A Sergeant Major was mentoring me on getting a command-wide initiative completed. I kept running into a block, because one of the guys I had to work through wasn’t getting it done.
“Maybe it’s genetics,” said the Sergeant Major.
He told me a story about a specific kind of breaching his team did. He described which position (person) on the team normally conducts the breach, where each position goes and how the breach is completed. But this breach depends on physicality. You can’t be too short or too tall to perform this breach, you have to be in the range of a certain height. Whether or not you can perform this breach from this position on the team is driven by genetics.
The same thing applies, he said, to getting other things done. Just because a person holds a certain position, doesn’t mean he or she is the right person for the particular task at hand. Sometimes, you have to Task Organize for Purpose.
Seems obvious? It’s not. Watch your organization and the organizations you work with. Consider how often we are depending on people for certain tasks solely based on the position they hold rather than their abilities.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes you have to put aside the org chart and reorganize to get things done.
The only thing you can’t delegate or reorganize is responsibility. For everything else, consider genetics.
Photo by Cpl. Alexander Sturdivant
