We subscribed to an emergency texting system with which we could manage an infinitely subdividable database of text numbers and e-mail addresses. If something that went wrong required instant communication with everyone, say a last-minute cancellation or an evacuation, we could instantly and simultaneously reach out to our full database of teammates working with us at the Super Bowl. We also divided the database into functional subgroups to whom we could communicate messages tailored for more specific audiences—the executive management team, department heads, the operations team, the security department, the event operations group, and many others.
The database management-and-communications system was used to keep specific segments of the staff informed with the latest operational information, such as travel times and waiting times at gates. Thankfully, we rarely had to issue a communication to the widest, all-points audience, but if our off-site staff parking or check-in facilities were inaccessible due to, say, a fire in the area or a road closure, we would have been able to reach thousands of team members with a single text message command. This system would have given us the ability to instantly contact and quickly gather the most appropriate group decision makers for coordinated responses to critical problems.
Having a method to rapidly communicate with your entire team, or with selective subgroups of key department, project, and contractor staff, can save valuable time mobilizing responses. Many organizations use e-mail distribution lists for this purpose, but I’ve found that brief texts tend to cut through the clutter and are reviewed by recipients with more urgency. It just takes a little advance planning and thoughtfulness to set up the most likely subgroups you or your organization will need to contact in a hurry. Having a predetermined place where project leaders can collect senior decision makers and gather additional teammates for assistance can also greatly reduce response time when minutes count.
On Super Bowl Sunday, the place to gather was NFL Control. But, because fans and the media could look in through the big windows facing the field just as easily as we could look out, we designated a smaller, secondary room nearby with no windows, just in case an issue was so serious or sensitive that it required the Commissioner or other publicly recognizable figures to meet with us to be briefed, provide direction, or issue decisions in the midst of a crisis. Bud Selig, apparently, did not have easy access to such a place in 2002 when his 11th-inning All-Star Game briefing was conducted in front of millions of TV viewers.
THE WEB OF COMMAND
On July 21, 1944, American forces stormed the island of Guam in the western Pacific, launching a costly, weeks-long struggle to retake territory captured 2½ years earlier by the Japanese Imperial Army. As the heated battle raged, communications between the Japanese troops and their commanders were cut off. During the ensuing confusion, surviving members of Shōichi Yokoi’s platoon evaded capture by escaping deep into the tropical jungle. In the absence of orders from their superiors, as many as 1,000 troops hid in caves and dense vegetation, succumbing over time to starvation, capture, and suicide. Yokoi, the last known survivor of the battle, was discovered by two American hunters setting fish traps in 1972, 27 years after the end of World War II. Malnourished but still under standing orders to resist capture, Yokoi attempted to disarm one of the hunters before being overcome and marched to the local police station. Yokoi was returned to Japan a few weeks later to a hero’s welcome and to a world he could not have imagined. He died in 1997 after having spent two years less time in postwar Japan than he did waiting for a new set of orders from inside a cave in Guam.
Few of us are as resolute, persevering, or as unquestioningly loyal as Shōichi Yokoi. In his story, the chain of command was irretrievably broken, and as a result, his orders stood immutably frozen for 27 years. Your team may not be able to wait even 27 minutes for direction; nor should they, when something goes wrong. Many times, things go from bad to worse precisely because of inordinate delays while the team awaits answers to questions that have made their way up the chain of command. Decentralizing how decisions get made and delegating levels of authority to members of the team along the chain of command is one of the best ways for leaders to head off emerging issues and avoid having small problems becoming bigger ones. Often, there is not just one chain of command operating at once in an organization, but many. If all those chains are elevating a combination of routine and urgent messages all at once, it is more likely the decision maker(s) at the top will be overwhelmed and timely responses to the most important issues may be delayed.
Managing my first Super Bowls, it seemed like almost every problem was elevated to someone sitting at NFL Control. I know that’s an exaggeration, and that many decisions were being made out in the field. The high volume of radio and phone traffic, however, resulted in a queue of issues waiting either for me or someone in the command center to respond to in some order or priority.
One of the areas of most frustration for our supervisors and teammates in the field, we learned, was “waiting for answers from NFL Control.” From my perspective, it felt as though an enormous number of requests for noncritical decisions from nearly every area of the business were thrown into a funnel; the funnel narrowed down to a constant, high-pressure stream to be handled by a very small number of people. So, when falling snow and ice, unfinished construction, overwhelmed gates, and long delays occupied all of our attention in the command center, we were unable or unavailable to provide direction for many routine decisions that were normally elevated to NFL Control. More decisions HAD to be made at different levels along the chain of command or in the field and on-the-spot.
There was not one decision-making chain, but multiple chains, all operating at the same time and terminating in the same place. Some were directly involved in managing the many difficult challenges that day. A great many more were not affected, but they were still sending information and requests for action on other issues to their “prime decision maker” at NFL Control.
In the aftermath, and following lengthy and exhaustive consideration, we determined that it was essential to push more authority for decision making down each chain, away from NFL Control. The command center would continue to be the location where issues of the greatest implications for the game, event, and organization were evaluated and managed, or where responses requiring the greatest degree of coordination were directed.
We delegated decision-making authority for managing many smaller, localized matters to supervisors and teammates on the ground. Along with that authority, we assigned responsibility for developing collaborative, coordinated solutions to localized problems directly between the chains of command most affected by the issue and in the best position to solve them. This interconnectivity between chains of command formed more of a web of decision making. (See Figure 10.1.)
FIGURE 10.1. Web of Command
Providing quick, relatively low-cost solutions to lesser experiential problems were similarly delegated. Any teammate could take the name and e-mail address of a fan whose clothes were torn by a sharp edge on a barricade or stained by a dirty seat and agree on the spot that we would pay for repair, replacement, or dry cleaning without getting clearance from NFL Control. (What’s a $15 cleaning bill on an $800 ticket?) A gate supervisor was assigned to every security checkpoint who could make decisions on better organizing queues, call directly for maintenance or repairs, or communicate with other gates to divert excess traffic to less-crowded locations. In addition to streamlining decision making and enabling NFL Control to better focus on handling bigger, more impactful, and more encompassing problems, this new redistribution of authority also resulted in the entire team taking a greater ownership over their personal contribution to the fan experience at the Super Bowl.
To be entirely accurate, the ultimate decision maker at the NFL on any given day is, of course, the commissioner and above him, the owners of the 32 football clubs. On Super Bowl Sundays, the authority to make operational decisions had been delegated to those of us at NFL Control, and we only oc
casionally had the need to elevate problems up to those highest of levels.
Think about how the chains of command for your business, department, or project are structured. When the most senior levels of management are absorbed with so much routine decision making that teammates regularly spend an inordinate amount of time waiting for answers, the organization is not well positioned to respond to an unfolding problem or crisis. In such an environment, important deadlines can be threatened, small problems can fester into big ones, and things that could have been made to go right go wrong. Define what kinds of challenges, questions, or problems need to be elevated to the highest levels, and what can be handled on the supervisory or field level. Identify the limits on financial impacts of decision making. That is, determine the cost, if any, that you will allow each level in the web of command to commit to in solving localized problems.
When something does go so awfully wrong that senior management is entirely absorbed defusing an existential problem, we cannot allow a rigid decision-making structure to cause every decision to stall, or operations to grind to a halt. Shōichi Yokoi spent 27 of his prime years hiding in the jungle waiting for orders that would never come because he and the rest of his unit were given no authority to make decisions if the chain of command was interrupted. Before being faced with a crisis, identify and communicate how you expect each level along the web of command to operate when the focus of senior management is diverted to solving more major problems. Identify one or more interim decision makers who senior management can rely upon to manage routine operations; pass along to senior management only information that is relevant to solving a bigger problem.
Streamlining and decentralizing decision making may require a decided culture shift in your organization. Developing a team-oriented culture focused on collaborative problem solving is the next step in preparing to handle the things that may go wrong.
11
BUILDING A SUPER TEAM
Successfully managing a problem when something does go wrong starts long before any challenge even has a chance to present itself. It begins with finding, enlisting, training, and managing the staff, colleagues, contractors, and vendors who you will trust not only to do their jobs to make things go right, but also to help avert disaster when things don’t.
If you build a team and can’t trust them to do their job and do it well, you have one of two significant issues: (1) you either have the wrong team; or (2) you are the wrong leader. The first is avoidable, the second is fixable.
THE RAW MATERIALS OF A SUPER TEAM
Many project teams are composed of more than just our day-to-day teammates. We may require the help of outside resources such as temporary staff, third-party agencies, vendors, and independent contractors. How do our customers and business partners tell the difference between a full-time permanent staff member, a temporary employee, a contractor, or a vendor? They can’t, and we shouldn’t expect them to.
Every participant on the team represents our brand, whether he or she carries a company business card, is a vendor employee providing specialized expertise, or is a short-term, part-time laborer. In the eyes of our customers, they are all part of the brand experience and there is absolutely no difference from whence they draw their paycheck.
Our permanent event staff at the NFL was a group of 28 event planners. On Draft Day, our team numbered in the hundreds; on Super Bowl Sunday that number increased into the thousands. If any one of them did their job poorly or contributed to a bad customer experience, it didn’t matter whose employee they were. It would be our failure as far as our fans were concerned. We and our teams need to recognize and embrace this fact as soon as we can.
A team is a blended family comprising everyone who contributes to the product, service, and brand experience they provide. Since every contributor is viewed as a member of the team by the outside world, they must communicate the same messages and expectations, be adequately trained to be ambassadors of our brand, and be managed similarly, as well. In short, we must make our nonstaff team members our teammates.
Importing Teammates
It is common to bring on outside resources when we require expertise that is not resident within our company. Importing temporary talent enables us to accommodate inconsistent workloads, such as projects and seasonal spikes in business activity, without having to hire permanent staff for the busiest times and have them be idle the rest of the year.
When we bring new, transient teammates on board, the probability of something going wrong can increase if we do not imbue them with the same sense of belonging and responsibility as though they were permanent employees. That’s why I believe that we should take as much time and care to qualify temporary employees, contractors, and vendors as we do for full-time staff.
Our onboarding and training regimen for a temporary workforce includes: how to dress and behave in the workplace, how to invoice or report work hours, how to fill out expense reports, and how to report an illness. These and other processes are all very important operational necessities, but are simply procedural instructions. So, too, are most job descriptions (or for vendors, scopes of work), which are often just lists of what each teammate’s specific responsibilities will entail. None of these truly inspires, motivates, or creates a teammate out of anyone.
We can add great value to our orientation strategy by adding an hour or two to share not only “what and how we do things” but “why we are doing them.” This provides temporary teammates and vendors, along with permanent staff, with a greater sense of our collective purpose. What can be even more transformational is an overt admission that our success is in their hands. By sharing how and why we will rely on them, individually and together, we begin to instill a sense of shared ownership in the end result. Teammates begin to appreciate how their individual jobs matter, and how they fit into the bigger picture.
I like to communicate these perspectives in person, in sessions that blend permanent, temporary, and vendor staff. When we do this, we further break down the walls otherwise defined by who people work for; this is a vivid demonstration that we are all part of the same team. It is one thing to require permanent and temporary staff to attend a team-building orientation. But, is it realistic to expect key vendor staff to participate as well? You bet it is. In fact, make it mandatory if you can. If they are reluctant, they may not be the right partner for you. Wouldn’t you like to know that they might not work as part of a collaborative team before something goes really wrong?
Specifications versus Expectations
When we first compose our team, we start filling our roster with the most important position players, the people with the skill sets that our business or project requires—designers and engineers, accountants and analysts, planners and marketers, operating staff and subject specialists. Perhaps we already have a core team in place or must manage a project team stocked with “volunteers” from our company’s internal departments. Often, corporate titles and job descriptions, and if we’re lucky, actual skills, will define the individuals best applied to the effort. If nothing else, they already know the processes, procedures, and politics of the corporate environment.
If you can be selective for any of the essential functions, it is relatively easy to identify candidates with the technical or operational expertise you require. With a minimal investment in time and training to indoctrinate them with knowledge of the nuances, idiosyncrasies, and processes of your project, you will soon be able to trust these people to get the job done to your specifications. But, more importantly, will you also be able to trust them to deliver to your expectations?
What’s the difference between the two? Anyone who has managed people knows that having a team of good, hardworking people who faithfully and meticulously follow specific instructions and processes is the hallmark of an efficient, productive organization. These tireless, often selfless workers can methodically apply proven procedures, meticulously adhere to exacting schedules, complete complex checklists with precision, and
contribute to guiding the process from Point A to Point Z. You can trust these dedicated, talented teammates to routinely make things go right way more often than they might otherwise.
Expectations, however, can and should go well beyond simply meeting specifications. To contribute to success in a more impactful way, removing threats and dealing with their consequences, our teammates need to be able to think three steps ahead, to imagine and plan, and to respond to things that go wrong with creative and effective solutions that are not necessarily written in an operating manual. Our expectations should also include teammates proactively collaborating with their colleagues across the organization to identify and manage weaknesses, threats, and areas of concern. If they do, we have a much easier time trusting them to do what is required without constant direction and that they will contribute to getting things back to right when things go wrong.
Trust: The Common Denominator
By now, I’m sure you’ve grasped the common denominator in delegating responsibility and authority—trust. This is very easy to say and extremely hard to live by. After all, it challenges the pervasive ideology that the careers of staff members are solely in the hands of their superiors. The truth is a leader’s career is just as much in the hands of the team. Successful recovery when things go wrong will be just as reliant on the skillful contributions of individual team members as on the deft management of their leaders.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 12
