(HELP YOUR TEAM TO) MIND THE GAPS


A performance gap is the distance between where you are now and where you should be. An opportunity gap measures where you are now against where you could be. If employees’ time and energy are consumed with filling performance gaps—and if they don’t trust their leaders enough to take the risk of innovating—opportunity gaps may go unfilled and the organization risks stagnation. (Image by akindo/iStock)


what other people haven’t done. So when someone brings them work, they see what the person hasn’t done as opposed to what they have done.


What we hear about people who are very talented, motivated individuals is that they don’t give much positive feedback. Tat is a very common complaint. It is partly because when you are really good, you really want to make sure the whole group is going to achieve. Also, you have a lot of pressure on you to deliver. Imagine you have a child who brings home a report card with all As except for one C. You see the C; you don’t see all of those As. We are sort of wired that way. And therefore we inad- vertently create experiences for other people that make them feel not so good or not so special, when in fact if someone who brings home all As but for one C—that’s a lot of talent there.


Army AL&T: I would like to talk about dealing with the bureau- cracy, because it is such a big part of working anywhere in the government. Are there skills of particular value in building net- works across bureaucratic boundaries?


Hill: Businesses today recognize the need to do what is referred to as silo busting, to be able to work horizontally. Usually in highly bureaucratic organizations, those silos and those rules are deeply embedded in the organization. But bureaucracies exist for a reason. Tey serve a purpose—to give us clarity about peo- ple’s roles and responsibilities and formal structures. It matters [especially] when you are at war, for example, that people know what their roles are, the reporting structures, who is supposed to speak to whom and when.


Bureaucracies are not very agile, obviously. One reason is that they are so siloed, both horizontally and vertically. Vertically, communication tends to go in only one direction, from the top down as opposed to the bottom up. Horizontally, we sort of stay within our own worlds and communicate within those worlds. To be able to execute and innovate, communication needs to become more transparent, and it needs to move up and down and across the organization. As a leader, this is why you have to build that informal network, to help you figure out what is happening in the organization and to get things done, because


ASC.ARMY.MIL 83


CRITICAL THINKING


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