Silos and bureaucracy are well-oiled machines in corporate America, but they are ultimately perpetuated by individual behavior. If we start behaving differently, we can create change. In other words, shifting your focus onto the team - or the ship as a whole, not just yourself - will have meaningful impact.
— Chris Fussell
On any high-performing team I've been a part of, putting mission first, and team before self, was always key to collective success.
There's a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.
As a leader, you must consistently drive effective communication. Meetings must be deliberate and intentional - your organizational rhythm should value purpose over habit and effectiveness over efficiency.
As a leader, you sit at a different level of perspective from your team, either with line of sight higher and across the organization structure or connected at more senior levels with your clients and partners.
Leaders in an interconnected organization must be comfortable sitting in the middle of a network, not at the top of an org-chart.
In 2010, I was an executive officer in the Navy, splitting my time between U.S. headquarters and being deployed to an international location.
How often are you really realigning yourselves on strategy? And does it need to be faster, based on how quickly your market actually changes? The answer is usually yes.
As you move up a traditional, sort of bureaucratic structure, there's a certain point at which you realize, 'Well, I'm not really on the implementation or execution side - I'm not on the battlefield. I'm an operations person who's overseeing multiple units that are out on the ground doing the job.'
Special operations are small, highly specialized. They do amazing work when they're put into the fight, but it's a limited resource. And so if we become overly dependent on an organization that's designed for a very specific mission and expect them to solve all problems around the world, you're naturally going to overextend it.
The 20th century was all about hierarchies: if you want to create something, if you want to start a country, create a product, whatever it is. Your goal is to create a highly efficient hierarchical model, scale it, because that's what the competition's doing.
In any bureaucracy, there's a natural tendency to let the system become an excuse for inaction.
A dynamic team cannot rely solely on orders; they must be able to read each others' every move so they can act as parts of a coordinated whole.
If you're trying to stay productive, stop and think, 'Are my meetings actually productive, or are we merely having meetings for meetings' sake?'
There is clearly risk associated with empowering your team to make more and faster decisions at a lowerlevel than was previously the norm. As you take your hands off the wheel, you need to be more vigilant and aware than ever about the decisions your team is making.
By providing clear objectives for your team, and setting guardrails for how they get there, you will set them on the path to success.
Most teams are naturally flat; they have fewer members than a large enterprise, which allows for intimacy and trust to form. This makes collaborative problem solving in individual teams more straightforward.
The truth is that key influencers exist in all effective organizations, but a solid-line org chart won't tell you where they are.
The reality, as the battlefield taught us, is that a 20th-century organizational system is simply insufficient for the speed of the information age.
When we first met, I was probably six layers down in the military structure, but General McChrystal at that time was a soldier's leader, and he was part of the task force. So everyone developed close relationships.
The Defense Department is prone to all of the 'traditional bureaucratic rules,' which is the same thing you'll find in most traditional government systems.
When the collective mentality of any organization is self and self-preservation first, it's a sure sign of pending doom.
The information age has ushered in a networked and interdependent world, one in which challenges and opportunities appear and disappear faster than traditional organizational models can manage.
It's difficult to feel as though you are truly being effective at work. Many of us feel trapped in endless meetings, with barely any time to grab lunch, let alone do any work. Overarching strategies and key priorities seem completely divorced from the day-to-day tactics.
Before you can trust your team to make decisions better than you would have, you need to build their capability to connect the dots.
In the military, and in business, the most elite and effective teams I've seen or been part of are filled with individuals who take responsibility for their choices. Life is a series of decisions that you make and actions you take, not a series of things that happen to you.
As I found while leading special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, if the problem is interconnected, your organization must be, as well.
If the most deeply interconnected individuals can exemplify the behaviors that your official top brass sets out, then the rest of the organization will follow suit.
Bureaucratic advancement means fewer peers, more span of control, generally an increasing information-pump function, and increased distance from the actual implementation of whatever it is the organization does.
As the insurgency in Iraq started to grow, we realized this is a connected network of individual actors that can move at light speed.
The 21st century is dominated by networks because the introduction of the information age, we can suddenly create, free flow these globally distributed, organic, shaped networks of individuals.
