Leadership in a future of distributed everything

Ever changing , shape shifting business, to adapt to the ever changing world. I think our government has been doing this for years. In front of the American people they are one person, behind closed doors they're someone totally different.

We have been doing this for years in the physical form, and it is being adapted to the cloud now.
If any of you have ever worked at a Joint environment, you worked for different Armed service elements, Organizations, Agencies, etc. Having a GS-12 write your NCOER/OER//Yearly evals etc. because you report to them and work for them on a daily basis.
However, you still are reeled back into the big “Service” element, in this case, I will use the Army, as the example. You have PT, Weapons Qual, CTT, MOPP Training, UADC (urinalysis) testing, promotion preparation and testing, boards, and various other required semi-annual/annual testing for your individual services.
That said, you now have two bosses (or peaks depicted the diagram), now let’s toss in being in a Leadership position. You might have 3 different bosses to report to at various times, depending on your situation and where you in the food chain...
Once being in the middle management level as an NCO some 20 years ago, I ran into this exact scenario myself. Whom has priority over whom?
Well, Mission always took precedence over the Army Training, and that was command driven from the MACOM. Then, any free time you had, well that all volunteer status was kindly provided to the US Army when you thought you were supposed to be off - comes with the territory of raising ones hand... Following all other was the civilian whom wrote your evaluation when the mission was MC. Made for fun jockeying around and unfortunately, made trips learn politics early in their careers if they didn’t know any! Poor first assignments for lower enlisted, but just the way things were set-up.
Regardless of how one thinks, they have to learn to communicate between the different areas. It also helps if there are pre-coordinated standards/operational orders in place so the individual is not left making the decisions and then left to explain his/her position and why they did what they did. Work place agreements should be a standardized element and future with these new “clouded” work environments. Just like if you are asked to do something and a superior stops you in midstream and orders you to do something else, what do I do - those with experience would inform the current mission, those in experiences personnel would just adjust fire and drive on and then get blamed for not completing the other job first, even though the CEO is the one that may have re-focused the young lad...
All I can say is that the civilian populous has a huge deficit in its communication, still and today, even with email, communicator, messenger or other variant readily at their finger tips. Why? Because it has never been driven into them to use it like it has been with those in the military!
My final words on the matter, have fun with your organizations to point out the flaws or inconsistencies to your superiors based-off your past experiences, or simply fix the problems if you are in a position to do so. It’s all about the communication. You can develop a million different APPs and tools to use on the open market, but if they aren’t used properly (communication wise) not a single one will work!

All the best,
Jim

Great article and I see one problem but that can easily be turned in to an opportunity. The Government is slower that the private sector in change. So, today we have an ever expanding government that thinks it can provide faster than the private sector. This clash is seen today in the Health Care Insurance debate. The cycle of change is what will occur to government services when Politicians and Citizens realize that they can have only two of the three (Quality, Cost, Time). Once they understand this and also figure out that long waiting lists are not acceptable then we will see a seismic shift in how the Government supports programs and policies.