group think where we all go down a path and are thinking along the same lines and we discount something that we should have taken into consideration we don't realize at that time you know having this diverse team with a lot of different perspectives can help us not get into

that group think mentality because we really are all processing the situation differently and thinking about it with diverse perspectives. Rachel, I have a question. How are there different ways of thinking? How do people process information differently? Like I only know how I process information because I just know my experience. In your reading and research on this subject, if you've been able to find broad categories about the way people approach taking in information and processing it. Yeah, that's an interesting question and kind of gets to the heart of how difficult it is to recognize cognitive diversity. So yes, there are some general ways to start figuring out how people approach and process information. Things like

Myers-Briggs or any other type of personality tests, they can actually help us with this. The Coast Guard, in their session training and some of their leadership training, does have people take these personality type tests. But it's more than just taking the test. So we tend to have the single day where we take the Myers-Briggs and then talk about it for, you know, half an hour and then kind of never come back to it. That is just a starting point. So we need to build from there and actually use that information we've just learned to have continuing intentional conversations about how we have different information processing styles and perceive the world differently. Now, this can definitely be awkward, especially if you don't know someone

very well. Using personality type assessments to spark those conversations, because in that context, it's not going to feel quite as awkward to ask those questions. And then using that information to keep building and keep having those conversations. Don't just do it as a one-time thing. You take the personality assessment, take that and build on it so that you're enriching the knowledge that you initially got from that personality type assessment and use that in your team building skills and perpetuate those conversations to longer than just that day my background is in agriculture i think in terms of cycles like biological cycles the nitrogen cycle the water cycle very interrelated you tweak something over here and it has a the butterfly

effect over there and and it wasn't really until i started working with a lot of coast guard engineers on ships that I realized that they think very, very differently, right? They are very linear. They are like, here's the problem. Here's what's not working. Here is the step function of what I try next to try and troubleshoot something that's not working. That's a gross generalization of engineers, but I think it's fair. And the number of engineers that I've worked with over the years and have seen that same pattern over and over again. And so it's such a stark example to me of how where we come from, how we are brought up, so to speak, impacts how we perceive the information that we're taking in. That's a great point that, Rachel, you also talk about

in your article. Communities will develop a sort of mindset that is this key to success. And you either adapt to that, as the case of the engineers and the Coast Guard, you've got your FPC cards, specific step-by-step troubleshooting processes that are the Coast Guard's way of dealing with whatever is broken and you either adapt to that or you get frustrated. The really creative thinkers who don't want to follow that process or whose brains don't naturally align that way are going to struggle in that community. Exactly. I mean, I certainly experienced this when I first joined the Coast Guard, right? I was a music major, so an artist. So I came in and I was talking to people and kind of the way I problem solved, I was just getting all these blank looks like, where are you

coming from what are you talking about and i'm like oh okay and so by joining the organization of the coast guard actually it's had an effect on how i approach problem solving and it had an effect on what i did to process information because i did want to come closer to what others in the coast guard did so that we could have a conversation and there is a place for that There is, but if we start having these intentional conversations about the fact that it's okay that we can process information differently and problem-solve differently, maybe we can make the Coast Guard a more cognitively diverse organization. And by that, we can hopefully, as they've found in business research, have better problem-solving as an organization because we have embraced this additional cognitive diversity. diversity. And certainly this isn't something that's going to change overnight. And it's something that when you have an institution like the Coast Guard or any of the military branches

really that have a fairly developed culture, that kind of change is going to be hard because it's not what we're used to doing. And the other piece of this is that there are times when there isn't room for having that creative problem-solving way. There are times when the commanding officer of the cutter has to say, no, we are doing it this way, and we have to follow that chain of command concept because there isn't time for debate. And I certainly recognize that, but what I want to have people get out of my article and podcast and hopefully having these discussions is that in those times where we don't have to have that kind of decision-making scheme, that we do think about the value of cognitive diversity and how we can possibly enrich it in the Coast Guard.

Why is this a joint professional military education topic? Why has the Army War College decided to talk about cognitive diversity on their podcast? And what else can we take away from this? The podcast that you referred to with the Army War College when they talked about this, they also talked about a concept called implicit bias. That's a recognition that we all have biases, and whether they're explicit biases, which we are aware of, and there are implicit biases, which we tend not to be aware of. And those implicit biases, the idea is, as you learn more about yourself, you can try and bring them from that implicit side, you not realizing that you have them, to the explicit side, and then look at how that affects your decision making and how you approach people. However, interestingly enough, in considering bias, it's actually very easy to develop bias about bias.

In other words, think of bias as a bad thing. But bias doesn't necessarily have to be bad. For example, bias for action might make an individual jump into a pool to save someone who's drowning. Also, since information comes at us so quickly in most circumstances, we can't actually help but resort to kind of an automatic processing of that information. So that's how we decide, for example, to apply the brakes for a red light or when a deer runs in front of our car. That automatic processing, this implicit thought process, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can be when it blinds us to other information. So if we were in another country

and a green light meant stop our normal association of green is go might cause us to continue through an intersection with a green light even if all other traffic is coming to a stop so we have that association green equals go and so that might be binding us to all the other information that suggests green should be stopped because all the other traffic is coming to a stop consider a person who believes that women are only fit to be home wakers despite evidence to the contrary so this bias could be a problem in a professional setting because it could change how the person interacted with female co-workers. That's the idea behind why it's important to try and learn more about our own biases, be they implicit or explicit, and counter them when and if it is

appropriate or necessary. And this ties to a concept that I discuss in my article, which is the golden rule. It's a good thought, but it can actually get in the way of cognitive diversity. If we treat everyone as we want to be treated, it's creating a stumbling block for cognitive diversity because we're actually assuming that everyone else wants to be treated the same as we do. And so we're defaulting to our own personal preferences and working styles and assuming everyone else wants to interact with us the same way. This can lead to an environment where people are inadvertently neglecting or marginalizing individuals who are different. We also tend not to realize this because, hey, we're following the golden rule. We're being as nice to everyone as

we would want them to be to ourselves. It's an interesting problem because, similar to implicit bus, it's not easy to realize that our well-meaning following of the golden rule might actually be marginalizing people. Rachel, your example of the stoplight, spot on. I remember my first six years of being on Coast Guard ships, we always operated in the U.S. and down off of the Central Pacific and South America. And when I went to Bahrain for the first time, so in Allah B, it's red right returning. It's not that way in Allah A. And the first couple of times I did a transit through restricted waters with the red buoys on my right side and i was leaving port it hurt my brain yeah that's another great example i hadn't thought of that one so thank you for sharing it's amazing

what that automatic processing can show about this topic just feels wrong somehow so charlotte what does a unit leader need to know about cognitive diversity and do you have any stories for us Oh, I always got C stories, 100%. So I think the most obvious thing to me about cognitive diversity is that it's there, it's real, whether we pay attention to it or not, we still deal with it every single day. And ignoring it just becomes a stumbling block in our own leadership style. Like I may have never put the words cognitive diversity necessarily to what I was doing until recently. But I think there's just a kind of innate awareness that people approach problems differently. They approach stress differently. They approach discomfort differently. And all of

those things are things that you have to be aware of. For example, Vigorous has a crew of about 80 people. We've got 80 different people that I'm trying to figure out what makes them tick and what their motivations are to get the ship going in the same direction. I think that as a leader, you ignore cognitive diversity at your own peril, just simply because whether you pay attention to or not. It's just the reality of the situation. There was most recently, we had a rather tense discussion with a couple members of my crew. It turned into a little bit of a blow up and somebody stormed out of the room and there was hurt feelings all around. It was unfortunate and it was clearly slowing us down. The situation bubbled over and made me do some digging into what was going on.

There was clearly some backstory. This wasn't something that just happened immediately. This was a lot of resentment built up over a long time. Talking to the two individuals that were involved in it separately, I came to realize that of all things, I never expected to be talking about love languages as CEO of a ship. But I come to realize that one of them, his love language was giving gifts. He showed how much he cared about the ship and the crew by making sure that what he was doing was benefiting everybody as much as possible. The other member, all he wanted to hear was thank you. And the first guy wasn't saying it. And so he felt completely ignored and undervalued and just not a valued part of the team. So when I explained this to each of them, I kind of saw a

light bulb go on in both of their heads. And, oh, we really do have the same goals. We just have very, very different ways of getting there. And I don't think that they'll ever necessarily agree with the other one that their way isn't the better way for them. The difference in how they showed appreciation, how they went about demonstrating their dedication to the crew, it was just so stark that I think it's a great example of where that cognitive diversity really plays into how you bring people together for a common cause. And now you as a CO know that you have two people from two different worlds of communication that you could bring into a conversation about appreciation in the future. And the crazy thing about it is there's 80 of

them, and no two of them are alike. And so trying to orchestrate that symphony for the music analogy, I don't know. I think that that's an important part of leadership for an operational unit. It's definitely something that we don't spend a lot of time on because there's a thousand other things to do. But I think a little bit of time spent on it can make the rest of the time and the rest of the effort's a lot more efficient and effective. The Army War College's War Room podcast, which we mentioned previously, when they interview their faculty about how they've successfully leveraged diversity in their classrooms, they mention that there still needs to be a leader, an instructor,

someone in charge of identifying the diverse perspectives within a team and then drawing them out and encouraging them to speak up. Does that ring true to you? Yeah, especially in a military unit. Institutionally, I value that chain of command. It's how we get things done. And it's just, it is an implicit bias. And it's something that we have gotten so used to that it is our default way of managing

things. I've definitely been in meetings before from my couple of tours at headquarters. You know, there are these weekly meetings where they were just on the calendar and people showed up to the conference room and they dialed in and they had the meeting and there was nobody taking charge. And oh my God, it made me crazy every single time. It'd be like counting the seconds to get the heck out of that meeting because it was just so unproductive.

eventually i was just like okay i'm going to make this hour of my time productive and i started taking in an agenda so i think that in the absence of that leadership role the strongest personality in the room is going to take it over and pursue their agenda and sometimes that's a good agenda and sometimes that might not be the agenda that's going to best position the organization for what they need to get done so yes absolutely i think that there needs to be that leadership and interaction manager, but you also have to be very flexible and not just assume that that's what the need is immediately. I found it to be really effective to see how the room is laying before you go in with a big stick to get it in order. That's important too. I actually just finished

reading a book called Good Guys about how men can be professional allies for women that they work with. It's actually a really good book. I was really pretty surprised at how effective some of tools were that the authors talked about. There is just that recognition that men are more likely to speak up more quickly than women, particularly in a male-dominated organization like ours. While I say give the room a few minutes to see how it lays, there's also the opportunity if you see somebody that might be shying back from participating, figuring out how to bring their voice out, because maybe they are that one voice that is seeing things differently and has that bit of spark that's going to solve the problem for the rest of the group.

Charlotte, you provided me a great introduction to a couple of topics that I was hoping we'd get to. Emotional intelligence and empathy. I touch on these lightly in my article and really have been doing some more research on emotional intelligence since then because it sparked my interest. The idea that it's not just sheer rationality that makes good decision making, that decision decision-making actually needs emotional fortitude gained from past experience. Bringing that emotional fortitude into not only decision-making, but into how you're

interacting with other people, which basically is what you were just telling us, Charlotte. One thing that really speaks to me and some of the emotional intelligence concepts is empathy. So one way to actually look at emotional intelligence and those that are good at emotional intelligence is you need to understand yourself and be resilient in yourself, and you also need empathy so that you can interact well with others. If we recognize those differences that Charlotte was just talking about so eloquently and use empathy to bring others to the table and actively cultivate these differences, not just acknowledge them, but actively cultivate them, then we can

enrich cognitive diversity and potentially enrich our decision-making and problem-solving in teams. Look to, you know, identify these meaningful differences between the working styles of all your people, appreciate the value that those differences bring, and then use that information to determine what each individual or group needs to excel, and then act on this information to become a more effective leader or colleague. As it alluded to in the Army War podcast, and as Charlotte was just telling us, there oftentimes needs to still be a leader to get that conversation going. But if that leader can use empathy, recognize cognitive diversity, then that can often lead to an environment where even the introverts in the room feel comfortable contributing.

Rachel, that reminds me a lot of another topic that the SimSec group has been talking about a lot and that we love to cover, which is wargaming. Military branches do a lot of wargaming where they will have a moderator in charge of running a session. And that moderator specifically chooses to answer questions, to provide information, and set up a forum in which you can have the teams be as creative as possible. So one of the things that the authors talked about in that book, Good Guys, was ways of encouraging some of that underrepresented way of thinking specific to women, but I think it could definitely be applied to any kind of diversity type, whether it's physical or mental, was just even the awareness. So they ordered a study, I'll probably get the details wrong here, but women were given an example that they were bad at math and then went in and take a math test. They did worse than if nothing had been said, but if women had been encouraged before taking the math test, and they did better. And it's just even that very simple empathy you were talking

about, Rachel, of trying to get people in the right headspace to be a part of a team, to do something that we know is going to be challenging and hard, to be aware of the dangers in the environment, that even just the brief discussion of that can put you in the right mindset or, conversely, in the wrong mindset, depending on how it's approached, to really affect how the performs. A lot of the research I found on cognitive diversity is in the business context, not in the military context. I think business has realized since they're in the business of making money that they can't ignore this because it would be to their detriment. You know, they're constantly pushing forward and trying to figure out how do we make teams solve problems faster?

How do we make teams more efficient, come up with creative ideas fast? It's an interesting idea that if we can follow along where, you know, business has already introduced some of these ideas, because actually business is where there's a lot of emotional intelligence research too, then realize it's possible we can get back to exactly what you were just saying, have that right mindset. Rachel, you wrote on several ways that the Coast Guard can make organizational or policy changes to promote cognitive diversity. What's your take on the current status of Cognitive Diversity and the Coast Guard? As I mentioned at the start, our policies are out there that has the language and recognizes cognitive diversity. But at the unit level,

I don't think we're having very many of these conversations about cognitive diversity and how can it help the Coast Guard. How do we let the rubber meet the road, so to speak? How are our unit leaders, our commanding officers, our officers in charge, our XOs, how are they approaching diversity and having these conversations. Things that we can do to kind of spark these conversations are important and ways that we can show that this is important. One way is adding deliberate conversations about cognitive diversity and empathy to all accession and leadership courses. Basic training, Coast Guard Academy, Officers Candidate School, LAMS, Leadership and Management School, the mid-grade officer force, Chief Petty Officer's Academy, you know,

having modules in all those training areas to discuss these topics. So that starts signaling to the fleet that, yes, these concepts are embraced by policy, but not only are they in policy, they're important. The other thing that we can do to signal importance is add them to our evaluation. Coast Guard officer evaluation, we could update the definition of teamwork to add empathy into that. Ability to manage, lead, and participate in teams and employ empathy to recognize the value of all perspectives, encourage cooperation, and develop a spirit of decor. Just subtly shifting the language, you could change workplace climate to add similar language And also in the enlisted evaluation systems, you could update the language to include these concepts of empathy, cognitive diversity, emotional intelligence.

I think what you're saying about kind of the organic discussions that happen at the unit level, I think that that's a lot of where it's at. I know that when I do like a check-in interview with somebody new that's reporting to the ship, you know, I go through my command philosophy with them and tell them drink responsibly, all that good stuff. one of the things that I really make sure to highlight is communication. And a couple of things about that that I talk about with them, that even if they're new, I expect them to speak up. Their opinion still matters to me, even if they don't feel like they know what's going on, because a lot of time it's that person that's looking in from the outside that's not familiar, that's not so desensitized to what they're seeing, that sees something that we could do better. I also talk a lot about kind of an attitude of continual improvement. Like we never sail with

the same crew. I feel like at every port call, we swap somebody out, somebody leaves, somebody comes in, although not so much now in COVID times, we've had people come in. But it's never the same crew that we're sailing with. And that requires a continual rebalancing of responsibilities and who's doing what job and what their level of competence is. I also talk about the importance that we place on hot washes, post-evolution debriefs, that kind of thing about what worked well? What didn't go well? What do you want to see done differently? And it really is building that culture of just continual reflection on how things are always changing. I don't think I appreciated this so much when I was younger, but the thing that the only constant is change,

that's so true. I think just that continual reinforcement of that kind of helps till the soil, if you would, for making sure that people can come in and automatically feel like their different way of looking at things is valued and appreciated. Admiral Thad Allen, 23rd Commandant of the Coast Guard, he has a quote back in 2011 that says, the best gift that we can give new members is to instill confidence in them that their leaders understand and care about them. Now, I shortened that quote a little bit, but that idea of making new members feel like we can hear them, like you just said, and that we value them is really, really important. Well, and I wonder how much of this is generational things. By the time you get to where I'm at, 22 years in, I'm

set in my ways. I know how I learn, and that's the only way I want to learn because I want to be as comfortable as possible. And to contrast that against these 18-year-olds or 21-year-olds that are just brand new to the service, that they're energetic and they're enthusiastic and they've got all these great ideas and they're fresh and they're not burned out and bitter and all of that. I can definitely think of a few examples in my own experience over the last couple of years where unintentionally, I have squashed some of that enthusiasm just because I'm like, no, my experience rules the day. And as a leader, it is continually reinforced to me how important it is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. For me personally,

illusion without preconceived notions about how it's going to go and what I'm going to hear from people without expectation, because that is one of the fastest ways to shut people down and turn them off is to just presume you already know everything that's going to happen because you've got all this bonded experience and you are the leader so of course you know how it's going to go I'm the first one to admit that I'm lucky to appreciate that I know what the questions are and I might have a good sense of where we might start looking for the answers but I sure don't know them all we're talking about cognitive diversity and embracing differences and thought processing and in some ways to be a good leader of cognitive diversity I might have to approach

something that's not the way that I feel comfortable approaching something, and realize that by doing that, I am encouraging those other approaches that I wouldn't necessarily default to. And then I'm helping cognitive diversity by squashing my own act in some ways. I get back to, as an introvert, it's really hard for me to go out and interact with people, and it's very draining. and i tend to not make great first impressions because i'm so nervous about meeting new people i've realized over time that you know i have to deliberately try and counter those impressions that i've made by going and trying my hardest to be approachable going and talking to the crew hey what did you do this weekend and how is your pet dog and how's your family doing in isolated

Valdez, doing things that make me feel very uncomfortable and are very hard for me, but that helped me become that approachable person that people will open up to, that people will share their opinions, problem-solving strategies with. And it actually does work. It just means at the end of the day, when I go home, I pretty much don't want to see anybody else and have that I need time. I don't have that quiet time that I need. It's something that you have to be intentional about and realize what you're doing so that in circumstances where that's not as appropriate, you don't just default to continuing to do that. It's not easy, that's for sure. If it was easy, everybody would do it, right?

Probably. Recognizing that this is not easy, I'll add that there are now in the Coast Guard diversity inclusion change agents. They're folks who have received training through the Coast Guard to help facilitate conversations, to help talk about things like emotional intelligence in the workplace and the value of that. But they also receive coaching training because the journey that you're each describing is very personal. It's very me talking about what are my own biases and recognizing them, seeing that there's a change that needs to happen that I want to be part of as a leader. But how do I get there? And so I would just want to plug in here because it's a perfect opportunity. Thanks for setting me up for it.

If you haven't reached out to your change agent or you don't know who that is and you're in a unit leadership position and you feel like you could use some coaching to talk about biases, to talk about conversations in the workplace, and you feel kind of alone about it and you just want to have someone to talk to, the change agents are really good for that. I think it is definitely an undervalued skill to be able to recognize these things. And the more that people become aware of them and see the power of them, I think it'll grow. And that kind of takes me back to that generational thing is I really do feel like the younger generation, the younger folks that are coming up into the organization now are much, much more comfortable with self-awareness and knowing to ask them what they need. And I think that that's great. It makes the leadership, like the older generation, very uncomfortable. And, you know, there's all the grumbling about it. But some of that I think is fairly natural.

The more that we talk about it, the more that we see the benefits of it. I think that it's going to make people happier in what they do, which overall then is going to improve everybody's experience with the organization. Self-awareness is related to all this. You have to be self-aware to start having these conversations, but self-awareness is just the first step. So from self-awareness, you have to move forward and, you know, have empathy, work on handling relationships and apply all those emotional intelligence concepts to making teams work and making social relationships work. You know, the fact that generation just coming into the Coast Guard has a lot of self-awareness is great. And it's going to be our job as leaders to take that

self-awareness and help them apply some of the other concepts of teamwork and emotional intelligence and empathy to use that self-awareness to develop effective teams. Thank you, Rachel, for writing on this important topic in Charlotte for your leadership in the Cutter community. I know that no matter what's next for you both, it's going to be done with compassion, connection to and support from your shipmates. Can you tell us a bit about your current professional projects and where the audience can find you on social media? I am not really on social media, but I have been working on doing some more research into emotional intelligence. Some of the research I did for cognitive diversity led me there.

that may turn into something or it may not really at the moment I've got a lot of my plans on hold because I'm waiting to find out where I transfer this summer so you had mentioned the change agent piece Anna it was something that I noticed at the time it came out and I was interested in potentially looking into that decided that I'd wait until I had more idea of what I would be doing for the next few years so that is also something that after I transfer I may look back into and becoming one of them. Charlotte? Well, I am down to about four months left in the Coast Guard on active duty. I'm retiring this summer. I get done with my tour on Vigorous. All kinds of exciting things planned for retirement. Lots of traveling because I won't have the same restrictions

applied. And I have both my shots. Very excited about that. And relocating down to Wilmington, North Carolina to kind of settle into a new place there. But in the meantime, really very much focused on setting Vigorous up for a successful transition to the new command sometime in June of this summer. So I hope that one of the things that I get to do in retirement is revive my blog that I had been keeping for about 10 years while I was on active duty. It's called Just a Girl in the World. It talks personal and professional stuff about my experiences. It was a lot of fun while I was doing it on active duty, and I hope to get the same benefits out of it as I share it in retirement. Anna, thanks for this opportunity, and Rachel, for all your insights. This was really

fun. I really enjoyed the conversation and the opportunity to hear a different perspective and share some sea stories. Yeah, thank you so much, Anna, for this opportunity. This has been great. And Charlotte, good luck in your retirement. Thank you. Sea Control is produced and edited by Jonathan Selling. Financial support is provided by you, our listeners, through Amazon Smile and on our website at www.simsec.org. See you next time. So help me, Bob, I'm bullying the addicts. Why are you bullying the addicts?

Help me, Bob, I'm bullying the addicts. Put it out in your mouth now.