Category Archives: Development

Develop your team

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Developing your people or developing organizational processes?

Which is wiser to invest your limited time in?

As leaders, we have to make the most use out of our finite time available. At some point we are faced with a decision of whether to prioritize investing that limited time in developing our people versus investing it in developing processes for our organization. This article will shed insight into these two approaches and help you determine which one will work best to improve your organization.

Developing a Fool-proof system

As a battalion operations officer, I remember investing a lot of time and energy into developing and implementing a training management process to improve our organization. I worked closely with my team to nail down a fool-proof system. It only took one week to create, gain approval for, and communicate the process. It took eight weeks to implement and gain organizational alignment with the new process before it became second nature.

Once we had the process going though, we noticed an improvement in our planning, communication, and execution of training events. Things were going great for a few months. My two assistant operations officers had a smooth transition between current and future operations. The process would surely help us through an upcoming period of transition in which both of my assistant operations officers and I would change jobs. All of us would stay in the same battalion, but would move to different positions. I would stay in the battalion headquarters as the Executive Officer, but would be gone for a few weeks to undergo physical rehabilitation following a near-fatal parachuting accident I had a few months earlier. My two assistant operations officers would assume command of two of our companies (subordinate units).

When I returned to the office in my new role, both of the assistant operations officers that implemented the training management process had already moved to new positions. While the three of us were still in the battalion, our new positions took our focus into different areas.  I soon noticed that in just under a month the process we had built was already starting to unravel.

Developing the Team

After seeing how fragile and temporary processes can be, I decided to change focus to developing our people. While we still developed processes, we focused less on the structure of the process and focused more on developing our people who could in turn develop processes for their organizations.

I started holding weekly leader development sessions for my counterparts at our subordinate units (Company Executive Officers). After a few short weeks, I noticed a significant improvement in the company executive officers’ ability to get their units moving in the same direction. I also noticed that amount the influence they had in their companies was increasing as well.

Wanting to further capitalize on progress made with the company executive officers, I also started weekly professional development sessions with the staff. Just as with the executive officers, I noticed that in a short time, the staff started to mature in their roles.  They needed less guidance and solved problems on their own without my assistance.

We improved our performance in key areas and fixed some systemic flaws. This time, though, the change lasted much longer. The lasted not only through my tenure as the Battalion Executive Officer, but remained beyond my time in the unit. Six months after I had left the organization, one of the company commanders approached me to let me know that the unit was continuing to improve and many of the processes were still in place.

Different Approaches Garner Different Results

Why did one approach (focus on developing processes) only last a few weeks, while the other approach (focus on developing people) last much longer? The impact from developing processes are temporary, while developing people leads to long-term results. The reasons below outline why and can potentially help you and your organization make lasting and impactful change.

  • Processes have a temporary shelf life. Processes require people to make them work. If your people don’t have buy-in or aren’t educated on the system, the system will go by the way side. When the people leave, the process is at risk of dying.
  • Conversely, investing time and energy into your people can last a lifetime. People will take lessons learned and carry them for the remainder of their career.
  • Developing your people enables and empowers them to be the ones to create processes for their current or future organization. Educating people improves their knowledge, which in turn improves their confidence. Increased knowledge confidence combined with the right culture leads to ownership.
  • Ownership. The training management process we put in place was more my plan than it was the team’s plan. If I had given autonomy to my subordinates to create and implement a plan, it would’ve had a better chance at surviving in the long term. Dan Pink’s book Drive speaks to this idea.
  • The development sessions allowed us to spend more meaningful time together. This not only built trust within the group, but also allowed us to get to know each other at a deeper level. Spending time with your team allows you to understand your team better. You learn their strengths and weaknesses and gain better perspective in how to guide them through challenges.

Conclusion

While it is important to spend time in both, developing your people and developing organizational processes, you will likely find that you will get more return on your investment in developing your team. Developing your people increases trust, builds their confidence, and empowers your team to reach the next level. The results can last beyond your tenure and may last a lifetime.

You’re opinion is wanted. Please comment on the following question below.

Question for readers:

  • Which approach have you found to be more effective?
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Business Rules to Improve Communication in Your Staff

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:

  1. Inform the commander to make decisions
  2. Serve our subordinate units’
  3. “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:

  1. Face-to-face,
  2. Phone call,
  3. Email

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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Welcome to Developing Your Team

Welcome to Developing Your Team.com! This site is intended to serve you, as organizational leaders. If you are a leader in any type of organization, then this site is for you.

Developing Your Team.com will focus on professional development, explore challenges facing leaders today, and will provide fellow leaders with insights and a simple plan to achieve two objectives:

  1. Provide focus to their organization
  2. Develop their team

The goal of Developing Your Team.com is to enable readers to lead with clarity and confidence.

This site may help you if:

  • If you have ever felt as though you and your organization is task-saturated and overwhelmed with the sheer volume of work ahead.
  • You and your organization are pulled in multiple directions in a constant battle with too many “important” or top priority issues
  • You struggle with carving out time to develop your team.

Developing Your Team.com will:

  • Explore organizational leadership challenges,
  • Uncover simple yet effective ideas to overcome those challenges
  • Serve as a forum for leaders to discuss leadership and professional development

The site will strive to publish posts on a weekly basis in order to provide you with relevant content and foster discussion. This site is intended to be a dialogue not a monologue, so please provide comments and feedback.

Keep an eye out for the first article to be posted with the next week! In the mean time, please let us know what you currently struggle with as a leader.

Question:

  • What challenges do you face as an organizational leader that you would like this site to address?
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