Admiral McRaven offered a unique, high-stakes application of this concept of states and dates when describing the planning for Operation Neptune Spear, the raid on Osama bin Laden. The operation was broken down into 162 phases. Each phase told you what state you would have to achieve to continue, and what state you might be in that would cause you to quit during that phase. Because this was all planned out in advance, it left McRaven, as he told me, with only about five command decisions he might have to make on the fly once the mission had commenced and they were already in it.
Roman terms do not exactly match our own here, but there was still a significant contrast between otium – normally translated as ‘leisure’, but more accurately ‘what you did when you were in control of your own time’ – and its opposite ‘negotium’, ‘work’, or ‘what you had to do when you were not in control of it’.
Marcus Junius Brutus, who emerges as an honourable patriot from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, was probably one of the most self-interested of the lot. He had an appalling record of exploiting people in Rome’s empire. Notoriously, he lent money to a city in Cyprus at a 48 per cent rate of interest, four times the legal maximum, and he had his agents blockade the local council chamber to recover what was owed, starving five councillors to death in the process. And within a couple of years of Caesar’s assassination, despite his opposition to monarchy, he had his own head depicted on the coins that he minted to pay his troops.
The empire, in other words, gradually destroyed the distinctive structures of government that had brought it into existence in the first place, paving the way for one-man rule. The empire created the emperors, not the other way around.
“What I think you’ve taught me most is how important it is to state the obvious.” Yes, it felt like a backhanded compliment. But what I think she meant is that I strive to make implicit structures and beliefs explicit. Making those elements clear to everyone allows a group of people to become a true team and a company to scale.
Another practice to consider is having a team snippets document that every team member completes each week. This way, you don’t have to take up meeting time with updates, but everyone has information about what the rest of the team is up to and the status of important work. If you lead a larger team or division, consider a weekly or monthly cadence of updates that you share with everyone on the team. Use this time to reinforce goals and priorities, celebrate wins, discuss challenges, and ask for ideas. Above all, use it to keep the team connected to you as their leader. Don’t be afraid to share personal anecdotes or photos.
