A Recipe for Excellence (Organizational Leadership)

Regimental Ball 2019, 2D Cavalry Regiment

You’ve likely heard  Admiral McRaven’s commencement speech about starting your morning by making your bed. His message is about how excellence starts with a simple task that sets the tone for the day and is the foundation for greatness. General McChrystal talks about this speech and building organizations that recognize and marginalize risk in order to accomplish greatness in his newest book, Risk: A User's Guide .  I would recommend it to anyone that wants to enhance their leadership database. With those in mind, I want to talk about the consistency and alignment of efforts that go into building organizations. 

I’ve learned that big changes are necessary sometimes, but they will lack the lasting effects we hope they will. Instead, we need to focus on micro adjustments, multiple lines of effort, and consistency if we want to make an impact that will have long term results. In the rest of this blog post, I’m going to give examples of what each one means and ways I’ve implemented the techniques. 

Micro-Adjustments

When identifying issues, look for what the real cause is by  not looking at the symptoms, but looking at the disease. You see an environment where people don’t exercise initiative and wait until they are told what to do instead of making a decision and executing. 

That’s the symptoms and the disease is the lack of trust, autonomy, and reward mechanisms for taking calculated risks. There isn’t an environment where mistakes can be made and where lessons learned are analyzed to help improve it. Instead, people are chastised for the mistakes until eventually they decide they should just go with the flow and never stick their neck out. 

As the leader, you need to ask questions to help you understand how we got there, what are the barriers, and how as a team can you make small changes that will encourage others which result in shifts to the current mentalities. 

Lines of Effort

I never like to count on one thing to solve a problem because if it fails, you are going to lose time and effort. You will learn a lesson, but you have to go back to the drawing board and try something else. Losing valuable time and in a way, you are distracted from your overall goal. 

When I look at change, I want to look at how I’m going to affect the culture from as many angles as possible. The people, tempo, training, and resources. One of the best ways to realize the barriers to morale is to ask by getting down to the lowest levels and develop a rapport that people are frank about what the issues are. Some would like to do “townhall” like meetings where they stand on a stage and expect the audience from their organization to be frank and honest about the issues. In my experience, they are helpful but never transparent. 

It just isn’t as effective as you would like and will likely produce information that will have so much negativity that others in attendance will feel heard, but not comforted. In fact, they will add to the repertoire of bad things existing in the organization. 

Instead, have small or individual conversations with folks. Listen more than you talk and take notes feverishly. Communicate to them that you can’t fix things if you don’t know about them and that you are new to this leadership position so you are coming to them as experts in the formation. 

You are looking for trends to find quick and long-term wins. When you find something that is easy to fix, fix it immediately. Individuals in the organization will see it and you will start to create trust because they will see that if they bring an issue to you, you fix it! 

Consistency

This is mortar that holds the changes together and will serve as the most important component to work effort. After you have developed your lines of effort, you will need to work the plan over and over. Every day you will have multiple touch points that directly and indirectly affect change in the organization. Because of positions in the military, I know that I need to schedule to make sure they happen. Some days the calendar drives my life. I will blink and the day will be over, so having them programmed ensures I’m working on it and also it allows us to visualize the efforts. 

A couple examples might include a leader professional development session to start my morning with one of the senior leaders in the formation where we talk about their short and long term goals or doing some type of activity with one of the subordinate elements to gain understanding of their job and roles. A discussion with an agency that helps us improve quality of life in our footprint or conducting an interview with a potential member about them coming onto the team. 

Repeat it each day and those are only some examples but there are countless more. The goal is to personally lead the changes you want to see and hopefully to see them replicated by others in the organization. This will require pointed discussions with others about why you are doing them and how you need their help. I’ve personally shouldered the load to change culture for the better part of a year and while effective, it can be exhausting. Find the people that want to help and add that as a line of effort because it also is an opportunity to mentor the individual. 

Coming back to large scale changes, sometimes there will be a fundamental problem with an organization with the only option being to remove most of the foundation. Then we can start rebuilding from the ground up but unfortunately, we can’t really do that in organizations. We will see a weak spot, remove, replace, and repeat the process. You will use the above techniques and I would add that in the process, you will identify the leaders that are change agents. Capitalize on their abilities and have them be part of your line of effort. 

The reason that I titled this post, “A Recipe for Excellence” is because this technique has lasting power. This will lead to culture change while you are there, but it will also continue to grow and expand long after you leave your position. Real excellence that exists for the long haul takes time and you need to come to the realization you won’t see most of the fruits of your labor. They will continue to develop and expand but after all, isn’t that the point of leadership? 

I hope this adds value to your life. 

~Mike