Summary:
Avery Q. Muse joined the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) as the Executive Director, Office of Operations (Ops), in May 2023. Prior to joining HHS OCIO, Avery worked in several important roles including the Deputy Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Capitol Police, Chief of Service Management at the U.S. Marshalls Service, and Chief of Customer Support at the U.S. Department of Defense Joint staff where Avery served under General Stanley McChrystal.
Shortly after his appointment, Avery asked his Ops leadership team to read McChrystal’s 2015 book titled Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, in which McChrystal recounts his effort to reorganize the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Each week for 12 weeks, a different member of the Ops leadership team led a group discussion about powerful lessons learned and key take aways for leaders.
On Wednesday, August 30, 2023, the team gathered for an all-day Ops leadership retreat where they started the day with a culminating discussion on how a more decentralized approach can be effective even in traditionally hierarchical institutions like the U.S. government.
Darryl Washington, Deputy Director of Engineering and Infrastructure Operations, said “…this book has been helpful to offer meaningful insights to help us understand how to improve our relationship with our customers by providing a comprehensive guide to change, and challenge ourselves to make the best possible decisions for our workforce…ultimately, adapting, and evolving the business model to suit our customers’ needs.”
The traditional hierarchical organizational structure is a management approach that was developed in the early twentieth century to address business efficiency in cycles measured in years. Cycles today are measured in weeks to months, and agile is often used to describe our need for speed in adapting to constant change. While the traditional organizational model still serves an essential purpose, according to McChrystal, it is no longer sufficient as the sole means of organizing and executing work. To succeed in the new normal, organizations like OCIO require a new operating model built around teams and teamwork, organized to create and sustain value, rather than being organized by function.
According to Avery, “OCIO’s “Team-of-teams’ operational approach is not intended to replace the existing organizational structure, but instead, to enable a dynamic and agile enterprise-wide response by empowering team-level execution.”
When asked about his experience reading the book, Daniel Mills, Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions, Telecom and Vendor Management offered, “The opportunity to build our future organization in an inclusive leadership environment is exactly what this team needed! Kudos to Avery for engaging his leaders and broadening our culture.” Astria Newman-Weathers, Deputy Director of IT Services and Operations, said “I learned a lot about each and every one of my colleagues and how they think.”
OCIO focuses on empowering individuals and teams within our organization to act quickly based on an aligning narrative, while not overlooking the necessary guardrails that define the teams’ decision space. As a result of using this type of approach, OCIO has seen that employees are more productive, enabled to optimize their work, and are happier in their professional roles. We are also beginning to see this unified team translate into higher quality of service and products delivered to our customers, greater employee retention, and attraction of top-tier talent. The OCIO executive team remains steadfast in their efforts to help make HHS and OCIO a premier employer of choice.
