You Can’t Lead If You Can’t Manage

Often, it is the simple thing a leader does that helps turn a team around from failure to success.  For a team that is not making mission, leaders must take the time from their busy schedules for a detailed review of past and current performance, analyze the team’s production looking for trends and most importantly, to get an understanding of the team’s “dynamics.”  The leader seeks to gain a “situational awareness” from this review that will detail such factors as:  

• Analyze Production Activity:  Who is getting the enlistments?  Is everyone working or is there one or two RRNCOs that is carrying the production?  Who is taking a “ride”?

• Analyze Market Penetration: Where are the enlistments coming from? Are team members active in their primary market (schools) and the secondary markets or in their primary demographics?

• Determine Individual and Team Skill Level:  What is the skill level of the team, individually and collectively?  Do they have the skillsets to be successful?

• What are the priorities of the Leader:  The primary if not sole purpose of the team is to recruit and retain soldiers, if the leader is not intensely focused on the actions necessary to do that then the individual team member’s priority of activities and intensity of action will be “out of focus”.

• Is the leader coaching:  With our high turnover and low skill level of our RRNCOs, it is absolutely imperative that the leader get into the field to teach and coach.  Is the leader getting out or do they always answer their office phone?

     

Having some situational awareness based on this review that identified the symptoms, the leader then can proceed to determining the cause.   It is important that before going to visit the Team Leader that the leader try to isolate the critical factors that might be contributing to low performance. I try to break down the problem into two questions; is it the team or is it the leader.  One cautionary note, the leader (the coach) must be aware that sometimes the obvious cause for lack of success is often obscured by the not so obvious cause. That even sounds confusing to me so let me give you an example of what I mean by that phrase.     

Over a two-week period, I visited one of my teams two to three days a week.  On the first day, I spent all day with the NCOIC, from early morning to late evening, observing him in action while we visited his RRNCOs.  This team had a large geographic area with an inexperienced team that was further complicated by the NCOIC being newly assigned with very little previous leadership experience.  The team rarely made their assigned mission, was very inconsistent in production and really lacked cohesiveness.  Another indicator of trouble was that the NCOIC was frequently late on reports and these were often inaccurate.  One of the observations that I found interesting during the coaching was that the NCOIC received an average of six incoming phone calls an hour and made an average of two outgoing phone calls per hour.  I asked him if this was normal and he said that some days he even was busier on the phone.  Now think about it, here was a NCOIC spending over 30 minutes of every hour on the phone! Further analysis discovered that many of the phone calls were unnecessary, as many were the same questions asked by different team members. Crisis management leaves little to no opportunity for leadership.     

My concern was now a question as to how could the NCOIC make good decisions while operating in this chaotic environment.  Another observation, back at his office, was that there was an extreme amount of clutter with papers and yellow “stickem notes” stuck everywhere! Another symptom was that the office was dirty, not just unclean but dirty!  Was I seeing poor leadership or poor management or both? Obviously, we know that before we can be effective leaders we must know how to manage, ourselves first before others. As this NCOIC had obvious problems managing himself let alone his team, it became clear that before he could become an effective leader he had to learn to become an effective manager.  Soldiers want to be lead by good leaders but they also know that good management of resources is essential to being an effective leader.  Needless to say, leaders manage resources to enable them to lead soldiers.  What to fix first (after cleaning and organizing the office) became obvious; a leader leads and manages through effective communication.       

Having learned that a lot of communication is not always the same as effective communicating I know that often, the first challenge is to improve communications.  Surely, we have all found by now that the cell phone is often the poorest means for effective communicating due to resorting to short messages to conserve minutes, the dangers talking on cell phones pose while driving and then, owing to the convenience of the cell phone, no telephone discipline.  To reduce the cell phone calls to the leader I recommended that he send out a daily situational report by email called the “Daily Dispatch”.  The objective of the “Daily Dispatch” was to inform the Team: 

     -What the month to date enlistments by each RRNCO were

     -Total month to date enlistments for the team

     -How many enlistments were needed for each RRNCO and the Team to achieve mission 

     -Request for specific status of prospects being processed

     -Give the priority of efforts for each RRNCO and the Team

     -Any administrative or logistical requirements or messages to the team, what the NCOIC would be doing and where

     -Include a motivational message from the NCOIC 

It was recommended that the NCOIC tell all RRNCOs that they would respond by email daily, telling the NCOIC their top three priorities for the day, their prospecting and processing activities.  Additionally, all RRNCOs were told by the NCOIC to look at the regulation first before calling the NCOIC or another team RRNCO.  

Simply managing the team communications improved the operation of the team and allowed the NCOIC to focus on the other critical team challenges.  However, there was still more to do to make this team capable of achieving mission.  What to do next was the question? 

Bill Malone