Does the staff from your higher headquarters seem to exist to simply put demands on your organization with little meaningful communication? I felt that our higher headquarters crushed us with demands when I was on a battalion staff. As a matter of fact, we in turn did the same thing to our subordinate units.
A couple years ago, as an Executive Officer, I noticed that our staff seemed content to simply pass on emails with little to no analysis. Emails flew back and forth with no real meaning. We also pushed too many demands on our subordinate units without thought to the repercussions.
The staff members largely consisted of Lieutenants, junior members of the military with less than 4 years of experience. These officers did not intend to cause anyone any more work. They were simply unaccustomed to another way of business as they were only following the model of what they had seen before them.
Realizing that our staff just needed some direction, we held a Leader Professional Development session for 30 minutes to outline the issue, issue guidance, and provide some concrete examples of methods to improve communication and outline processes. Laying out how the staff was unintentionally affecting the greater organization was critical in understanding “why” we needed to modify our processes. Given that context, our people delving into examples of best practices made more sense.
The info below is the set of business rules for a battalion level staff that we adopted in an attempt to change the culture within the organization. We needed to change from simply relaying information to higher headquarters to a staff that analyzed information, made recommendations to our commander, and most importantly, serve our subordinate units.
Staff Business Rules
The staff primarily serves three purposes:
- Inform the commander to make decisions
- Serve our subordinate units’
- “Feed the machine” – meaning provide information requirements to our higher HQ
Attitude
The staff should develop and maintain a “culture of service” or “customer service” attitude. The staff serves its subordinate units, not the other way around. This may sometimes get confusing, because as a higher headquarters, we at times need to demand information from subordinate units in order to facilitate higher level operations. We must never act nor communicate in a way that implies that our subordinate troops’ sole purpose in life is to feed us our information demands. I understand that our higher headquarters demands a lot of information from us and many times we are simply relaying this to the to our subordinate organizations, however, we need to avoid the mental trap that our subordinate organization’s priority effort is to get us that information. Our subordinate units’ priority effort will always be to prepare for war.
Communication
We currently rely on email way to much. I am guilty of this as well. This document serves as written guidance for future reference. The priorities of communication modes are:
- Face-to-face,
- Phone call,
We need to use face-to-face communication and phone calls more often. Email should be used to follow up conversations with facts or in the event people are not available. Email is quick, convenient for the staff, and allows us the ability to communicate to a large group in an asynchronous manner. As easy as email is to send, it is also easy to ignore. Take the Weekly Operations Orders for example. Not many people read them. If an information requirement is truly important, then walk to brigade or to the companies and go talk to someone in person. Solely sending it in an email sends a message that it is not important or it is a low priority. Make the effort to talk to someone and you will see a difference in your ability to get results.
Calendar
The Battalion short-range Outlook calendar should provide situational awareness on meetings, training events, and other operations such as taskings. This calendar should have events and information updated at least two to four weeks out. Information accuracy will decrease the further out the event is as details may not yet be fully fleshed out. Everyone on the staff as well as Company CDRs/1SGs/XOs should be able to add calendar events to the calendar. When an event is added to the calendar it must contain the 5 Ws, the point of contact, and any pertinent attachments. For example:
Who: BN Staff Primaries and NCOICs
What: Participate in OIP LPD given by the IG Office
Where: BN Classroom
Why: Ensure all administrative systems fall within the Army and Division standards and fix any shortcomings.
POC: LT Smith
Conclusion
In addition to the areas addressed above, we developed business rules for our meetings and email correspondence, which I will include in future posts. Michael Hyatt has interesting an article on email etiquette as well.
After implementing the above business rules, we noticed that our communication improved within the organization. Additionally, adopting a customer service attitude instilled a sense of ownership, which translated into improved analysis and problem solving within our team. Hopefully this can be of use to you in the future.
Question
- What staff guidelines or business rules suggestions do you have ?
Please leave a comment with suggestions for other Staff guidelines that have worked for you.
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