“You think that you’re too cool for school, but I have a newsflash for you Walter Cronkite … you aren’t.”
– Derek Zoolander
“We get it, dude. You’re the PAO. You read a lot of news, you know what senior leaders are talking about, you’ve got a good sense of the news value here, and you’ve seen it all before. Please, just go away.”
– Every staff officer exhausted with your shitty attitude.
Please, please, stop acting like you’re too cool, too informed, too strategic, to support your organization’s priorities.
We need you to match your commander’s enthusiasm and commitment to the mission.
We need you to get excited about the resources, authorities and operational support your organization needs. And then, get excited about the big and small things you can do to help achieve results.
We need you to do the small things nobody wants to do: take out the trash; find a way to make slides look better; write talking points for your organization’s LNOs.
We need people to like you; to believe in you. Nobody likes or believes in the PAO who:
- … thinks their own drafts are mediocre (or worse).
- … knows why the current plan will fail, and suggests we just do nothing.
- … endlessly rolls their eyes at the questions and requests coming their way.
- … dismisses ideas as “wastes of time” when they’ve got time to spare.
- … bemoans a lack of guidance or policy from the mountaintop.
Some of our peers — the dudes in S2 or S3, etc. — get to be skeptical and sarcastic and bored. If you want be skeptical and sarcastic and bored, go take a job in one of those teams.
When you make options and next steps your way of life, you’ll find you don’t miss spending your credibility and bandwidth on negative emotions which only serve to bring you down and impede progress.
(Photo by Kemberly Groue, DVIDS)
