How can I show my boss that I make good decisions?

Napoleon Bonaparte, French emperor in the early 19th century, was a skilled military leader. But perhaps one of his most impressive achievements was how he divided responsibilities within his army, and it’s the same way that large military organizations are structured today. Credited with creating what is known as the military staff structure (in many cases called the “joint staff”), this concept organizes the most important elements that a military headquarters needs to address to ensure it has an effective fighting force. Today, militaries across the world use the joint staff structure because of its efficiency and effectiveness for streamlining decision making and increasing the speed in which they conduct operations. And the faster you can make better decisions, the more likely you are to win.

To answer the title question above, you can use the joint staff structure to your advantage. Here’s how: In the traditional joint staff structure, there are eight numbers, each corresponding to a particular area of oversight. Most of the time, you’ll find a number associated with a letter: J-1 through J-8.

While the “J” stands for “joint” (its definition is not important here), each number one through eight corresponds to the particular function necessary to have a highly effective military unit: personnel, intelligence, operations, logistics, strategic planning, communications, training, and finance.

But wait, you might be saying, those are the same functions that businesses need to be effective! And you’d be right. Look at the chart below to see the comparison between the military staff structure and a typical equivalent corporate function.

As you can tell, the military joint staff structure is similar to how many other large organizations function, but instead of calling the someone the J-8, they’re the Vice President for Finance/Financial Management. The J-1 is the Vice President of Human Resources. The J-3 is the Chief Operating Officer. The functions are the same. The only difference is the name.

How does this apply to you and why do you need to know this?

Let’s say you are new to a job and have been put in charge of a project. You’re the lead and the entire project is your overall responsibility. You want to ensure you deliver, make the right decisions, and show your supervisor(s) that you can be trusted with increasing levels of responsibility. Even if you don’t have experience in the project’s topic, you can still use the chart above, the military joint staff structure, to help you figure out the things you need to consider. Ask yourself:

-          Personnel: Who should be involved in this project?

-          Intelligence: What information do I need to gather? Has it been done before at this company? At another company? What does this group know and not know?

-          Operations: What’s the timeline for the project? Who is going to do what?

-          Logistics: What support do we need to accomplish our goals?

-          Strategic Planning: What are the contingencies? What happens if something goes wrong?

-          Communications: How are we going to communicate the project’s status and final product internally and externally?

-          Training: Does anyone need to be trained or reskilled to best be able to contribute?

-          Finance: How will the project be funded?

Even if you don’t have project management experience or you’ve never led a team before, or whatever your excuse is, you can use the joint staff structure as a structured approach (pun intended) for how you can show your competence. It’s a great way to show that you’re a thoughtful, self-aware person who knows how to consider all aspects of a task while recognizing that you can’t do everything on your own.

If you do this in response to an assignment from a supervisor, you’re in a great place. Use the joint staff structure as a baseline for the way ahead and deliver the best you can.

But what if you’re not given this opportunity? What if you’ve been at your job for a year and haven’t had a chance to demonstrate your decision-making skills or your leadership attributes?

You can do this by taking your own initiative. How? Take a look at a real-life example from a company that enables employees to do this all the time. NextJump is a Manhattan-based e-commerce company that has been praised internationally for its focus on developing its employees, with the Harvard Business Review identifying them as one of three deliberately developmental organizations in the world.[1] They have a huge leadership development operation and have worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies to improve their leaders.

I first met NextJump co-CEOs Charlie Kim and Meghan Messenger in 2016, when I was selected as one of a lucky few to attend a NextJump leadership academy, a three-day immersive experience for attendees to learn about their company culture and participate in a number of activities that we could apply to our own workplaces.

During one of the presentations, Charlie showed a PowerPoint slide of a rudimentary drawing of a boat floating in the water. The waterline was drawn in a wavy blue line through the center of the page from left to right, through the middle of the boat, showing that there was a part of the boat below the water line and a part above.

Charlie asked us to imagine the boat was in a naval battle and gets hit with a cannonball. If the cannonball hits the boat above the water line, he said, the ship will be damaged and it will look ugly, but the damage doesn’t affect the ship’s ability to sail. It can be repaired, and the ship can continue to float. But then he asked us to imagine the cannonball hitting below the waterline. What would happen? The boat would take on water, eventually sink, and everyone on board would drown.

What did this have to do with work? According to Charlie, everything.

He told us that at NextJump this analogy was how they viewed their approach to work and the development of their employees. For example, let’s say they hired a young person out of college with no professional experience. How could they know that the new hire was ready to make decisions that could mean significant profit or loss for the company?

Charlie said that the part of the ship below the waterline was NextJump’s revenue. If someone at the company made a bad decision in this area, the company “ship” would take a hit below the waterline, and if it was bad enough, it might lead to the company losing so much money that it would have to lay off employees or possibly go bankrupt, effectively “sinking” the company.

The part of the ship that was above the waterline, he said, was NextJump’s workplace culture. It was their “practice ground,” the area in which their employees could take risks and practice their decision making and leadership attributes. If an employee-led initiative in this area didn’t go well, it wasn’t going to impact the company’s revenue and its ability to continue to employ its staff. In the analogy above, the ship might not look good, but it could be repaired and keep sailing.

Moving from an analogy to a real example, Charlie said that when NextJump was in its infancy, employees typically relied on junk food and sugary sodas purchased from Manhattan’s bodegas and corner stores to get through their workdays. Because Charlie and Meghan wanted to promote healthy lifestyles, an employee volunteered to develop a plan to acquire catering for the entire office paid for by the company. The catering would include breakfast, lunch, dinner comprising lean proteins, whole grains, vegetables, as well as a variety of healthier beverages from kombucha teas to zero- or low-calorie electrolyte drinks. Instead of having a staff wired on high-fructose corn syrup and fast foods, employees could eat healthier, feel better, and be more effective throughout their days.

The project lead went to work and created a successful program that provided NextJump employees with healthy food and drink options. Employees less of their own money, consumed less junk food, and had healthier bodies and minds.

Through these few examples provided by Charlie and Meghan, it became clear that there was an overlap between successful corporate business initiatives and the implementation of the joint staff structure; NextJump employees were unknowingly using military strategy to tackle workplace-related challenges. They were identifying the personnel, information, operations, logistics, planning, communications, training, and finance that were necessary to complete the project.

Circling back to the boat diagram, what would have happened if the project failed? What if the company they hired for catering didn’t provide the right food, or delivered it to the wrong address, or didn’t show up one day? What if the company provided food that made everyone sick? Sad and unfortunate, for sure, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome in a day or two.

The project lead (and the rest of the team) could learn from the situation and/or their own mistakes and make the appropriate adjustments to ensure they don’t happen again in the future. All is well, the cannon hit above the water and the company could live to sail another day.

In the end, it wasn’t the success of the project that mattered, Charlie said, but the improved decision making and leadership growth of the project lead. It showed that the project lead considered all options and made the right decisions in a workplace issue that didn’t impact the company’s bottom line (the part of the boat beneath the water). If the catering project failed, NextJump would still survive, and the project lead had an opportunity to learn from failure and demonstrate resilience. If the project was successful, it fixed a workplace culture issue at the company and showed the project lead likely made good decisions. And maybe it showed the project lead was ready to take on decisions related to company revenue. If so, decisions could be delegated to this project lead, that person could be trusted to make corporate decisions faster and at lower levels, rather than funneling everything to the co-CEOs, thus creating efficiencies. Companies that make the right decisions faster than others are the ones that keep growing, winning market share, and staying ahead of the competition.

But what NextJump hadn’t shared was the relation I recognized to the military joint staff structure, the J-1 through J-8.

Following this structure is how you enable your own growth and development and ultimately show that you’re a good decision maker.

You can apply these principles if you’re new to a company or a job, even if you’re not directed to lead a project of significance. Maybe your company doesn’t have a robust onboarding program for interns or new employees. Maybe your company has siloed teams that could benefit from some teambuilding exercises to build stronger bonds across teams. Maybe it’s something else.

Whatever it is, see what you can do to take the initiative, get a team together, and try to fix it. There is no shortage of workplace issues, no matter what company you work for. Some might have more than others, but there will always be some. Identify an issue and ask your supervisor if you can try to address it.

I think you should take out this sentence and potentially the next and move the area highlighted in grey down to here. It creates a more cohesive bridge. The wording needs to be reworked.

And when you do so, use the joint staff structure, the J-1 through J-8, to set yourself up for success. Consider:

-          What people you need (personnel)

-          The information you need to gather (intelligence)

-          The timeline and implementation plan (operations)

-          What supplies and support you need (logistics)

-          Future contingencies (strategic planning)

-          How you’ll share updates (communications)

-          What development people need (training)

-          How you’re going to pay for it (finance)

While you’re leading the project, deliberately and regularly communicate your thought process, decision making, and updates with your supervisor, so they can see the well-rounded and fully encompassing approach you’re taking to problem solving, teamwork, and leading a group. Then, your supervisor can see that you have a strong sense of these key issues and be more likely to assign you projects of increased significance in the future.

Remember, it’s not the success or failure of the project that matters. It’s the personal and professional growth you have throughout the project. Not every project will be successful, and sometimes it will be outside of your control. Other projects will be successful by sheer chance.

In the end, it’s about taking an opportunity to improve your workplace, applying a structured approach for demonstrating your competence, and showing your effectiveness as a decision maker and leader. And you can do that using the military’s joint staff structure, the J-1 through J-8, just as Napoleon designed it more than 200 years ago.

References: [1] https://store.hbr.org/product/an-everyone-culture-becoming-a-deliberately-developmental-organization/14259