Introduction

When I wrote “Why the Best Don’t Rise”, I argued that Defence’s promotion system may reward compliance, career sequencing, and polished reporting over leadership potential. The article drew a stronger response than I expected.

Readers described a system shaped by box-ticking, time served, negotiated performance reports, and risk aversion. Some raised concerns about civilian experience being discounted, one adverse report outweighing years of good service, or injury blocking advancement because it prevented attendance at a prescribed course.

One contributor proposed moving from annual reporting to on-occurrence feedback. Another asked a question just as important as “who should not?” rather than “who should be promoted?”

The debate led me to reflect more critically on the solutions I had originally put forward. Readers supported interviews and broader panels but warned that 360-degree feedback could become a vehicle for grudges or popularity contests.

Others rightly observed that an infantry corporal, a maintenance technician, and a senior staff officer cannot be judged against an identical model of leadership. I would argue that these comments sharpen, rather than weaken, the argument.

The issue is not that every unsuccessful candidate is an overlooked leader, nor that everyone promoted today is a compliant careerist. Dissatisfaction is not proof of systemic failure.

The defensible proposition is narrower: the evidence used to establish past performance and eligibility is not necessarily sufficient to assess suitability for command. Promotion is often treated as a reward for past service.

In reality, it is an allocation of institutional risk: a decision about who will hold greater authority, shape the culture others experience, and – in some appointments – make decisions involving life, death, and national purpose. The evidence standard should reflect the consequence of that decision.

Performance, Eligibility, and Potential Are Different Questions

A credible system must separate three questions that are usually compressed into one. Eligibility asks whether the member has met the professional, technical, and experiential requirements for the next rank. Performance asks how effectively they have delivered in previous roles. Potential asks how likely they are to succeed when the scale, ambiguity, and human consequences of the role increase.

Eligibility does not establish potential, and performance in one context does not automatically predict effectiveness in another. A highly proficient staff officer may not be suited to command. A technically gifted practitioner may be promoted into a role whose principal requirement is no longer technical mastery but the ability to lead and decide through others.

Conversely, a member whose career does not follow the preferred sequence may possess judgement and perspective that are hard to see in a file review. This matters because ADF doctrine demands more than administrative proficiency.

ADF-P-0 Command describes mission command as promoting initiative, ingenuity, innovation, and the devolution of authority, and states that ethically sound errors of judgement made in good faith should attract less censure than inaction or the neglect of opportunity (Australian Defence Force 2024). A system that unintentionally rewards risk avoidance and flawless administration selects against the very qualities doctrine expects in operations.

The Limits of the Annual Record

Performance reports remain essential. They capture sustained observation across time that cannot be recreated in a short selection activity. The problem is not their existence, but the weight placed on them.

A publicly described Career Management Board experience illustrates the scale of the task: Mankowski (2024) reported receiving 84 candidate files, averaging 35 pages each, with 37 days to review them and no specifically allocated work time. The process was serious, but that volume creates an unavoidable compression problem: a complex professional life reduced to ratings, narratives, and a brief board statement.

This creates vulnerabilities. The quality of the written narrative can shape how performance is understood, the record is largely constructed through the eyes of two supervisors, annual reporting invites retrospective reconstruction, and context is easily lost. A demanding role performed well can appear less impressive than a visible role with strong sponsorship.

None of this makes reports invalid. Rather, it means they are one source of evidence, not a complete portrait. The United States Army reached a similar conclusion with its Command Assessment Program, retaining evaluation reports but supplementing them with multiple assessments, on the view that brief file reviews written from two perspectives were too narrow a basis for selecting commanders (Morgado and O’Brien 2025).

Character and Competence Are Not Alternatives

My original article warned against overemphasising character at the expense of competence. That framing was too binary. The better question is whether the system can identify both and observe how they interact. ADF doctrine states that character lies at the heart of leadership and underpins ethical conduct, describing it not as reputation or conformity but as the qualities that guide conduct when authority and force are exercised (Australian Defence Force 2021, 2023). Sturm, Vera, and Crossan (2017) similarly argue that leader character and competence are entangled in their effect on performance.

Competence without character can produce results through fear, concealment, or the exploitation of subordinates. Character without competence can produce a well-intentioned leader who cannot understand the problem or deliver the mission. Neither is acceptable.

Selection must therefore examine not only what a candidate achieved, but how, what happened to the team, and whether they accept responsibility when outcomes are poor. This also gives substance to “who should not?”

A member should not be selected merely because serious concerns have not crossed the threshold for formal adverse action. Repeated, credible evidence of a destructive command climate, ethical avoidance, blame-shifting, or results achieved at an unsustainable cost to people should matter.

Equally, a single anonymous allegation or unpopular decision must not disqualify a candidate. The standard is evidence, pattern, and context – applied with procedural fairness, not popularity.

Avoiding Simple but Flawed Fixes

The answer is not to replace one subjective process with another. Interviews can help, but an unstructured conversation rewards confidence and verbal polish. Selection research finds structured interviews among the stronger predictors in personnel selection, though the field has also revised many validity estimates and cautions that predictive power is contested; the value comes from structure, equivalent questions, defined behavioural indicators, independent scoring, and questions linked to the role (Sackett et al. 2022). A military interview should test judgement, not the ability to repeat accepted leadership language.

The same caution applies to 360-degree feedback. Subordinates and peers observe behaviours senior assessors rarely see, particularly how a leader uses authority when supervision is absent. But RAND advised against simply inserting anonymous feedback into high-stakes evaluations, identifying risks of inaccurate information, strategic rating, loss of context, and damage to the tool’s developmental value (Hardison et al. 2015). Multi-source evidence may still have a place when used developmentally, or as controlled evidence drawn from a broad group, screened for reliability, examined for patterns, and considered alongside the candidate’s response, but not as an unfiltered score stapled to a file.

A Better Selection Model

A more credible approach would preserve the strengths of the present system while adding a separate, proportionate assessment for command and key leadership appointments.

• Define the role before assessing the person. Keep a common doctrinal foundation: character, competence, judgement, accountability, trust, adaptability, and the development of others – but tailor the behavioural indicators. The leadership expected of a section commander, technical supervisor, unit commander, and strategic staff leader are not identical. A single generic model rewards a narrow stereotype rather than what the appointment requires.
• Keep the record as the foundation. Qualifications, employment history, performance reports, disciplinary and commendation records, and demonstrated results over years remain essential. Seek patterns rather than letting one unusually strong or weak report dominate. Recognise relevant experience gained outside the conventional sequence, such as Reserve service, industry, education, and joint appointments where these genuinely relate to the role.
• Add a structured, proportionate assessment. Candidates for command and selected key appointments should complete an assessment scaled to the level of responsibility, not a resource-intensive copy of the US model. No single component should be decisive unless it identifies a serious and substantiated risk.
• Train and govern the panels as carefully as the candidates. Members should declare conflicts, receive guidance on cognitive bias, score independently before discussion, and record reasons for material changes. Diverse representation broadens judgement, but consistent criteria, behavioural anchors, and an auditable process matter more than simply adding people to the room.
• Give candidates meaningful feedback. A process that labels someone unsuitable without identifying development needs wastes the effort and breeds distrust. Where security and privacy permit, the member should understand the capabilities demonstrated, the concerns identified, and what development would enable reconsideration.

A practical Australian pilot could include:

• a structured behavioural interview with anchored scoring criteria;
• a command or workplace problem requiring a decision, communication of intent, and explanation of accepted risk;
• an ethical decision exercise testing accountability and moral courage;
• a short written and oral communication task; and
• controlled multi-source evidence focused on observable behaviour and command climate.

The purpose is not an artificial examination in which candidates learn the preferred answers. It is to generate several independent observations of how a candidate thinks, communicates, and responds when challenged.

The Standard Our Own Doctrine Already Sets

The strongest case for a higher evidence standard is not imported from the United States; it is written into the Army’s own recent publications. Two are instructive.

The Sword and Baton, the professional code of honour and conduct for the Army’s generals, states that generalship is “by nature, consequential” and that accountability, “the acceptance of the outcomes of action or inaction”, becomes inescapable at that level, irrespective of proximity or awareness (Australian Army 2026b).

If accountability is inescapable, the decision to confer it cannot rest on a file alone. The code also declares that the principal test of a senior leader’s performance is the command climate they establish, and that some failures are intolerable because trust, once lost, cannot be recovered.

That is precisely the terrain a selection system must probe before appointment, not discover afterwards. It gives doctrinal weight to assessing command climate and to the discipline of asking “who should not?”

The Soldier makes a complementary point from the other end of the rank structure. Its ethos rests on the aphorism that a soldier “does not rise to the occasion in battle, rather a soldier sinks to their level of training”, and it treats character as muscle memory built by repetition and reflection, not proclaimed once a year (Australian Army 2026a).

If we accept that character and competence are forged continuously and revealed under pressure, an annual snapshot is plainly an inadequate instrument, and an interview that rewards rehearsed language tests the wrong thing.

The same handbook insists that when death is close, “only character and competence matter”, and it makes bias for action, “if in doubt, do something”, the foundation of the Army’s battlefield reputation. A promotion system that quietly rewards caution and immaculate paperwork is therefore not neutral; it works against the ethos the Army asks its people to live by.

Taken together, these publications show the argument is not a critique from outside the profession. It is a call to make our selection decisions as demanding as the standards we already publish for those we select.

From Annual Appraisal to Continuous Evidence

The proposal to use on-occurrence reporting deserves consideration, implemented carefully. Performance research has long distinguished the annual appraisal event from the broader process of setting expectations, observing performance, and giving feedback (DeNisi and Murphy 2017).

A better model would capture significant performance and leadership events when they occur, with timely feedback the member can acknowledge, contextualise, and act on before the annual report.

The risk is that this becomes continuous surveillance or a repository for minor grievances. Clear thresholds are essential: records should concern material achievements, decisions, and behaviours; with positive evidence captured as deliberately as concerns; and members must have a right to respond. The aim is a fair professional record, not a larger disciplinary file.

This also more clearly separates selection for command from a judgement of a member’s overall worth. Not every high performer should command, and command should not be the only route to influence. A mature talent system offers respected pathways for command, specialist mastery, and senior staff leadership so that failure to be selected means the evidence did not support that appointment at that time, not that the person has no future value.

Test Before Imposing

Reform should be piloted, not announced as an enterprise-wide solution. A trial could focus on one category of appointment and compare the new process with the existing board outcome, examining whether the assessment changes selections, whether candidates and panels regard it as fair, whether it creates adverse impacts, how much time it consumes, and whether results later correlate with command climate, retention, and complaints. A process that feels rigorous can still predict poorly; a modest addition may add real value if it exposes risks invisible in the file. The test is not whether the process looks modern, but whether it improves decisions.

The answer is not to discard Career Management Boards, qualifications, or performance reports. These establish standards and preserve organisational knowledge. The answer is to stop requiring the file alone to answer questions it was never designed to answer.

A board file tells us where a person has served and what selected assessors recorded. It cannot, by itself, reveal how that person will act when the plan fails, when the ethical choice is costly, or when mission and people appear to compete. Those are the moments in which leadership matters most.

The central question is therefore no longer only “who should rise?” It is: what evidence should Defence require before entrusting someone with greater authority? The quality of future leadership depends on how seriously we answer it.

Still Interested?

Why not also read Why the Best Don’t Rise – Leadership Lost in the Military Promotion System

Cove+ also has short learning courses on similar topics: Cove+.