The Leadership Minute #23: Employ your unit in accordance with its capabilities

The Leadership Minute #23
Leadership Principle: Employ your unit in accordance with its capabilities

What does this leadership principle mean? Well, it means you are not going to send members of your Engineering Department to go conduct “emergency” bookkeeping. You won’t do it because they are not trained to be bookkeepers. By the same token, you are not going to send your Accounting Department down to the warehouse to conduct inventory.

It is the same way the United States Army does not send a battalion of cooks and administrative personnel to clear a city block. They send Infantry supported by Armor units.

They send what’s appropriate to do the job that’s appropriate. Now to feed all those Infantrymen and Tankers then of course, they will send out the Army Cooks and for the required administrative paperwork must get done thus the Admin Clerks will have to be deployed to do their jobs.

Your should be taking care of your employees and ensuring that they can do the job they are hired to do. Of course, there is cross-training and that’s good in that it gets them familiar with what it going on in other departments but you do not want it to become the standard.

Thank you,
David Guerra

I invite you to follow me on Twitter: @daveguerra • visit my website: www.daveguerra.com

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