Like the rest of the military, the Coast Guard is home to communities of people with unique operational skills. The cutter community spends weeks offshore patrolling for narcotics smuggling or illegal fishing. The boat forces community stands duty at stations along the coast ready to respond to mariners in distress. The aviators are similarly ready to launch into the worst weather to save someone from certain doom. In each of these communities, people take tremendous pride in their ships, boats and aircraft and a strong culture has formed around skillfully operating them. There’s a bit of swagger about the high standards of proficiency they expect from each other, and they train constantly to meet those standards.
There is no doubt that in my organization, and probably most other organizations, technical skill is important. But what about leadership? Are there technical skills that leaders of all kinds should take pride in developing, as much as an aviator takes pride in flying an aircraft?
Leaders are communicators
Leaders spend most of their time communicating with other people. Some of that communication will be in face to face conversations, but in larger teams much of it will rely on technology to reach more people. George Washington issued more than ten thousand hand-written orders while leading the Continental Army during the American revolution. Those orders were communicated using the technology of his day; now we use email. Our emails are no less important that Washington’s letters. To share information beyond a simple email, today’s leaders create written documents or visual images for a presentation. Successful leadership is dependent on skill with these communication tools.
At the nuts and bolts level, leaders must have skill with information technology. But that doesn’t mean they must have the latest smart gadgets or use machine learning applications straight out of Silicon Valley. Today’s leaders need sharp skills with the software that started the personal computer revolution in the 1980s: word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, email, calendar and tasks. Those tools are the basic necessities of information technology but we pay little attention to them.
The key technology of my job as a mid- to senior-level leader isn’t an all-weather helicopter or self-righting boat. It’s Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office: not glamorous but essential
I’ve heard, and told, countless sea stories of exploits in heavy seas and listened to many tales of aviation daring on dark nights. We pass knowledge about our profession on to others through these stories. But I’ve never heard anyone talk about the perfectly formatted memo they wrote or the creative graphics on their presentation slides. I’m sure there are many reasons why no one brags about skill with our fundamental tools of communication.
I suspect that the primary cultural enabler of weak software skill is the leadership cliché that we shouldn’t be at our desks all day. The conventional wisdom is that we should be out and about talking to our people. The idea that leaders shouldn’t be at their desk de-values the work accomplished in front of a computer screen. It seems we’ve adopted an incorrect belief that desk work is the opposite of good leadership.
It is true that leaders need to get out of their offices and engage with people to be successful. However, that truth makes skill with Microsoft Office even more important, not less important, for two reasons.
First, stronger Office skill means anything leaders create will be more easily understood by others. Well organized and crisply formatted written documents are easier to read than jumbled blobs of text. Presentation slides created with the audience in mind will lead to better understanding than text-heavy slides created using the default template. No one questions the benefit of clear communication; leaders must accept that clarity comes in large part from skill with the software.
The second and more important benefit of Office proficiency is speed. If you know what you’re doing, creating your desired product will take less time. The challenge with the Office applications is that as they’ve grown more powerful they’ve also grown more complex. You can do just about anything with Microsoft Word, but you must do it the way the software’s designers intended. If you don’t understand the way Word structures documents and formatting, you’ll end up fighting the program instead of using it. You’ll burn minutes or hours in frustration getting it to do what you want.
Leaders aren’t always the people swooping in on the crest of wave or dropping from a hovering helicopter to save the day. We’re office workers. Learn to make Office work.
People are never taught how to use Office software and there are consequences
I think another reason why we undervalue Office software skill is that no one has the skills. When I was a junior officer, I had no trouble finding experienced cutter drivers to learn from. But where are the software experts? The organization has never taught us how to use Office. We’ve all had to figure that out on our own.
The lack of cultural value for software skill has consequences for the organization. We waste a lot of time struggling to get our points across in written work. I’d like to share an example to illustrate this point. Perhaps for the first time in history, here is a not a sea story, but a software story.
So there I was, leading a team to create a policy document explaining how we would carry out a new and important mission. The document was about fifteen pages long and represented several months of work by half a dozen people. It had been reviewed up and down the chain of command several times, revisions had been made, and it was ready for final approval. A team member had drafted a cover memo for my boss to sign to make the policy document official. The cover memo was a revision of an old cover memo file someone found, retaining the structure and formatting a document drafted long ago. All I needed to do was change the date, print it out, and route it up.
When I opened the cover memo, a document with several paragraphs and sub-paragraphs in an outline structure, I noticed that a few lines didn’t seem to line up correctly with the others. In order to see what the problem was, I hit the little paragraph button to reveal formatting (if you don’t know what the paragraph button is…this article is definitely for you).
The paragraph button revealed that the entire document was a meticulously constructed house of cards. Instead of using Word’s outline function to align the paragraphs and sub-paragraphs, or even manually setting them up with tabs, the document’s creator had aligned everything using spaces. Even the second lines of each indented sub-paragraph had been walked over from the edge of the page using several dozen hits of the spacebar. Honestly, it was a pretty impressive effort to get it as close to perfect alignment as it was. But if I changed one even one word, the entire thing would collapse into a broken mess.
It took me about half an hour to remove all the extraneous spaces and use the outline function to get it aligned again. But what was the opportunity cost of that time investment, and of the time investment made by the document’s original creator? What other leadership work could we have done if we all had better software skill?
In my organization, we would never tolerate someone whose lack of technical skill meant it took hours to accomplish a mission that should take minutes. Boat and aircraft crews practice their craft so they can take a disabled vessel in tow or pass a dewatering pump quickly and safely on the first try. High standards of technical skill are part of the culture that drives their communities. Those of us that don’t drive the boats, but lead or support the people that do, should hold ourselves to the same standard in our technical realm. We need to be masters of Microsoft Office.
Another kind of leadership skill self-assessment
This article is meant to be a call to arms, not a tutorial. However, I present the following as a kind of self-assessment. If you can employ the following features in Microsoft Word, you’re in good water. But if not, you probably need to build your skill. I’ve linked to a few helpful videos.
The “paragraph” button to show spaces and indents. I call it the paragraph button, but its confusing official name is the “show/hide” button. See what I’m talking about here. It will show you how spaces, tabs, and paragraphs are aligning your text. You need to know what the dots, little arrows, and anchors mean. Yes, there are anchors on boats and in Microsoft Word. Once you understand the paragraph button, learn about Word’s useful but horrifically hard to find reveal formatting window.
The ruler and the paragraph indent markers. The ruler at the top of the page and the tiny indent icons set the alignment of text lines. Set these correctly and everything falls in the right place without additional effort. Ignore them and your paragraphs or bulleted lists will wander all over the place with a mind of their own. Here’s a video to explain the ruler, indents and tabs.
Bulleted, numbered, or outlined lists. These tools are tricky to the point that people just don’t use them. Learn how to set the indent the way you want it so lists work for you instead of against you. Here’s a good introduction to a basic numbered list and the slightly more advanced outlined list with multiple levels.
Formatting paragraphs. Word maintains several levels of formatting at the same time. Paragraphs have formatting and characters have formatting; you should understand how each one impacts your document. I think everyone understands font formatting, but paragraph formatting is less well known. Here’s a short introduction.