Defence 101 - Stars and Stardust

Before you waste a senior officer's time (and your own!), speak to the advisers and staff officers first - this is the first rule of building a defence relationship in Canberra.
I am often approached by clients who tell me that they need to get a meeting with a particular Defence officer but have been frustrated in getting access. Normally it's with someone pretty senior like a Division Head within DMO or CIO or the head of a group like DPE or CSIG. In any case they are chasing a meeting with one of that select group of officers that Defence calls the 'Senior Leadership Group' (SLG). The SLG comprises about 250 Defence and Public Service leaders starting at Brigadier/Senior Executive Service Level 1 (one star) going through to the CDF and the Secretary (four stars).

The reality, however, is that time spent chasing and even getting meetings at this level is time consuming and, in some cases, actually unhelpful unless you follow some very basic defence relationship building rules.

Rule Number 1 - Don't Forget the Star Dust! Every senior officer in Defence is normally supported by a team of more junior Defence and Public Service staff officers and advisors in the ranks of Major to Colonel or Executive Level 1 and 2. I call them Star Dust as eventually some of them will go on to win their own stars and get promoted into the SLG. These people are critically important to having a successful relationship with a senior officer. Before your meeting they will have normally prepared a background brief on who you are, what your organisation does and where you are working, or hoping to work, in Defence. If you leave information or a proposal behind at the end of the meeting they will prepare a decision brief that outlines the case for supporting or rejecting your request.

Staff officers and advisors to senior Defence leaders are highly capable and articulate people who can greatly assist you to place your approach into the most effective context for the senior officer. They can also make your life very difficult as they know a myriad of ways of killing, delaying or hampering ideas. The message here is not to get too focussed on the stars: staff officers and advisors must be important part of your relationship plan.

Rule Number 2 - Do your homework. Make sure that the senior officer you want to see is actually the right person and you have the right things to say. It is a total waste of their time and yours if you discover half way through the meeting that he or she is not actually responsible for the area that you are interested in. In some cases this is not always obvious because of numerous Defence restructures in recent years. Spend the time speaking with your existing sources and looking through the Defence website to make sure that you target the right person.

Rule Number 3 - Get a Time. A friend of mine who is a senior officer in Defence told me once that he gets upwards of 25 calls a week from various organisations who want to talk to him. The reality is that if he meets with all of them for an hour each that is three precious days gone from his week. As he puts it, "I need to be convinced to spend my time with them." This is not arrogance on his part, just a very busy diary.

Making contact with Defence personnel is an art. To start with, do not write or email a request for a meeting. The reality is that these just get lost in process and ignored. The only effective way to do it is by a phone call to the senior officer's Personal or Executive Assistant. The PA or EA is the senior officer's gatekeeper and will do everything he or she can to protect their boss from what might be a time wasting appointment. To pass successfully by these Cerberus' you need to ensure that you can give them a short and highly relevant reason for the meeting and that you can very quickly follow it up with a supporting email. An important hint: get a time for the meeting during the call. They will often tell you that they need to confirm it with the senior officer but from experience I can tell you that once there is a time in the diary it tends to stick.

Rule Number 4 - Plan the Meeting. I ask my clients to tell me 'where they want to be at the end of the meeting' well before we go into the room. Make sure that you have a have a single consistent goal for the meeting. This is particularly important if you have people converging on a meeting from different offices or areas. The goal might be to influence a decision or to position your organisation in preparation for a tender. Regardless, make sure that you have one goal and that everybody focuses on that. I recommend that you stage manage the meeting closely so that everybody knows the part of the story they have to tell and that you make sure the meeting is guided to a successful conclusion.

Of course, there are two important points to remember about this. The first is the old military adage that 'no plan survives h-hour' so you must be flexible enough to adapt your plan based on what the senior officer has to say. The other point to remember is that a meeting is a process of human communication. In other words listen as much as speak!

Rule Number 5 - Follow up. Assuming that your meeting was successful you need to think about where to go next. The first thing to do is to write a quick thank you email for the meeting. This is a useful way or reinforcing the points you made (or wanted to make) during the meeting. It also gives the senior officer a copy of material that he or she can then send to others in their area. If you reached a point during the meeting where the senior officer was interested in some aspect of what you had to say or wanted more information, then you need to make sure you follow this up promptly. You would be surprised how many people let this opportunity slip and they fail to get back to the senior officer with the desired information.

Once you have a foothold, you need to stay engaged with the senior officer so that you build up the momentum of the relationship and start to establish some common points of view. There are a number of ways that you can do this. These include subsequent meetings or invitations to information events. I make this distinction because Defence has fairly tight probity rules about personnel accepting invitations to sporting or social events. Things like ABL or Defence Watch Lunches at The National Press Club or similar events are seen as being safer and more benign.

In the final analysis building relationships within Defence is all about understanding who are the right people to speak to what are the right messages to bring them. This is not a quick process. Relationships take time and patience to build. Meeting with a senior officer once is good, twice is better and three times is the starting point for a good working relationship.

Murray Davies is the Managing Director of The People Company and conducts Defence 101(tm) workshops across Australia. See www.thepeoplecompany.com.au for further details.

By Murray Davies, Canberra