Welcome to the second of 72 posts from this humble airman. Today’s post might seem like it should have been last month’s post: Beginnings!
The Air Force may or may not want you to believe that things start with beginnings, but allow me to begin with a reminder: despite being an Air Force officer, any of the contents herein are my own thoughts and opinions and I do not write on behalf of the Air Force in these posts.
Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings, musings, and — hopefully on occasion — insightful writing.
With all that, let us begin.
Really, the entire focus of this post has to do with me arriving at a new duty station for a new job in a new function after having nearly a month to prepare for it all. This makes the potential for a very long post incredibly strong, but I’ll do my best to keep it under 1000 words. Maybe 2000.
We’ll see.
Approaching A New Beginning
Like any officer should be, I am always behind on the list of books I think I want to read. Even as I write this, I have been about half way through a book for over four months, now…
The book I’ve been working through is called The First 90 Days. It describes a way to guide yourself through that initial employment phase in which you feel enthusiastic but somewhat useless for maybe 4-8 months.
I figured that I wanted to become useful as fast as possible. After completing two assignments, it seemed reasonable to expect to take about 6 months, but finding a book offering closer to 3 months for getting up to speed struck me as well worth checking out.
With much of July spent at home rather than in the office, it’s difficult to pin a starting point for my first 90 days, but I can just as well not worry too much about that — the principles within the book are more valuable to reflect upon here.
I did run into some obstacles attempting to learn the offered process in the book, but even getting half way through the general steps feels like it has been useful. The ten chapters are ordered as follows:
Prepare Yourself
Accelerate Your Learning
Match Strategy to Situation
Negotiate Success
Secure Early Wins
Achieve Alignment
Build Your Team
Create Alliances
Manage Yourself
Accelerate Everyone
Weeks before the PCS and perhaps two weeks after, I spent a lot of time playing games and moving into our house, but also took a few hours here and there to think through how to introduce myself into this new environment.
Preparing myself involved using this book’s guidance to think about what I might be expected to do in this new unit.
What is my purpose in this organization’s context? What have I been good at in my past jobs, and will enhancing those skills be useful here? …or will I need to develop other skills? Will I have to learn something brand new to me?
Accelerating on the On Ramp
Accelerating my learning seemed more daunting before, but now that I’ve had some time in the office, it’s been interesting to see how rapidly I am capable of learning new things. That said, I think this is the phase I am currently in, really: now that I have had a taste of the ocean, it’s time to really drown in it. More clearly, however, my given role makes more and more sense every day and I can now develop learning goals. With those learning goals, I can pursue a state of expertise that can be leveraged to amplify even more learning and the ability to make increasingly substantial impacts across my wider organization.
Key to accelerating learning is recognizing your own learning strengths and weaknesses. It’s also key to not rush into action. While learning by doing is certainly viable and valuable, there is good reason to understand the environment before trying to make changes.
…yes, even if Air Force acquisition desperately needs dramatic and sweeping change.
Anyway, it’s important to focus on what is actually valuable to learn. When you are in a program where multiple disciplines are involved, it’s rarely as simple as fixing one thing and having a great day. Resolving one problem can lead to a domino effect of positives and/or negatives. Or a lot of nothing. Maybe Action A is incredibly important, but it’s not in your disciplinary lane to concern yourself with. Maybe Event B is valuable to know about, but your time is limited and better spent learning how Process C works.
All that is to say, figure out what you need to know so you can learn most efficiently. Plenty of people will be attempting to influence you to best help them and their efforts. I don’t want to unintentionally convince anyone that everyone is trying to distract you, but you need to focus on trying to recognize what the best relationships to build soonest are.
It’s also important to learn what the organization is. It’s one thing to join a volleyball team, but there are different levels to volleyball teams: are you joining an intramural team of random people, or a team of random former athletes, or an established team that is just adding you, etc.?
I wish I had known that my previous assignment was with a relatively young organization. The only difference it would have likely made is managing my expectations better, as I recall often being frustrated with the sense that training was not established and things just felt random despite having a somewhat consistent vector.
Granted, training was not established, but had I known that was the case, I might have been less frustrated!
Hmm. I am rapidly approaching 1000 words.
My new organization has firmly established personnel and processes, but I’m disappointed but finally not surprised that there’s no apparent formal training paradigm. It was nice to feel prepared to have to teach myself a lot instead of hoping for teaching and training and being disappointed in that way.
I suppose the expectation was never stated aloud or even consciously intended, but showing up here has been a matter of getting up to speed and performing with minimal on-boarding.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there are better ways to begin an employee’s time in your organization…
Keeping The Next Beginner’s Beginning in Mind
Now to intentionally skip to the end of the process — accelerate everyone — I’ve begun a continuity book in hopes of accelerating the next new guy’s introduction to my current unit. We all know we move on eventually — there’s always an end, whether voluntary or not.
There’s always a beginning, too, and when it comes to an organization’s persistence, it can be helpful to provide those experiencing a beginning in your organization a solid foundation.
While it’s absolutely likely — if not often necessary — that each new wave of personnel will do business their own way, it’s frankly a disservice to simply pull someone in and provide no guidance whatsoever.
I have not decided how to develop my continuity book just yet; it’s more like a rambling journal that focuses on my thoughts as I proceed through daily business. Since it’s electronic, I do go back and tighten it up for logic, order, succinctness, and humor (additions or removals, depending…).
Perhaps it would pay great dividends to learn the lessons learned about developing lessons learned…
Wrapping Up
I’ll have to get a bit more organized in my future posts — a personal quality demand — but I’m technically in the catch up phase on my own project — though this is for July, it’s actually already September as I write this!
I’m not going to ask as many questions as last time:
> What were your best and worst professional beginnings like?
I can share a few of my experiences from Basic Military Training and Officer Training School — I’d love to hear some of your stories!
> What are you reading?
> Do you have any lessons to share about developing lessons learned?
I’d absolutely love to hear about them if you do.
Again, I appreciate you reading through some of my rambles and thoughts. Maybe you’ve gotten something out of this, or perhaps simply enjoyed relating to certain ideas. If so, let me know!
Until next time!
72 Airman's Writings 