Communication: leadership responsibility 24/7

  • Published
  • By Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Sargeant
  • AFOTEC commander
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. (AFNS) --  In Jim Collins' book, "Good to Great," he states that "good to great teams consist of people who debate vigorously in search of the best answers, yet unify behind decisions, regardless of parochial interests."

Over the past year, we aligned our mission with the right location and the right manning, as we adapted to the harsh realities of manpower cuts, military and contractor conversions to civilian positions, and the need to make our processes predictable and repeatable. Lessons from our transformation experience highlight the importance of leaders and supervisors at all echelons of command unifying behind decisions and continually and accurately communicating the changes, and the reasons behind the changes, to their subordinates.

Some of our changes were the result of a changing environment, including new Department of Defense and Air Force instructions and guidance, as well as previously announced manpower and current and future budget cuts. We began the transformation with a top-to-bottom self-examination manpower study and asked how we could maximize the productivity of our people conducting the mission as we shrank from 731 to 625 military and civilian billets. Our manpower study was based on the theme of the right mission, right person, right place, and that theme helped us determine the adjustments that needed to be made to ensure the best match of billets, roles and responsibilities.

Using the results of the manpower study, we realized that about 70 percent of our people were at Kirtland Air Force Base, where we did not conduct Operational Test and Evaluation. That left only about 30 percent of our manpower at our four geographically separated detachments to actually perform our mission of OT&E.

Clearly, the detachments were undermanned to conduct the operational test mission, and our headquarters was overstaffed to fulfill the standardization, policy and resource-support mission of a typical headquarters.

Armed with the manpower information, we went to work transferring billets to the right location, enabling adequate manning for our detachments to assume responsibility for planning, executing and reporting our test mission.

We also adjusted the roles of our headquarters staff to empower the detachments, as more of the responsibility for the conduct of test preparation and reporting transferred from the headquarters to the detachments.

With the change to the headquarters' more precisely defined role as one of standardization and evaluation, policy and resource support came the significant challenge of transferring the knowledge resident with the headquarters staff to the detachments.

Therefore, we embraced Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st century training and tools to empower us to codify our processes into repeatable and predictable steps in checklist form called "standard work." That enabled us to standardize how we conduct OT&E and reduce the time needed to train test teams.

Most importantly, we were able to eliminate waste in our processes, buy back time for our people and begin a journey of continuous process improvement.

However, not all of our people were always directly involved in the high-level reviews or AFSO21 events. Therefore, communication led by me, and all of our leaders and first-line supervisors, was the linchpin to success at every step of our journey.

Our journey proves the importance of all leaders needing to embrace organizational change as their own, after options are explored and command decisions are made on the way ahead.

Communicating those changes and providing the reason and vision for the change at all levels, as if the changes were their decision, are most important to move the organization and effect the change to accomplish the goals smoothly and with less of the angst and turbulence that accompanies all change.

Leaders at all echelons of command and supervision are responsible for ensuring the reasons and vision associated with change are clearly communicated to everyone in the organization. The adage that a message sent does not equal message received certainly applies in time of change, when an organization is moving a lot of "cheese."

Leaders at all levels are not just responsible for sending a message or watching their superiors communicate the vision and decisions. Leaders are directly responsible for following up and ensuring all their subordinates fully understand the details and rationale for the change so that they understand the way ahead and can better participate in implementing and refining the changes.

We have exercised several means of communication throughout our journey to better equip our organization and people to face the realities of the situation. We used tools including quarterly commander's calls and special commander-led, command-wide meetings announcing the manpower study results and resultant decisions. In addition, we employed commanders' conferences with direct interaction between me, detachment commanders, directors, technical advisors and superintendents, posting the outbrief from each event on the intranet and hosting a commander-led AFSO21 training day.

As the commander, I took the opportunity again on training day to explain the reason why we were changing and using the AFSO21 tools. Significantly, our technical advisors shared the results of AFSO21 events with the entire organization.

We also developed and distributed several publications to communicate the details of our change and vision both for our internal and external audiences. We developed our strategic plan (defining our vision and way forward), forging our culture (articulating our priorities and goals), program manager and test director toolkits as handy reference tools for test team and our partners to use on a daily basis. However, all echelons of command must embrace and continually and consistently articulate the change and communicate the rationale, while ensuring the change is being embraced by their subordinates.

Communication and follow-up is how we will sustain the momentum we've established with our people who are now leading our organization to new levels of excellence. Many of our people are embracing change and refining our movement forward. We will need all of our team to buy into the changes to achieve an environment of continuous improvement.

Only leaders who embrace and lead the change completely can ensure every team member understands why the change is necessary and positive so that they can fully embrace it.

In C.K. Prahalad's June 2010 article entitled "Why Is It So Hard to Tackle the Obvious?" in the Harvard Business Review, he states: "During a corporate transformation, the 'forgetting curve' is sometimes more important than the learning curve."

One example of preparing our leaders to embrace and explain the changes was our insistence that they participate in our AFSO21 events. We selected them not only for their expertise and leadership, but to empower them to communicate the firsthand knowledge that they had gained in the AFSO21 event.

As our leaders at all levels returned from an event, it was imperative that they share not only the new checklist and way of doing business, but also the message of the importance of standard work and why we are making changes in our organizational roles and responsibilities as well as our processes.

Also, they needed to insist that their people begin to use the new processes and move beyond the previous way of doing their jobs.

The commander is not solely responsible to communicate the message about change if all are to embrace and sustain the change. Rather, all leaders and staff share the responsibility as they directly interact with the commander to understand and execute the organization's change as if they were the originator of the change.

Communication is a 24/7 job, and often leaders must restate their guidance and message 10 times or more before everyone "gets" the message.

Everyone has a responsibility to seek clarification if they don't understand their role in the changed environment. Supervisors have the responsibility to ensure they can clearly and accurately articulate the guidance and reason for change.

After that, we all have a responsibility to affect the change. Communication and follow-up are important ingredients in leading change and maintaining positive momentum in creating a culture of continuous improvement when facing the harsh realities of organizational change.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates' direction for a review of critical support policies that affect the entire Department in order to create a flatter, more agile and efficient organization illustrates that AFOTEC is not alone in our need to increase efficiency while at least maintaining, if not enhancing, effectiveness within each of our organizations.

Communication will be key to implementing changes essential to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our warfighting operations.