A Defense Contractor’s Book Club
An admission: we are a small business based out of Denver, with employees distributed in Indiana and California today. We have intent of a few more strategic locations within the next 12 months, where opportunities often are present, and proximity matters. How do we approach retaining a viable, flexible, hard-working, collaborative culture in this environment? It is hard, especially with virtual and hybrid events, a prolonged Covid intervention, and geographic distance. Our experiences are a smaller scale experiment with the same challenges our customers face running their large-scale operations.
Recently, we came up with a great idea, we started adopting a recurring event within the company. That event is a book club. You might be wondering what types of books we are reading. We are into DevSecOps and defense, so much to your surprise, we’re reading books like The Phoenix Project and Team of Teams. Are you ready for another unexpected twist? It’s working splendidly.
How We Got Started
As with many things in the world, starting is probably the hardest part. We are all engrossed in whatever we are doing and everything else is a distraction. Members of the leadership team often respond positively to reading recommendations. Is that unique? We did not think so. Having a few new members to the team, we hypothesized that we needed to have some way to consistently communicate with the team about our values. We wanted to do so by expressing the values through behaviors more than periodic messages, emails, or something not quite personal enough.
We started with a book the fewest of the team already read. We broke the book into four chapter sections and committed our Friday lunch hour (or equivalent for those in other time zones) to a structured conversation about the topic. Our team has a lot of different personality types and roles. Defense teams mirror our team in a lot of ways, save the fact that our team is not often called to task on fitness standards. Most of us might fear the results if we were subject to that type of exam. Meanwhile, we’re happy to exercise our strongest muscles, our brains.
We started the events with the loudest and strongest voice on the team. The style of the review included round-robin question asking. Acknowledging many members of the team were either stereotypical engineers or new to the company, we made a concerted effort to be inclusive and not allow any one voice to dominate the conversation. As a company we value everyone’s voice, and as hard as it is to stop the talkers, the extroverts, we endeavored to reinforce one of our core values. Once things picked up, others were nominated to take over facilitation. This is both an opportunity and a challenge for most people. You are in the point position, and you are doing something potentially unfamiliar. The result — a team that understands more about facilitation, its pressures and its value.
Why it’s Working
First, the company supplied the books. In the first experiment, we supplied only print books. In subsequent experiments we have learned to offer multiple formats for people who consume information in different ways. Leaders currently are choosing the books based on the applicability of the content to the company’s cause. If I were to peer into my crystal ball, this too would be something generated by the team in time. Additionally, we are upping our game and trying new ways to facilitate the learning and sharing of ideas with each section.
What’s really working, though, is the change in conversation. Now, when we observe ourselves or others, we have a common language and experience to reference. We reference characters from the books we have collectively read, we reference how familiar a challenge faced by our defense customers are to those faced by General McChrystal’s team. Even better, some people are eager to read other books and recommendations and are picking up our collective knowledge through the experience.
Within teams, we are able to identify things that used to just seem like a pain. What is unplanned work? What are we doing to address it? What are our customers doing for the same situation? The learning has exposed things that otherwise would be labeled as pain points, and now are appropriately labeled and discussed. Leadership is now receiving feedback in terms that are commonly shared, we are growing as a unit.
Additionally, by purposefully calling on those who would normally prefer to be wallflowers, we’re getting more participation in day to day activities and ceremonies within the company. Our ‘charter engineers’ for the lack of a better term — our most loyal and longest-standing employees — are now familiar with the new hires that are geographically separated. As we continue to grow and add more staff, we are finding that these types of activities are reinforcing the culture we hoped to continue to maintain.
Book clubs might not be your company’s thing. The books we read and share are relevant to our technical delivery, our goal of breaking down silos in large organizations to increase effectiveness. Maybe that’s not your thing either. The best, unsolicited advice I could offer is that you should find something that generates cohesion and a greater understanding of the values you cherish as a company. As a large organization this might not be practical, but within your organization exist many symbiotic sub-organizations. At some level these types of activities are practical and even necessary for team building and common understanding.
Have a book to recommend? Shoot me a message on LinkedIn.
