Rearview Mirrors
I was stationed at the Pentagon from 1985-1988, and when I left, the most awesome gift I received was a picture of the Pentagon in a rearview mirror. That picture is above. It was said back then that any good officer and good leader would be the happiest when the Pentagon was in the rearview mirror and their tour of duty there was over.
Back then, I knew exactly what they meant as I left the staff job I had at the Pentagon and headed back into a mission meaningful leadership role. At that point so early in my career, I was misearable in a job where I felt that the urgency was minimal and the actual mission contribution was slight at best. When I first received my assignment orders to the Pentagon, I was ecstatic with the opportunity to be at the pinnacle of planning and the home of what was supposed to be the critical budgeting and support planning for those troops in the field. Unfortunately, what I found at the staff level was bureaucracy beyond belief and years of toil to get anything of meaning done.
In business, I’ve found something very similar – the further you are away from the actual revenue generating activities, the less the urgency and the greater the bureaucracy. In a start up, the headquarters functions are often times directly tied to the revenue and income generating activities. As a company grows, the separation widens as more program sites enter the picture and more abstraction occurs between those that serve the clients and those that feed the beast of bureaucracy. When a company exits “small business” and enters the ranks of “mid size”, the web of bureaucracy is growing faster than the mission needs and the administrative costs tend to outpace the competitive burden that is acceptable. And finally, when a company exits the mid size growth journey and enters the large size business category, the time to get anything done rivals the Pentagon and those that thrive in such an environment come straight from the Dilbert cartoon clips.
When I left the active military, I promised myself I’d never work in a big company – I’d been influenced too heavily against such a thing by being tormented by the Pentagon at such a young age. For over eight years I lived up to that promise and I deftly navigated my career through various start up and rapidly growing companies where the policies and process of the bureaucracy were pushed aside to focus on the exciting opportunities on the near horizon. But then I faced an incredibly tough decision – violate my “no staff” and “no big company” promise to myself or live with the highly unacceptable alternative of working for a new boss who had no understanding of the journey that had been taken. I chose the former and then slapped myself at least once a quarter from that point forward as the black hole of corporate process slowly sucked me in.
I’ve learned an awful lot during my time on staff throughout my 26 years in the military and business…and I want to share some of those lessons with you:
(1) A staff doesn’t have to be a black hole, but most military and big company staffs end up being that way because the measure of maturity is based on process and not progress.
(2) The depth of the black hole is inversely equivalent to the average years of mission serving experience that exists on the staff. I remember so vividly how fun it was to work for operational commanders at the Pentagon – they just wanted to get things done – and I remember even more clearly how frustrating it was to work for those that came from other staff jobs and focused primarily on process and quality of packages produced.
(3) The time to process any action through a staff is directly proportional to the breadth of organizational components that exist on a staff. A staff exists to literally “staff” or coordinate on things that need to be done. So, anything that flows through an organization for approval and action must by definition be staffed through each organizational component.
(4) When things don’t get done, the obvious answer is “we need more staff”. That has to be an answer because its that same staff that isn’t getting things done that is thus making a staffing decision in response to things not getting done, and in that answer determining mode they decide that more things would get done by hiring more staff.
(5) Every staff loves to model and every staff can find a model that reflects what they want to be which isn’t necessarily what they ought to be.
(6) And the kicker of them all, every staff I’ve had any visibility into defined the budget process and then approved their own budgets. Since size of staff and size of budget are two very key items on resumes, why wouldn’t numbers of people and size of budget for any staff function continue to grow so that any functional staff leader can maximize both.
With all this being said, here’s nirvana to me:
— any staff element is headed by someone that was first at the operational and mission serving level
— the staff budget is built by the staff but approved by the organizational components they serve
— if those being served do not feel the value of the service equals the costs being proposed, they have full authority to go elsewhere or to hire their own staff members
— each staff element provides quarterly “staff reports” to those being served no different than the quarterly board meetings required by those business units in the company portfolio
— each staff member being recruited is interviewed by those that will ultimately be served by that staff
— bonuses and pay increases for the staff leaders get vetted and approved by the organizational elements served by that staff
— each staff role is a maximum of 3 years and then the staff leaders must rotate back into a mission serving role
— any assessment of the staff to speed up the process and increase efficiency is provided by experts outside the staff and not being paid by the staff being assessed
— every year, at least 15% of the staff must rotate off of or out of the staff; personnel evaluations should clearly indicate who the least successful members of the staff are and those should be the first ones considered for re-assignment to better fitting jobs
— twice a year, every member of the staff must visit an operational element of the business and brief them on what they do for the business at the staff level
Some would say this just isn’t possible, but I’d beg to differ. I bet it’s being done somewhere.
That might be my next quest – to find that organization that best reflects nirvana at the staff level to me. Till then, I’ll keep looking at that picture of the Pentagon in the rearview mirror and realize that the joy I felt in leaving could have been tears of sadness if it had been nirvana.