Unbound with Chris DuBois

I skipped philosophy in college. But if you want to learn an easy way to align your organization to how you want things run, do not skip this episode. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. Welcome to unbound where today we are going to talk command philosophies. So a command philosophy is a way of looking at the world to series of beliefs that are going to dictate how your organization runs. And in the absence of leadership, it's that guiding principles, right that everyone can follow. So in Word, it's really how you're going to run the business, whether you're there or not, it aligns everyone so that they know what path to follow. Providing a command philosophy is a great way to keep everyone on the same page, right? Everyone does, he's in the army, I did mine a bit different because it holds a lot more practical experience from the business world, primarily because I took command of a battalion first stint while I was in the Army Reserve. And so I had experience from both sides from growing up active duty in the army to then working in the reserve and having a good experience working with startup founders and working in a marketing company. And so I want to share my ideas. And hopefully, it'll spark some ideas for your organizational philosophy, because a lot of these do pertain to the business world as well. So I'm gonna go through the points in here, and you can decide what works for you. So number one, reputation is the quickest path to getting what we need. If you want immediate assistance from our higher headquarters, we need to be the unit they never have issues with. Want to recruit more soldiers, we need to be the unit that provides the best career opportunities and work life balance, we want to get more schools need to be the unit that fills slots, and successfully graduates more soldiers more often than the rest. Our reputation is our brand. It's how we do business. And it's proof of what we're able to deliver. Our reputation will command respect to winning ideas can come from anyone, I will never be the smartest person in the room. Your leaders may never be the smartest, you may never be the smartest, we all bring something different to the table. And that needs to be leveraged. More than we love winning, we need to hate losing. And that means accepting the best idea no matter who presents it, leaders will maintain the responsibility of signing on courses of action, but everyone can and must contribute. Number three, the simpler you make a system more likely people will follow it. The confused mind will always say no and army systems forms and programs will never be simple. It's a hazard of the profession. The role we can take is to simplify everything we require with our internal systems. The battalion staff will facilitate this companies should facilitate this. Sometimes, the fastest way up is to skip a step, just ensure you don't stumble. Number four. Rarely is anything black and white. The question should never be did we do it? but rather how well did we do it? Our world works in shades of grey and by boxing ourselves into yes or no options, we limit our abilities to improve. When we fail, we need to identify why and how we failed. We need to identify what we did right. This leads to success. Number Five speed is a competitive advantage. The faster we can complete a task, the more successful we become. When we move fast, we either win fast or we learn fast learning fast means we often get to take a second swing at the target. When other units are still trying to get started. We'll have learned our lessons achieve our goal and be on to the next thing. The Army Reserve is a slow organization. Most units fall into the flow of we'll do it next month. This breeds inefficiencies and failure. Imagine the difference if you cut your normal response from next month or next week to today. Not everything is that urgent, but not everything takes as long as you think. If we can do the simple things quickly, we win faster and with more time for our personal lives. Number six, there are two ways to learn fast, blunt force trauma and repetition. Similarly, we have two ways to accomplish a mission, preparation or perspiration. Personally, I like preparing and getting in Rhett's it takes it may take longer on the front end, where we're setting ourselves up for success in the long run. Number seven focus your attention. As humans we are terrible at multitasking. No one is as good as they think they are. The same problems arise when we pack too many events or requirements in a constrained timeline. The word priority was singular until the 1900s. Be deliberate and picking your focus and aim for one win at a time. It's counter. It sounds counterintuitive, but carrying multiple priorities without a single Focus leads to failure. Finally, metrics are leading and lagging indicators of our work and training. Some units prioritize metrics, this is flawed logic, we will prioritize the actions that lead to earning those metrics. When evaluations fall behind, because we didn't do our job, when our physical fitness scores are low, it's because we weren't training when our marksmanship scores are high, it's because we did the proper training, focus on the actions you take to achieve our target metrics. And we'll have a unit that's better trained and more flexible, create systems to do the work, not achieve a number. Alright, so that is, those are my number eight different things that I said I want to have as critical points for running my organization. And now I have to have the as the standard bearer for all of these. And so I need to hold people accountable to following this command philosophy. At the same time, everyone else in the unit, right, all of my company commanders, all of their, you know, their company. So as soon leaders, anyone else in this organization understands what the expectation is, because we have laid it out right in front of them. So they can run their their units in the same manner that I am running the overall battalion. And it just makes it easier for everyone to stay on the same page and have alignment. And so if there's ever a question of, Hey, should I should I move faster on this? Right? They know speed is a competitive advantage. So as long as I'm not doing something stupid, yes, I can go ahead and take that, Hey, am I multitasking right now? Am I packing too much stuff in here. And just so that, you know, I can have a great storyboard that I'm sending up, you know, as a situation report later, it probably means that my training isn't gonna be as good. So I don't actually come back, have really good training, make sure my soldiers are ready to go. That's what's going to win the day. And so hopefully, you take something from this. Again, a lot of these are super applicable to the business world. And so there are definitely some things that you can pull from here you can include in your own philosophy, and I would strongly encourage everybody makes their own. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership, visit leading four.com And as always deserve it