May 2024: Executive Officer Reflection

In this post:

I share some lessons learned while assigned as an Executive Officer.

—

31 May marked the end of my assignment as an Executive Officer.

In this post, I intend to touch on a few lessons learned from that experience.

—

Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough

This was probably the first job I’ve had with a high volume of repeated, regularly short deadlines.

Among my deadlines were annual performance evaluations, biweekly drafts for my boss’s note to the workforce, preparations for monthly mentoring, organizational administrative staff meetings, and brown bag lunches, as well as quarterly reservations and presentation preparations for full division and separate, military-only all calls.

It mattered that these different actions be completed well, but there was never any established expectation outside of myself that any of these products had to be perfect.

Especially when so many of these actions depend on the behavior of others, there was nothing but extreme, unnecessary stress waiting for me when I tried to precisely control the quality of the work I was responsible for.

Yes, “Excellence in All We Do” is an Air Force core value, but there are no bonuses for mission success in most of what we do.

Draft something, get it out there, and let conversation and feedback take place rather than burn your precious and minimal time trying to create a perfect first draft.

Be Succinct

My boss as of this writing is a colonel with Wing-commander-equivalent responsibilities. His calendar was regularly booked over 100% of the working day between 0800 and 1600, even if one of those daily hours was optimistically slated for lunch.

Even as I had all of the aforementioned deadlines, he was one of the input sources I needed to succeed through our busy days. The most efficient way to get usable inputs from my boss was to ask Yes/ No questions or politely request that he choose among a limited set of options.

The best way to frame those questions was to try putting myself in his shoes and, based on my understanding of him over time, try to guess what his answers might be. 

If you can skip asking your boss for inputs in the first place, you’re saving tons of time. If you can’t, then the simpler you can make your requests, the simpler answer you need from your boss to execute your mission.

On that note…

Aim for Simplicity

Nuance is important, but not every discussion requires nuance. 

Just ask a question or tell people what you need and let that unfold through discussion rather than baffle people with loosely tied information when it comes to short term activities.

If you are on the receiving end of a request or order, try to plan ahead based on your understanding of your stakeholders before asking questions.

This becomes easier when you…

Understand Your Networks

Early on, my boss asked me to schedule a meeting with someone whose name I’d never heard before. Without a point of contact or any contact information to work with, I was able to ask the executive administrator for a phone number and email address, but they did not provide any insight into what the person’s discipline was.

As I exited the job, I translated meeting requests into requests for briefs, potential alternate points of contact, expected topics that might include other relevant stakeholders, and where meetings might need to take place, whether in-person, in specific buildings or rooms, or online.

This is an administrative perspective, but developing this understanding can help simplify your ability to…

Focus on Collaboration

I doubt this is unique to the government, but everyone depends on everyone else. The sooner anyone can digest this concept, the sooner they will likely approach challenges with an expanded rather than narrow view.

The vast majority of value found throughout society involves solving problems. The more people affected by a common problem, the more valuable a solution to that problem becomes. This often also translates into more complex problems requiring multiple (expanded vs narrow) perspectives to generate a useful solution.

Your path to success in most any endeavor requires a willingness to collaborate with others and the follow-through to keep that focus on collaboration in mind.

Finally,

Take Intentional Risks

Bureaucracy is a painfully large monster that can only be ignored at great risk. I am not here to recommend ignoring bureaucracy.

I will, however, encourage recognizing risks, defining the likelihood, causes, and consequences of different courses of action, and making a conscious decision (or, as was more likely the case in my experience, a recommendation) based on that intentional examination.

I was not always able to get my boss’s input on things he wanted or requested beyond that initial order and sometimes just left him a note of what my intentions were as I executed something. 

Sometimes I got a note back indicating some nuance before I tried something, sometimes nothing needed to be said, and sometimes I got… let’s call it feedback after I made a move.

My evaluation isn’t due until late August, so I suppose the final verdict is still out, but anecdotally, my boss was happy with my performance over the year.

—

These aren’t lessons that require having been an executive officer to learn.

I’m sure a lot of other thoughts popped up over my year, but I unfortunately lost a lot of time and energy to write down most of my potential lessons throughout the year.

That said, if you are curious about anything above, I’d be down to discuss these or other thoughts!