Warriors In Transition: A Feature On The White Rhino Report

I have been featured on The White Rhino Report in a post called Warriors In Transition. The White Rhino Report is the blog of Dr. Al Chase, a friend and the founder of White Rhino Partners. White Rhino Partners is an executive recruiting company out of Boston, MA that as Dr. Chase so eloquently puts it"specializes in placing senior executives who are "Renaissance Men and Women," and who are entrepreneurial leaders - many of whom have had a distinguished military career and/or are Service Academy graduates and hold MBA's from top-tier business schools."

I am honored to be featured in the blog and to be working with Dr. Chase. I look forward to working alongside him to find my way into an organization where I can add value through my unique experiences and professional skill set. Below is the piece that was featured, but do yourself a favor and check out The White Rhino Report for a wide range of interesting topics as Al not only places Renaissance men and women, he is a Renaissance man himself.

Periodically in The White Rhino Report, we tell the story of a warrior who has served our nation in the military and is transitioning to a new career in the private sector. Today I am pleased to introduce the readers of the WRP to my good friend, USAF Captain Matt Bader. Matt is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, where he excelled as a member of the hockey team. He has recently returned from a deployment to Iraq. In the following paragraphs he shares some of experiences he had while serving with Tiger team in central Iraq.

Tiger Team in Iraq:

When I was deployed to Iraq I led a team of people responsible for providing contracting support to bases throughout central Iraq. There was seemingly more work to be done than could ever be accomplished, but you worked 14 hour days and did your best to prioritize the work to ensure the success of the mission. After I had been there a month or so I began to settle in and feel more comfortable in my role. Then I was assigned an additional duty as the lead of the DFAS Tiger Team. DFAS stands for Defense Finance and Accounting Service and they are the agency responsible for disbursing payments to all contractors doing business with DOD. I was charged with reducing the outstanding payments that the government owed contractors for goods, services, and construction that had been completed.

It was an additional duty that nobody wanted. The problems were multifaceted and complex in nature and each week the General in charge of all contracting for Iraq and Afghanistan got reports on the progress so it was very high stakes as well.

My team members were made up of DFAS liaisons, contracting personnel, and me. Most of them were less than thrilled to be given additional duties on top of the seemingly endless workload they already had. Our starting point was more than $2 million in outstanding invoices across Iraq many of which were accruing interest payments and costing the government thousands of dollars. We had conflicting interests amongst the key players and we were facing systemic wartime problems to include government bureaucracy, the fog of war, and the language/cultural barrier of our contractors. The DFAS Tiger Team on the prior rotation had made little to no progress in reducing the outstanding invoices and the lack of progress was becoming a sore spot for leadership. It was definitely an uphill battle.

I must admit that when I first took over I was feeling a little overwhelmed but I did the only thing you can really do in that environment which is put your head down, work hard, and give it your best shot. I knew that fostering a real team environment and creating buy in was the first thing I needed to do to get anywhere. I recognized that the DFAS liaisons were undermanned and often took the majority of the “blame” with regard to the outstanding invoices so I sought to earn their respect by immediately showing them that I cared about making a difference with the DFAS Tiger Team. I empathized with their situation and asked a ton of questions about the process. I think my humility and genuine desire to improve our current state won them over which was huge because they were the primary knowledge holders for the payment process and the inner workings of DFAS. I then sought to establish a common vision that was aligned with the overarching mission in Iraq. I described that it was building the Iraqi economy that was going to get us out of the war. Enhancing opportunities for the Iraqi people is the goal of counterinsurgency and there is no better way to do that then to put the Iraqi citizens to work. With that being said, huge damage can be done to our relations when the work has been performed and we do not hold up our end of the bargain with proper and prompt payment. I made sure that everyone on the team was aware that our team could have a direct impact on preventing extremism and that letting the current state continue could actually be fostering terrorism. It was clear that tying our additional duty to the mission of the war effort was a big turning point for the buy in and camaraderie of the team.

After I got my feet wet and had fostered a unified team environment I got my 8 member team together for a brainstorming session. I facilitated a mini continuous process improvement event for the team. We came up with the challenges we were facing and eventually came up with a set of action items we thought could improve the state of the payment process in Iraq. It was clear that we needed help from outside organizations such as DFAS Rome back in the states who processed all the payments, the Senior Contracting Official for Iraq, and the Brigadier General of CENTCOM Contracting Command. I knew that simply telling higher ranking people and outside organizations we needed help was a recipe for disaster. So we presented our findings in a very strategic manner. We showcased how we brought different stakeholders together and came up with a consensus of the “big rocks” or issues with payment process in Iraq. We then presented what “we,” Regional Contracting Center Central, were already doing to improve the current state. This included new standard work, re-engineered business processes, and visuals to be used as payment processing templates for contractors and customers. It was after our efforts had been showcased that we had a section detailing the help we needed from outside organizations. We tried to portray our findings as “here is what we are doing to help ourselves, but we could really use your help in these areas to take our successes to the next level.”

I presented our findings to my leadership and they in turn passed them onto the SCO-I, and the General. On a visit stateside the General met with the head of DFAS Rome in New York and began forging a new memorandum of agreement between the Command and DFAS.

Within two months the changes our 8 person DFAS Tiger Team had implemented had reduced the outstanding payments by more than 50%. This was without the help of the outside agencies. As I prepared to depart Iraq, The SCO-I emailed me directly for feedback on the memorandum they were drafting to be implemented in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was an incredibly rewarding experience to take over a program that nobody wanted to be a part of and to build a highly performing team that achieved amazing results. We went from the Regional Contracting Center with the largest outstanding payment issues to the model for entire theatre in less than six months.

Matt will be leaving the Air force in the next few weeks. He and his wife are committed to returning to the Portland, Oregon area. If you know of an employer in that area who could use a leader with the kind of skills that Matt outlines above, his work ethic, leadership abilities and unimpeachable integrity, have them contact me to get in touch with Matt.

Dr. Al Chase, White Rhino Partners
1 Broadway, 14th floor Kendall Sq.,
Cambridge, MA 02142
achase@whiterhinopartners.com
office: (617) 401-2113

To Know Thyself

"There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self. " - Benjamin Franklin

"This above all; to thine own self be true." - William Shakespeare

"Friendship with one’s self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self." - Napoleon Hill

"Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change." - Stephen Covey

What do all these great quotes have in common? They all acknowledge the importance of knowing yourself. I have recognized the importance of knowing myself for a long time, and I am sure that throughout my childhood it was imparted upon me in one way or another. In fact a big reason I started blogging was to truly challenge my beliefs and to reflect upon where I am and more importantly who I am.

The other day I took a Myers-Briggs Test Workshop for Choosing and Changing Careers. The premise of the workshop was to learn more about your personality preferences and to leverage that enhanced knowledge of yourself to find a career you truly love. Although the workshop had a career slant I think going through such a workshop is just as applicable to many other facets of life as well.

Here are a few things I took away from the workshop:

1. I went into the workshop with a fairly good self awareness. That was reassuring. I think the combination of my team sports background, military background, and conscious attempts (blogging, reading, starting a non-profit company etc.) to get to know myself better have paid off. That being said we all are constantly growing and changing so the journey to understand yourself is just that; a journey, not a destination.

2. Your personality is a profile of preferences in the way you respond to outside events. If you are extrovert you can still be introverted in various situations. Being an extrovert simply means that your preference is to respond to different life events as an extrovert does. There is a sliding scale of how strongly you identify with a certain preference.

3. Your personality profile can and does change in different situations. Although my "personal" and "work" self were largely aligned there are some scenarios where my preferences change. For instance, I am more laid back and have a go with the flow attitude in my personal life whereas I appreciate a more solid schedule and organized work environment.

4. Improving your own self awareness allows you to better recognize other peoples personality types and allows you to more effectively interact with different types of people.I couldn't help but analyze where my wife would shake out on the Myers Briggs test. It was pretty enlightening to see that the source of some of our minor disagreements may not be a lack of desire to resolve those disagreements but two differing preferences on how to respond to outside events. A simple example is cleaning the kitchen. My wife notices every crumb where I take more of a holistic view of how the kitchen ties in with the rest of the home's appearance. These are not coincidences. They are living examples of our differing personality profiles. My awareness of this subtle distinction in our preferences will surely make me more sensitive to how she lives her life....and may even improve my counter-wiping ability. Although this is an oversimplified example, it can be applied to relationship management in any scenario.

5. There are a few different facets that would make up my “dream job” that are consistent with my personality profile. I must be in a creative, team environment that is very collaborative in nature. Not surprisingly this ties in very nicely with things I have been passionate about in my life. Whether it was growing up playing hockey, starting Checking For Charity Corporation, or leading a team of contracting professionals in Iraq I have always thrived and enjoyed these types of environments. My future career should be no different.

Experience vs. Experiences

Recently my wife and I moved to Boston. Being in the Air Force I just show up and start my new job. Yeah I have to learn new things and get settled into a new routine, but I don’t have to actually go out and find a new job. My wife on the other hand had to start completely over. She was teaching in New Jersey, but with our move we thought it would be a great time to pursue one of her passions as a career. She has always been a fitness enthusiast so the thought of getting into the fitness industry was a natural transition. She decided to get her personal training license and begin interviewing for those type jobs. Despite having a degree from the University of Arizona in Physical Education, two years teaching experience, experience as a spinning instructor, a personal training certification, a life’s worth fitness activity all she heard throughout the majority of the interview’s was how they were hesitant due to her lack of experience. Besides being frustrating as hell, it really got me thinking about experience versus experiences and how people look at the two concepts.

Part of me can kind of understand where some of the people she interviewed with are coming from. I mean she had never had a personal training job before. She didn’t have experience doing that profession. What if she wasn’t any good at it and that person had hired her. They would have invested time, money and effort into an individual that just wasn’t cut out for that position. And most importantly, they would have delayed fulfilling their original goal; to fill a vacant position with a person who is the most qualified and competent for the job.

However, the other part of me can’t get over how blatantly off center this line of thinking is. Experience and experiences are different animals, and typically employers pay much more attention to the latter which, in my opinion, is the wrong approach. What does experience mean? Well it means that the applicant has familiarity with the position and it can be safely assumed that the individual has some basic knowledge of the duties to be carried out. Placing value on experience may well indeed save you time, effort, and money in the short run but is it the best strategy in the long run? I would argue no.

Think of it this way for a minute. By placing the emphasis on experience you are In essence blinding yourself to many other evaluation factors that are much more important and will have a much larger impact on your business’ bottom line. I can hire a person that has worked at McDonalds for 30 years and has only cooked fries the entire time (This is nothing against McDonalds. In fact I just read an article the other day that listed how many people had worked their way from cooking fries at Mickey D’s up to become CEO’s, late night talk show hosts, etc.). If I want a fry cooker tomorrow then placing emphasis on experience may be the way to go. However, if I want to hire the best employees to give my business the best chance of succeeding in a highly competitive environment then experience emphasis is obviously flawed. It’s kind of like the buggy whip analogy. The best buggy whip maker was probably making buggy whips (for horse and carriages) well into the mass production of model T’s. He probably did his craft better than anyone in the world at that time. But the automobile eventually put him out of business. He had a ton of experience that made him extremely competent at his specialized job, but that doesn’t mean I want to be him!

Maybe it’s because I have never officially hired anyone in my life. Maybe it’s because I am a naive “Gen Y’er” that is completely delusional. Or maybe, and this is a big maybe, I am not completely full of shit and once in a blue moon a decent original thought comes out of my head. I propose that weighting experienceS (emphasis) more than experience is a more effective way to surround yourself with people that will help you and your company succeed.

Let’s use my lovely wife as an example again. Personal training experience…none. But what experiences has she gone through that have shaped her to become a successful personal trainer and valuable team member to a company?

1. A proven ability to learn. She has a degree in a related field from a respected university. Just because you have experience as a trainer does not necessarily mean that you are educated in the science of the body. Do you want a trainer that tells you incorrect information?

2. Breadth. She has demonstrated success and results in multiple related fields. Whether it was teaching PE, instructing spinning, classroom teaching of health, or anything else on her resume there was a theme ever-present that she could succeed in different roles.

3. An ability to lead. Could you control 50 screaming pubescent middle school punks while they run around with hockey sticks in their hands? I would much rather go back to my Jr. hockey days and fight angry 6 foot 5 guys with hockey stick than try to control a bunch of kids with hockey sticks. She has taught spinning for numerous fitness levels.

4. Innovation and dedication. She created work out clubs before school for kids struggling with their weight. She did multiple after hours intramurals.

5. Personality. This may be the most overlooked and painful (in the long run) part of focusing primarily on experience instead of experiences. At the end of the day you need someone who you can work with. You need someone your customers will love and enjoy working with, especially in a service industry like the fitness industry. There are plenty of experienced assholes out there, and sadly their experience is probably enough to keep them gainfully employed in their niche until they finish out their days. You probably meet these experienced assholes on a daily basis whether it be at Kinkos, your local auto body shop, or even a large fitness center. Does the person you are interviewing have the personality, the aura about them, the 'it' factor that makes you think they will be a valued asset to the company in the position they are applying for? Or more importantly for a future position that isn’t available or even created yet?

I am sure there are numerous other traits that I haven't listed that are overlooked when you focus primarily on experience. However you get the point that there are a lot of benefits to looking beyond experience and on to someone’s experiences. Just continue to ask yourself "how has this person’s life and life experiences shaped them to be the perfect member of our team?" If you aren't asking yourself that question you are surely missing out on talent that could be the missing piece of your organization's puzzle.