A recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast covered meetings. Two or more people gathering to accomplish the business of business, as they defined it. It gave me some things I hope I remember the next time I’m organizing a recurring staff meeting…
Organize an agenda around questions-to-answer
Hold smaller meetings
Keep track and time
Meetings need agendas, just about every book I’ve read which touches on meetings agrees on this point. The agenda needs to be communicated to participants in advance, so folks can come ready to accomplish it. Folks need to know what to expect. Without an agenda meetings usually devolve into chaos, although sometimes it takes a couple aimless meetings in a row to hit this point. Staff meetings often don’t have a pre-published agenda, but they generally do have a set of topics they proceed through in a set order, and that becomes the known-agenda for the group.
To improve innovation on a team, consider building a team differently based on the problem you’re facing. There are many ways of categorizing a problem your team must solve, but one is along the axis of well-definedness.
Well-defined problems – here, you know what you’re trying to solve, you know what end-state your audience will find acceptable, maybe you’ve seen similar problems solved elsewhere or you even know some current acceptable solutions.
Everybody has a strength. Probably more than one. We are better-employed when we use our strengths. When possible, improving your weaknesses can make you a more effective individual… But we already possess our strengths and can put them to work now.
Build on My Strengths and on My Peoples’ Strengths
Know your peoples’ strengths and put those strengths to work. Build teams with a diversity of strengths. When a task lines up with an individual’s strengths, put them on that task.
When I was flight commander, supervising a group of fellow nerds with nerd jobs, I spent almost all of my time on the administrative requirements. They needed me to do the boss stuff - that was my official position!
I really wanted to do the nerd stuff though. It’s more fun, it’s my strength, and I’ve got more experience with it… I’ll admit that as the boss I had input into many nerdy problems, and having that was rewarding.
I’ve heard this quote numerous times. The falsehood evident in those words should be obvious, but these days perhaps it is not. Reality is reality, perception is perception.
Often reality and perception overlap heavily - but we don’t notice those times when our perceptions are correct. Our brains think that’s the default. There’s also almost always some amount of perception that doesn’t overlap reality - when our brain is jumping to conclusions and we are misled. These situations often don’t matter too much, and sometimes they even keep us safer than we’d be otherwise. Optical illusion is one time when perception doesn’t line up with reality.
I’m personally driven by a few ideas… Things I’m pretty passionate about. Improving cyber security in the US though education is a major one.
When I remember my goals they my action. Why do I want to volunteer to teach at a college? Why did I spend time building K-12 python, cyber security, and boolean logic short courses? Why do I look for opportunities to have my knowledgeable folks teach the rest of my folks?
One of the things every leadership course includes is some discussion of personality types. Usually everyone has to take or retake a personality test for the Myers-Briggs system. You usually go around the room at some point and talk about, or show by example, the effects of each piece of the type.
Then, at some point, they recommend building teams with a diversity of personality.
But who actually ends up doing that? Sure, any reasonably good builder of small teams and assigner of tasks considers personality when doing that job. Good managers even consider diversity of personality as one input. Who goes to their list of people and Myers-Briggs types and uses that list?*
I took a refreshing break from my staff job today to keep up my “mission qualification”, and it really re-centered me. Sim time is something only pilots used to talk about, but the new “cyber sim” concept has brought that idea into the info ops world. Stupid name, great concept.
I took my laptop out to the local library and sat in a back room one of the squadrons borrows regularly. I set out my coffee and turned my noise cancelling headphones on to the Swordfish soundtrack on repeat. I SSHed in to the cyber sim virtual machine and got started.
This can certainly be taken too far, as in “stop-and-frisk” policies, if those are examples of broken windows policing, as some suggest.
When applied to a team you’re leading, broken windows policing looks like: making sure uniforms are still sharp and worn properly, office common spaces are kept tidy, individuals are shown respect in each interaction, promises are kept, report and presentation standards are being met, and people generally meet the requirements and standards of each of their duties.
Commanders of operational units maintain their flying qualification. Most units in the Air Force aren’t flying units, but all have some mission they’re responsible for.
Remain Qualified on your Mission System
Once a quarter I should spend a day making sure I’m up to speed on the mission my folks are doing, and if possible I should get some practice actually doing it. At the least I should sit alongside folks as they execute the mission.