Overcommunicate: F-16s and Leading

In April of 2010, I took a ride in an F-16 fighter jet out of Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, AZ. Partway into the one hour, 45-minute ride I was feeling a bit queasy. Just like driving a car, you tend not to get car sick when you’re behind the wheel but when you’re in the backseat those chances go up exponentially - apparently a fighter jet is no different.

So when I told my pilot, call-sign ROMMEL, that I was turning a bit green, he asked if I wanted to fly. Of course, I let out a big, “UM YEAH!?” He taught me the process for transferring ownership of the control stick and it went something like this:

ROMMEL: “You’ve got the stick.”

Me: “I’ve got the stick.'“

ROMMEL: “You’ve got the stick.”

Me: “I’ve got the stick.”

Left: Safely on the ground in front of our F-16 Fighting Falcon; Right: A selfie with a BlackBerry phone at 14,000 feet and approaching Mach-1.

Back on planet Earth, six years ago Classroom Champions starting doing an annual organizational survey to look at culture, engagement, productivity and more amongst the whole team.

One of the pieces of feedback that we received really surprised me: 

Team members felt like WHY we were doing things was still a mystery. They wanted to know more about our objectives and strategy. In other words — the “why” behind our tactics. 

I expected to see room for improvement but this one caught me off guard. Surely we’d had a team meeting where we told everyone about our strategy?

Now, hindsight being 20/20, I can see the problem: the objectives and strategy were obvious to me and a couple of our leaders. But we hadn’t made them obvious to everyone else. 

When you're in a leadership role, you typically know everything. Not everything of course, but you tend to have a 360 view of the organization or your department. You know the strategy, the objectives - the big picture - and what success looks like. You know what’s goin’ down (or at least you should).

But not everyone else knows what you know. Your team members aren’t immersed in all the organizational details that you are. 

Along with their day-to-day on the job, they have other personal priorities competing for mental space, too. They have families, mortgages, dogs to take to the vet, kids who need help with their homework, community obligations, and all the other things that make up a life. 

Their job is one part of their life, not the whole picture. Rightfully so. 

As a result, they’re not going to hear (let alone remember) every word you say in a meeting or put into an email.

This might sound super obvious to you. But it took me a while to get it, because in sport, everybody has the same goal: to win. 

The coach, the owner, and every single person on the team is focused on the same goal. 

Communication is a given. No parts of the game plan are hidden. 

As an athlete, I woke up every single day with a set of very clear goals. I knew what I had to do to get better. My coach told me what to do, and I did it. 

As leaders, we have a responsibility to make sure people on our team know what they need to know. 

As F-16 pilots, we needed to ensure each of us knew what was happening by repeating the information.

If I want to make sure that team members know, understand, and remember something, I need to do more than communicate. I need to overcommunicate.

By the way, this is especially true when you’re a mostly remote organization, like Classroom Champions. Because people are in meetings, but they also likely have their email open, their Slack open, their text messages dinging them, and maybe a few online shopping carts going as well. I’m as guilty as everybody else: when you’re not sitting in a room together, it’s easier to miss stuff.

When I got the feedback from the survey, I realized we needed to communicate a lot more.

So here are a few things we did: 

• Organization-wide integration into Strategic Planning.

  • This was a proactive measure we put in place. We worked with the board for the highest level goals, objectives, and inputs. Then with leadership to refine the inputs. Then leadership worked with their teams to refine how they would achieve the inputs and goals for each objective. 

  • There have been a couple outcomes from this: first of all, everyone has a better understanding of the overall strategy and how they tie into it on a regular basis. The second outcome is the strategy and the inputs are materially better.

• Friday shout-outs and information. 

  • A concept I picked up from Brent Allardyce, a founding partner of Allardyce Bower Consulting.

  • Provide deliberate messaging to the organization on who’s doing what, who’s doing outstanding work, how the organization is doing relative to our objectives, and what updates in the great space are relevant for us.

  • My goal is to do this at least two Fridays per month. Sometimes I hit it; lately I’ve been struggling.

• Measuring of employee understanding and perception of the strategy.

  • We include a Vision and Focus area in our annual organizational surveys to gauge, on a year-over-year basis, if we’re hitting out goals to have greater understanding through communication and integration.

This is definitely a big area of improvement for me. So I’m interested to hear what some of you leaders out there think and what you do to communicate with your team beyond regular meetings and the like. If you’ve got any words of wisdom, I’d love to hear what you think!

- Steve

More about that F-16 flight: I “expertly” flew the F-16 that day over Arizona. We flew over the Grand Canyon, flew low over Lake Powell, and I got to fly barrel rolls over the deserts of Arizona. It was an awe-inspiring and humbling experience where I gained an incredible amount of respect for our Armed Forces and the people who we entrust our security to.

We met with the K9 Unit and Bomb Squad, and gave a motivational talk to the entire base. Brigadier General Neubauer, who commanded the base to shake our hands (I was there with my teammate Curt Tomasevicz, and skiers Brian Wilson and Shannon Bahrke, who helped arrange the entire trip) was the commander of the 56th Fighter Wing, Luke Air Force Base, Ariz. He led the largest and only active-duty F-16 training base in the world with more than 160 F-16s assigned.

To this day, a huge thank you goes to the soldiers on that base for that day and everything