Today is the anniversary of the death of Winston Spencer Churchill, the architect of the Grand Alliance between Britain, America, and Russia during World War II. It’s fitting that we hosted the Tri-Agency Retreat for TTI, TEES, and TEEX today. The purpose of the retreat was to get the leadership of the three agencies together to discuss how to align efforts.
Some cool things came out of the retreat. But for me, the most important point was identifying who your team is. In order to collaborate effectively, leaders have to identify who their team is. This is NOT your local team, but the team above you. Patrick Lencioni makes this point very clear in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. “Who’s your team?” is the key question. While we didn’t discuss it explicitly, I think a lot of people in the room realized that our team is “the college of engineering agencies”, not our individual agencies. This is the mindset that we have to take to be effective at the level of collaboration envisioned.
For example, what do we do if we have opportunities requiring capabilities that no one agency possesses? In the past, perhaps we passed on these opportunities. To win requires coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and communication (Four C’s) within the engineering agencies’ team. Dr. Banks said it best when she remarked, “We are family…think about the face of engineering as one.”
I’m not saying that our agencies are not our team anymore – they are, and we are paid to attend to them as well. It’s a question of perspective. In order to make the mental shift to prioritize work that can only happen with the capabilities of multiple agencies, we have to consider the relative importance of the engineering agencies’ team.
We’re going to go back to work on Monday. What will we do to further the priorities identified in this retreat? What will we do to help our engineering agencies’ team? In its day, the Grand Alliance defeated the Nazi menace. I would say that’s a worthy accomplishment. Are we up to the task of accomplishing something great?