A Colleague’s Expression is More Important than His Title.

What does air cover mean, in a management sense?  You have some idea?

Would your boss provide air cover for you if he did not care about you?  Why would a boss give air cover? Does your boss provide air cover for the team?

My connotation of air cover, what it means to me, is that of guardian.  One who cares.  One who allows you the wherewithal to do what you are supposed to do.  Air cover allows a level of focus on the important, and triages the urgent.

Air cover conveys a sense of importance to what you do.

Because of course we all need to matter.  We all need to contribute, and need to have it recognized.

If you have a team now, try this.  Go to a colleague who does something better than you do.  Tell her you admire how good she is at it- better than you.

How would you feel if your boss came up to you and said something like that?  “Matt, you handled that question so well! I could not have thought that fast on my feet!”

Big time motivation.

Want to make a team feel you appreciate them?  Invite them to your place. Invite the immediate families. Be keenly interested in them.  Make them feel your attention.  If you meet children you’ve struck gold.  You tell that little daughter how important her mommy is at work and how lucky we are to work with her.  Own the home.

A party at your house, excepting the annual retreat which I will get to next, is the most important shared experience of the year. Want to build a team?  This is an important brick.

The foundation is the annual retreat.  I don’t really care where it is or how fancy, but a critical factor is how much work and focus you personally put into it.  If you prepare a lot and build excitement, you signal it is important to you. A key is the format.  However you usually meet, it cannot be like that.  If you sit around a conference table a lot, then the retreat cannot be at a conference table.  Somewhere different.  Different seating, maybe different dress code.  If you are typically casual at work, make it business style.  If you work in a dark suit culture, then dress down.  Flip the script.

The only purpose on the retreat agenda is to collectively create and agree on a plan for the team, for the year.  Truly, I can think of 20 formats and agenda items but they almost don’t matter as long as you can create a comfortable stage for real brainstorming and a community sense of community. Define amongst yourselves what you want to accomplish, what you want to be known for, what you want your reputation to be as a unit.  What will success look like? Is it a cost number or revenue growth or a recognition as department of the year?  Whatever it is, the group gets in a room and figures it out together.  The team decides what a win will look like.  Where the goalposts are. And your goal as the boss?  Your goal is to get everyone working toward a shared goal.  Better their goal than your goal, because indeed that is how people are motivated.  By their goals.

I always planned for 6 hours in the “meeting” and then a night out.  Just the team.  No invited guests from other departments or anyone else who is not part of the unit.  Part of being a true team is being specific.  You are either on the team or not.  On the field or off.

Those are the two best shared experiences, the party at your place and the retreat, but there are many others.  Make sure you have lots of really little ways for the entire team to be focused on the same things at the same moments.  Those are shared experiences. I used to do fantasy football with a pearl-girl team; most of them could not tell you what a football looked like, but it gave me an opportunity to pen a weekly email recap that became a shared experience.

Individual shared experiences with a subordinate are big too and the weekly rap in my mind is great.

I’m naturally sort of chatty and if left to my own devices, might not use the 2 ears and one mouth approach enough.  I temper that in raps, I hope.  I want to make sure I listen lots and get to know my colleague.  In a previous post I talked about rap format so won’t go beyond reminding you the most impactful management query is “What more can you do?’.

Some ways to build trust and show you care during the rap:  1.  I’ll reference how I talk to my wife about you. What I said on the couch last night.  Shows you are on my mind.  And my wife HAS always known a lot about my colleagues.  Second, go on a 401k riff, at least with the young ‘uns.  Get them to start saving 5% of their salary at a young age and the power of compounding will take over.  40 years in the future, when my name is a fuzzy memory, I will stand as the best boss they ever had, even if they don’t know it.  Even if I suck at training and I don’t recognize performance and I don’t provide outlets for ideas, if I get them to invest I’ll possibly be the best boss they ever have.

(its not enough to save, you have to have your money working for you.  You are working for it!)

At the rap, in a true one-on-one conversation, let your colleague know you love your job and you love being on this team.  You don’t have to pretend the entire organization is ideal in every way, as long as you love being where you are. If that is not the case, make it so.  Whatever that takes.  Love where you are.  It is the Positive in PPFE. Positive, Productive, Fresh and Enthusiastic.

Raps are a great opportunity to express confidence in a colleague. You think a pitching coach ever visits the mound to tell a pitcher he cannot possible get this hitter out?  No- he is pumping him up.  When I was a little league coach and a pitcher was struggling, I’d go out and say “Garret, that team in the other dugout is all excited right now because they got a couple runners on base.  They didn’t think they could do that against you. But what’s really important is this: your mom is sitting over there on that bleacher  right now thinking  “Garrett is the cutest boy God ever created”, so you got that going for you. –Garret breaks into a huge grin– Now let’s settle those little boys in the other dugout- we’re ready to start hitting again.”

Garrett knew coach believed in him.

Quickly, who do you remember better- your coaches or your teachers?

Given that I went all stream of consciousness on this post, I’ll make one more left turn by leaving you with this belief.  A colleague’s expression is more important than his title.