The sergeant you mentioned was arrested for child molestation, and was universally reviled and hated by his soldiers. Exactly the kind of person that worries about shaving in the field. Counter productive micro managing that misses the point entirely.

There's some additional nuance to Sergeant Major Sixta and his enforcement of the grooming standard. His intention was not to psychologically trick his marines into being good soldiers by way of facial hair. The idea was to set himself up as a common annoyance that the marines shared without actually harming anybody, reducing combat effectiveness, or undermining his own authority. The marines are all comrades when it comes to Sixta. They all think he's an asshole together. That sense of camraderie is priceless in groups of soldiers, and it can't be bought. If they weren't all pissed at him, they would certainly be pissed at something else, and the likely targets are the other officers or each other. Sixta is a convenient lightning rod for the base level of resentment that's always going to be there. Nobody needs to like him all that much for him to do his job.

The whole concept sounds insane, and it is insane and probably a completely bad idea, but it's important to remember that marine recon units are not like most groups of workers. They have a lot of downtime, they get yelled at more, and other people are telling them what to do basically all of the time. My boss screaming about my chin hair would cripple my output, but that's probably not going to make a marine lose his next fight. Frankly, there's not a lot we can apply to normal office environments here. There are no conceivable workplace scenarios where you need to play negative head games with a group of armed twentysomethings in the desert.

> My boss screaming about my chin hair would cripple my output

Mine too, because I'd vanish. I did the military, and nobody anywhere gets to treat me that way.

And hey, managers and leads reading this, you should always remember that every one of your people are volunteers.

> And hey, managers and leads reading this, you should always remember that every one of your people are volunteers.

That's, sadly, just the privilege of the growing industry like ours. Majority of population are not volunteers, they're little more than slaves and managers know that very well. The fact that you absolutely, positively need a job and that you won't find another one quickly is one of the strongest ways of keeping workers in line, and what lets many of the higher-ups be openly and freely abusive towards their employees.

I'm not complaining about IT here. We just need to remember that our industry is special right now, and that it won't last forever.

This is absolutely true, and very well said.

Great point! KPIs are often milestones in the achievement of an overall goal, not the end game themselves.

KPI's can be can be useful if correctly employed, but the overzealous desire to apply metrics to everything, even things that are so abstract that they seem random, causes moral breakdown withing the ranks. I've seen so many people looking like a whipped dog because they are unable to achieve some fictitious measurement goal, especially one they have no control over.

How does shaving keep Marines moving forward?

Shaving is a luxury in the field, but it is a tell tale for essentials. Being shaven means the soldiers have both the resources and time necessary to attend their hygiene. A lack of hygiene is often far more dangerous than combat [1]. Shaving is also something many young soldiers do not feel strictly necessary. They do it because they are told so to do. Therefore it is a mark of some basic discipline.

Look at historic pictures of soldiers under continuous stress. Not shaving is the first thing you'll notice.

[1] Up until the Korean conflict, far more soldiers were killed by disease than contact with the enemy. That changed with anitbiotics and better field medicine (think MASH) but disease remains a serious threat.

Trying to enforce a proxy (shaving as a sign for a not over-stressed platoon) instead of tacking real issues is exactly the kind of thinking that makes working in enterprise so tedious.

I'd rather spend my time with soldiers practicing tactics or doing comms training.

I think looking after your feet /boots would be more useful - there's a great scene in "when we where soldiers" where the CO points this out.

In other words, you try to inculcate a desire to stay shaved whenever possible, because then you can use whether shaving happens as a metric to get a conservative estimate of a troop's hygiene generally, and this is an important thing to know.

Not just that. As GP wrote: "They do it because they are told so to do. Therefore it is a mark of some basic discipline.". Discipline is paramount for managing an army in combat.

In the infantry, we were required to shave in the field. Sometimes this means choosing between dry shaving or wet shaving with cold water, but not shaving is not an option, even during combat operations. There were times I hadn't showered for over thirty days, but was still shaving to standard. I think calling it a luxury is a stretch.

Of course in some recent conflicts soldiers grow beards to fit in with the locals.

Back in the day the SAS in Northern Ireland grew mustachers to help their cover.

That kind of uniform and grooming standard is only for special forces in special operating enviroments. It almost never applies to regular soldiers. I say almost because regular soldiers attached to special forces units in special operating environments can sometimes get away with similar standards as their special forces counterparts.

I think it's about being correlated to following orders, discipline, doing things even if you don't understand the reason. In the middle of battle, you're trained to trust and can use those skills...?