Standard Part 2
Summer Transition and the inevitability of change
The Distro is a military themed weekly newsletter designed to help make all leaders and organizations more effective. Newsletter topics include decision-making, strategy, risk, uncertainty, command, organizational theory, military operations, history, and leadership. I explore these topics through personal stories, ideas from books, lessons from history, military doctrine, and fictional stories.
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This essay is a sequel to my essay Standard and pulls together themes from my essays Tools and Process.
My unit is coming out of our summer transition period. For my civilian audience, summertime is the Army’s PCS season - when most soldiers move from one army base to another and start in a new position. This is always a very turbulent time for units because key personnel leave and take with them several years of experience with their unit. For some units, this can be a fresh start as substandard leaders move on to other assignments and new leaders of a higher caliber assume responsibility. But the reverse can also happen.
There isn’t always a change in quality, but there is always a change in personality. One great leader can be replaced by another great leader, but the change is often turbulent in and of itself. People will often stress the fact that the constant change in leaders heightens the importance of establishing robust systems and processes, but what is often missed is that systems and process, as I wrote about in my first essay, are almost always the result of the personalities of the people who lead and influence the organization. A great leader can establish great systems and processes, but when he leaves, the system that he created based on his personality is bound to leave as well.
When I was a lieutenant, we had an operations officer (known as an S3) who was really brilliant, and he called himself a “systems guy,” which was no exaggeration. He had our systems wired tight. We knew exactly how things were supposed to be processed and exactly how things were supposed to run. But when he left, everything had to change by necessity.
The S3 had established great systems and processes, but he was an instrumental part of those systems. He knew everything that was going on in the unit, and he had established relationships with other units and outside agencies that gave him a huge edge in decision making—he could see things coming that no one else could see, and he had an intuitive feel for the organization.
His replacement was a top-notch officer. He was highly intelligent, focused, and organized, but he wasn’t the same guy as the first S3. He tried to maintain the same systems that preceded him, but he quickly saw that it just wasn’t possible. The previous S3 was simply too instrumental to the processes to maintain them as they were. So, things had to change rapidly.
The performance of the unit suffered for a few months as we adjusted to the new S3, though we eventually recovered. But when we recovered, our systems and processes looked much different than they had before. They weren’t better or worse, but they were very different. The major downside was that all the time and energy that we had spent codifying our old systems and processes in order to be resilient to change ended up being wasted. We had created many different standard operating procedures and written many documents explaining exactly how things were supposed to run. But in the final analysis, all of those products were, for the most part, useless. We could have simply operated under the old system without spending the time to codify every detail. Furthermore, we would have been more open to change and more agile when the new S3 arrived, because we would have been less anchored on the old way of doing things.
“The major downside was that all the time and energy that we had spent codifying our old systems and processes in order to be resilient to change ended up being wasted.”
So, before you spend dozens or hundreds of man-hours codifying systems and processes, think about other ways to make your organization more resilient to changes in leadership. Trying to carbon copy a living breathing organization from one senior leader to another won’t be as effective as you think it will.
This is the off-ramp for free subscribers—I hope you enjoyed this essay!
Paid subscribers can continue reading to get my thoughts on one way to build a more resilient organization.
Some may argue that the first S3 did a poor job constructing the systems and processes because he made himself the single point of failure, such that the system would fail without him. Systems, one might argue, should be robust enough to withstand major changes in leadership. Maybe that’s true, but if talented officers like him cannot construct a robust system, I am not sure who can or what skillset one could teach to make that possible. I have also never seen it; change and turbulence are, from my experience, the rule not the exception, no matter how brilliant a leader is.
So, leaders should accept that when key personnel move around, the systems will likely die and must be reborn. Knowing this makes you think differently about how you spend your time, how you lead your organization, and how you prepare for transition. For military leaders especially, you will lead and act differently if you know that things will change drastically as soon as you leave your organization.
This is why I think that the use of tools is so important. If you introduce great tools that wield an enormous amount of leverage over the organization, and then train people how to use them, systems will start to emerge on their own. If you focus on training people on the power of the tools, and help them understand just how useful they are, the change in leadership will be far less disruptive. As long as the new leader doesn’t ignore the tools entirely, which some will, then the organization, not necessarily the systems and processes, will be much more effective and resilient to change.
The best example is the digital infrastructure of an organization. I am a huge fan of Microsoft Office365, especially Teams and SharePoint (though they have their problems), because of the impact they can have on the organization as it goes through a transition. If the digital infrastructure is set up correctly, things like slide templates and plans for routine events can be saved and easily referenced. They can also be easily changed to meet the needs and preferences of the new leadership.
“If you introduce great tools that wield an enormous amount of leverage over the organization, and then train people how to use them, systems will start to emerge on their own.”
To that end, in my current unit, the Knowledge Management Officer and I created a “staff onboarding” week where we focused a huge part of the instruction on teaching people how to use the digital infrastructure. Our ambitions for the program far exceeded what we were eventually able to scrape together, but at least it got people moving in the right direction. Simply getting people to give up on the practice of creating multiple versions of the same document, and instead use the collaborative tools with internal version control was a huge win. It wasn’t the greatest onboarding program, and there is a lot of improvements we can implement for next time, but it was better than doing nothing.
Continuity isn’t always Virtue
Sometimes an organization is so poorly run, or the vision of the new leader is so different, that continuity is a roadblock, not an asset.
When Elon took over Twitter, he wasn’t trying to preserve the old ways of doing things. He took over for the sole purpose of changing everything to accord with his new vision. This isn’t statement about whether he is right or wrong, but it demonstrates that continuity wasn’t the point. The same was true with Alan Mullaly when he took over as the CEO of Ford Motor Company in 2006. Ford was failing, and Mullaly was there because it was failing. Why would he have wanted to maintain continuity in an organization that was on the ropes?!
Continuity is only valuable insofar as the organization that is changing leadership is trying to preserve its previous success. But success is rarely a result of systems and processes. Rather, success is almost always the result of leadership and teamwork, both of which cannot be quantified and can only be vaguely described. To underscore the point of the previous section, tools can be very valuable when they enable teams to work together more efficiently. Tools are the most valuable when they build trust and understanding amongst the members of an organization. But tools can only help, they cannot build an organization without strong leaders who and motivated people.
The best way to maintain continuity of a winning organization is to ensure that the new set of leaders learns the strengths and weaknesses of the people in the organization and has the leadership skills and emotional intelligence necessary to get them to work together. This is what I did when I handed over command of my company to a new commander. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about systems, but we did spend a lot of time talking about the people in the organization—who to trust, who to develop and how, and who to marginalize to prevent damage.
Azimuth Check
I hope you all are starting to see how all of themes of The Distro are tied together. As I continue to write, I find it harder and harder to exclude all of the themes that I could relate to the topic at hand. This is the Subscriptions to the newsletter have continued to rise at an increasing rate, and I know that most new subscribers are not as familiar with the foundational essays and ideas that I wrote about when this was still “Austin Caroe’s Newsletter.”
To help point new subscribers in the right direction, I am working on a newsletter that is a collection of heuristics, aphorisms, and rules of thumb for leading organizations that are backed up by and linked to many of the essays that I wrote in 2021 and 2022. When I release it, probably near the end of the year, it will be an excellent roadmap to The Distro.
I really hope that you will consider sharing The Distro with others, especially with newer and younger leaders (both military and civilian) who are looking for some leadership direction.
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Have a great week!