Marc and Rob are once again joined by special guest Brian Russo to discuss how to build a learning-based, results focused culture, and why World War II generals were such snappy dressers.
Brian talks about giving candid feedback, sometimes brutal and the false dichotomy between honest or nice. How bringing compassion into communications results in greater impact. The fallacy off being right rather than being effective and how to reframe to achieve the desired outcome.
If someone else can do something 80% as well as you, let it ride. It’s 1000% better since out takes 0% of your time. It might even be better. You have a lot in your head and people only hear what comes out of your mouth. If you’re going to point out obstacles, people will think you’re negative unless you preface with your thought of ‘of course we’ll succeed eventually’. Don’t just verbalize the problems. “We’re gonna get there, however in order to do that we have to address these things.” Make sure you’re brining everyone along with you. This is the work.
Create a culture that will continue forward after you leave. How do you operationalize the culture so you don’t have to spend so much time being careful in communications. By investing in culture and making it a utility, the cheaper it will be to have interactions leading top success. Rather than getting caught up in trying to interpret what someone said, the team can focus on the unique challenges of the mission itself.
How to understand what is valued by the people you’re negotiating with. You can see when someone shuts down. If you go their direction but share the risk, that’s a problem. You have to get people to own the risk. I will support you 100%, but if it fails it’s on you. That can get people to negotiate more… Be transparent with what you value and why you are recommending an approach. Don’t play games.
Rob’s explains his LinkedIn post on the DoD problem of regurgitating jargon to blend into a community so you don’t stand out. Say the right thing and never have to do anything. The problems with DoD technology modernization – so much vaporware… Tons of money wasted that doesn’t make progress toward increasing and maintaining national security. Always about ripping everything apart and reshuffling and endless 3 year cycle where money is spent but nothing gets done. Should join a program, understand it, and make a plan to improve things with software. But this takes hard work and research, harder than just breaking everything and resetting. No incentive to actually execute. Just start learning and optimizing little things in preparation for larger shifts.
What happened to the strangler fig pattern for digital transformation efforts? Requires a self aware team with the right incentives that wants to execute. Some legacy systems aren’t even mapped to operational workflows anymore, but nobody wants to lose their gravy train. If your objective to to create something people can use, it’s so much more than just understanding the tech. People want to belong, saying “look at me I’m using AI”. They want to feel hip and part of the ecosystem.
The whole label of innovation is elusive. Nobody wants to define it. It’s so much theater. It comes down to organizations not wanting to define objectives or accountability.
Failure is a good thing so long as we seek to mitigate. Failure is useful data. The military doesn’t want to deal with failure. Then wrap it with saying fail fast, agile that they don’t believe. But they should to get higher ROI for warfighter and taxpayer.
“Why our Generals were more successful in WWII” by Thomas Ricks video. In WWII they didn’t fire generals who failed. They pushed them out to ensure they learned, then brought them back.
When people’s actions don’t make sense to you, try and find out how everyone is incentivized. If we have different jobs to do and don’t know it, it causes problems. Once you know, you can work together to succeed at the mission overall and everyone makes sense. If the General says it’s okay to fail, but someone on the team wants a promotion and fails, they will suffer, and they won’t okay with failure. Get all the incentives on the table. Make sure they’re close enough to collaborate and catch the turkey.
You have to be explicit in your communication and get it all out upfront. It’s too hard once you’re in the thick of things. We all need to understand and develop empathy and compassion for the people adjacent to us.
There is a level of leadership needed to create the governance between people and teams. Let’s do this, people.