“Leaning In” or “Taking a Knee”: Career Trajectories of Senior Leaders in the Canadian Armed Forces

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X221078331
• Author: Julie Coulthard,Justin Wright
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X221078331

Armed Forces & Society

2023, Vol. 49(3) 642 –661

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X221078331

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1134644AFSXXX10.1177/0095327X221078331Armed Forces & SocietyCoulthard and Wright

research-article2022

“Leaning In”or “Taking a

Knee”: Career Trajectories

of Senior Leaders in the

Canadian Armed Forces

Julie Coulthard

1

, and Justin Wright

1

Abstract

Less research has examined the extent to which external contexts and factors that

inf‌luence an organizational member’s life choices also inf‌luence their career trajec-

tories within the military, and particularly among those who advance to leadership

positions at the General Off‌icer/Flag Off‌icer level. Interviews were conducted with

20 select General Off‌icer/Flag Off‌icers in the Canadian Armed Forces. As part of a

secondary analysis of an exploratory qualitative study, we applied a Life Course Theory

lens to better understand the intersections between the sociohistorical and cultural

context of senior leader development, and the individual choices that the participants

made that led to their ascent to their rank. This study provides insight into how the

historical time and place, the timing in their lives, the linked lives they share with family,

and the degree of agency they maintained over their life choices led participants to “lean

in”rather than “take a knee.”

Keywords

military leadership, professionalism/leadership, organizational commitment, military

organization, senior leader development, life course theory

1

Department of National Defence, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Julie Coulthard, Department of National Defence, NDHQ (Carling), 60 Moodie Dr, Bldg 9., Ottawa, ON,

Canada.

Email: Julie.Coulthard@forces.gc.ca

Coulthard and Wright 643

“Leaning In”or “Taking a

Knee”: Career Trajectories

of Senior Leaders in the

Canadian Armed Forces

Julie Coulthard

1

, and Justin Wright

1

Abstract

Less research has examined the extent to which external contexts and factors that

inf‌luence an organizational member’s life choices also inf‌luence their career trajec-

tories within the military, and particularly among those who advance to leadership

positions at the General Off‌icer/Flag Off‌icer level. Interviews were conducted with

20 select General Off‌icer/Flag Off‌icers in the Canadian Armed Forces. As part of a

secondary analysis of an exploratory qualitative study, we applied a Life Course Theory

lens to better understand the intersections between the sociohistorical and cultural

context of senior leader development, and the individual choices that the participants

made that led to their ascent to their rank. This study provides insight into how the

historical time and place, the timing in their lives, the linked lives they share with family,

and the degree of agency they maintained over their life choices led participants to “lean

in”rather than “take a knee.”

Keywords

military leadership, professionalism/leadership, organizational commitment, military

organization, senior leader development, life course theory

1

Department of National Defence, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Julie Coulthard, Department of National Defence, NDHQ (Carling), 60 Moodie Dr, Bldg 9., Ottawa, ON,

Canada.

Email: Julie.Coulthard@forces.gc.ca

Stewarding the profession of arms in Canada is the responsibility of its most senior

leaders, including and particularly those occupying the executive leadership ranks of

General Off‌icer/Flag Off‌icer (GO/FO). In order to prepare Canadian Armed Forces

(CAF) members to take on this responsibility, the institution requires future GO/FOs to

navigate an extremely demanding, career-long professional development system.

While the focus tends to be on the formal educational and training requirements and

operational experience needed to ascend to the executive leadership ranks, little

empirical research exists that explores the lived experiences of this group of military

members as they make this ascent.

Scholarly work on military leadership development (Dabkowski et al., 2011;

Kirchner & Akdere, 2017;Mumford et al., 2017;Nazri & Rudi, 2019) often em-

phasizes processes of skill acquisition and talent management within the military

organizational structure and context. In a similar vein, work on organizational com-

mitment, social identities, and newcomer socialization (Meyer et al., 2006;Saks et al.,

2007), and among military populations specif‌ically (O’Shea et al., 2009), again tend to

focus on the military organizational structures and contexts in which these identities

and commitments are formed, expressed, and linked to organizational outcomes, such

as job satisfaction, role conf‌lict, or work performance. While these works provide a

wealth of empirical evidence regarding organizational socialization, commitment,

leader development, and the psychosocial mechanisms underlying them (both broadly

and in a military context specif‌ically), less work has been done to examine the extent to

which external contexts and factors that impact an organizational member’s life choices

also inf‌luence their career trajectories within the organization, and particularly among

those who advance to positions of executive leadership.

Investigating the intersections between personal and public spheres is not new in

social science (e.g., Mills, 1959). More recent examples of scholarship that consider

this intersection include examinations of the career trajectories of women in organi-

zational leadership roles. In a study of the career trajectories of women executives and

senior leaders in New Zealand, for example, Kuntz and Livingston (2020) found that

organizational culture and external factors, such as perceived work-family tensions,

were key barriers to leadership advancement of the study participants (Kuntz &

Livingston, 2020). Similar work in the context of the US education system investi-

gated why some women were successful in pursuing senior administrative and

leadership positions, such as superintendency, while others appeared to opt-out (Hill

et al., 2020). To approach this research question, Hill et al. apply Life Course Theory

which was developed by Glen Elder in the 1960s when exploring the life trajectories

and development of children and families from the Great Depression (Elder, 1998;Hill

et al., 2020). Hill and colleagues explain, “Life Course Theory embraces the simple

idea that external context shapes life choices and life trajectories. It connects macro-

level sociohistorical dynamics of the historical moment with individual-level decision

making (Hill et al., 2020, p. 190).”

In a paper revisiting the development of Life Course Theory, Elder (1998) provides a

useful overview of the theory’s main principles. The f‌irst principle, which he refers to as

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