Building (and keeping) a cohesive team: AMA with Rep Seth Moulton (full transcript)

On December 9th, 2020, Members-elect of the 117th Congress joined current members, staffers, technologists, scientists, academics, and advocates for the inaugural Tech, Science, and Data New Member Orientation Day, hosted by the First Branch Tech, Science and Data (TSD) cohort.

In the “Tech” section of the day, Representative Seth Moulton (D, MA-06) offered advice to new colleagues on the importance of taking the time to set clear goals as a whole team early in the process, and some concrete tips on how to build and maintain cohesion among a team spread out between multiple offices and tasks. Especially while working virtually, a clear sense of shared goals and a structure in place to knit together the different teams is vital.

For the full transcript, see below. For a summary, please see here.

Nicole Tisdale 0:11
We’re gonna transition to another Congressional Management Foundation Democracy Award-winning office, and that is the Office of Congressman Seth Moulton, who represents the sixth district of Massachusetts ,and his district director, Rick Jakious. They are winners of this year’s CMF award for constituent services, which is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. The questions for this panel are going to be moderated by Lorelei Kelly, who is the congressional modernization fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown.

Lorelei Kelly 0:45
Thank you, thank you everybody for being here today! Congressman, Rick, it’s good to see you. Thank you, Nicole. I’m going to jump right in, because I know there’s going to be a lot of fun, interesting discussion for everyone. I had the delightful experience of doing one of my case study research field experiences in your district, in sixth district Massachusetts. And what I’d like to start out with is just by pointing out that you came to Congress in 2014 as a trailblazer on technology, and you really created a unified model and effort between your district and DC, using things like Slack — which you got a waiver for — and video conferencing with a stand up every morning, for example. You also have shared lessons consistently with your colleagues, with with everyone working in Congress — the Veterans Townhall Playbook is a great example, but also the new member Casework Handbook. So what I’m seeing here is that you’re not only an innovator, but you’re also a supporter of the institution. And I’d love for you to share sort of tips on how do you integrate analog and digital to build a shared experience, not just with your staff, but with the whole institution?

Seth Moulton 1:53
Well, first of all, it’s an honor to be here, and I hope a lot of people are getting some value out of this. I certainly am someone who benefited a lot from asking a ton of questions when I first came to Congress: I had no political background whatsoever, hadn’t served in the state legislature, or even run for office before — I guess unless you count Middle School Treasurer, which I lost, so this is a new experience for me. And I think you do well to ask a lot of questions. You’d be very arrogant to come into a super high-performing organization and say that you’re going to do everything differently, but the other side of that is that if you come into a relatively low-performing organization and want to do things exactly the way they’ve always been always been done, then you know that’s probably not a good strategy.

So our approach from the very beginning, has been to be willing to question assumptions, try new technology and try to do things to better serve our constituents. So, yes, I mean, the public story is that we got a waiver to use Slack, the true story is that we just started using it, because we were afraid we weren’t going to get a waiver from the House. We did our research to make sure that it was safe and secure, but we just started using it — we’d actually tried to use something else earlier, that was denied by the house. And now it’s been institutionalized and a lot of other offices are using it.

Perhaps most importantly, we do a stand up every single morning with our district office. So, every single morning, the DC team and the district team are on the same page, which historically has been a real problem with with offices on Capitol Hill — that the district and the DC offices are not coordinated. Technology enables that, but really that’s just a leadership approach. We’ve also integrated a lot of other just digital tools into how we organize tasks and track progress on initiatives — I’m sure Rick can go into some of the details of all that if you have any questions — but basically our philosophy was, ‘hey we’re going to be willing to to push the limits here and try to do things differently.’ I think we’re actually the first office to ever hire a computer programmer as one of our staff members, just to kind of get us up and running with some of our some of our new tech when we first started.

Lorelei Kelly 4:10
Thank you. Rick, did you have any comments, how are you working to integrate tech, continuum of information sharing…?

Rick Jakious 4:17
Yeah, we can get in the weeds, but I would actually start maybe with a step backwards which is I think any of the one individual, you know any individual thing that we’ve implemented might not be in and of itself revolutionary, but we really have infused this across our entire organization you know we’ve we have six core values in our office. One of those is transparency, and part of our transparency value explicitly states that we seek out effective ways to connect, including the use of technology, in order to improve how we interact with our constituents and each other. So it’s not just one thing we do, it’s not just that we treat technology as a tool to make our jobs a bit easier, I mean, it’s literally part of our cultur — it’s codified and written into our values, and we view it as fundamental to our ability to do our job.

So that manifests not only in the best of times, but really in the worst of times. You know, when the entire country, the Congress was shutting down with a pandemic, we already had everybody able to work remotely and mobile; we already met regularly, multiple times a day, via video conference; we already had a high degree of connectedness via slack; we were already using data to drive decisions about staff deployments and caseloads. So, you know, that saved us, I would say weeks over a lot of other offices, and that translates into better quality of life and frankly lives saved.

Seth Moulton 5:41
Let me give you another quick example that just came up in the last 24 hours: you know, our tech support guy for the House says that he spends about 90% of his time and his job, dealing with cyber security issues: intrusions viruses and whatnot. The number of times that he’s had to deal with that in our office is exactly zero, for the simple reason that we have Macs, and they’re not susceptible to some of the problems that PCs have. The data breach yesterday with FireEye is massive, and it’s very serious — that’s the primary security soft software used by the House of Representatives. So think about this stuff as you’re setting up your office: you know, do the research, make sure you understand the limits of certain technologies, and don’t be afraid to innovate.

Then perhaps the most important thing that Rick said was we take our mission and values seriously. I spent a solid few days on a retreat with some mentors and future staff to really debate exactly what the mission and values would be, our statements, our top values for this office. They’re posted on the wall when you walk in the door, and we take them really seriously. And I think that underlies, perhaps, the more unique approach we take to to serving our constituents.

Lorelei Kelly 7:03
One of the other things I noticed when I was working in sixth district Massachusetts was the way that your office really integrated constituent services, and an ability to find the golden nuggets of local expertise, into a pipeline and into policy — one was like a makerspace focused on oceans and ocean science. What are the best ways you’ve found that move beyond the old town hall model to integrate these golden nuggets of knowledge that are coming straight from your constituents?

Seth Moulton 7:32
Rick, do you want to start?

Rick Jakious 7:34
I guess I would just say that you have to — look, we have to look at our job beyond the halls of Congress and legislating, and realize the power in the office to convene and to recognize that the big social problems we’re trying to tackle can’t be solved by government alone, can’t be solved by nonprofits, can’t be solved by the private sector, but it has to be done by a partnership between the three. And so, I think we’ve been effective under Seth’s leadership in bringing people together from all of those sectors to think creatively about how we leverage academia, nonprofits, the private sector, and really push folks to tackle and solve some of these problems. We don’t think of it just as a quote-unquote “legislative” challenge.

Seth Moulton 8:15
And perhaps the value that kind of underlies this is a real sense of humility, that we don’t have all the best ideas. And if we’re serious about not just listening, but really acting on the ideas the suggestions, requests and complaints of our constituents, then we’re going to ultimately do a better job.

Lorelei Kelly 8:35
I have one more thing that I loved in the way you set up in your district office, which is that you have this sort of an analog/digital again: you have a bell on the wall, so when when someone is successful with casework, someone rings the bell and then you all gather together as a team and tell the story of how that happened, and recognize it, and then everybody learns, and you’ve got it — it’s an in the sense that you build it into the workflow. And I feel like that workflow integration is something that certainly with the Modernization Committee, all of Congress hopefully, we’ll do more of — but I wanted to point that out too: that it’s all not digital, that it’s fundamentally human.

Seth Moulton 9:15
It is, a lot of it is really human. And although — you know, we are very conscious of morale, and we we always talk about being a team, not a staff: I don’t have a staff, I have a team. We all work together to to truly serve our constituents and that’s our, that’s our primary mission here. We also really embrace the idea of critical feedback: there is not an interviewer, a hearing, anything I do that I don’t walk out of and immediately turn to the person next to me and say, ‘hey, what could I have done better?’ And that’s something that we really try to embody as well.

Lorelei Kelly 9:44
You share everything with the whole institution, with all your colleagues too — not based on party, but also internally, through caucuses and committees and collegial interactions and that’s been a tremendous assist for everyone. So, thank you! I have heard that many times.

Nicole Tisdale 10:00
I will jump in and I will say to this office, I love what you all have done, because I think what we’re all talking about here is, like, we’re all in this for public service, right? And so the thing about highlighting casework is that if you decide that the only way you win is when something becomes — when legislation becomes law, you don’t get to celebrate your wins very much. So, the idea that everything that you do in your office is a win for your constituents and for the country — I think that is a model for a lot of offices, that example will work in multiple ways. It makes your constituents happy, but it also keeps your staff very focused and rewarded for public service which is really great.

Seth Moulton 10:47
And we’ve passed two pretty significant pieces of legislation just in the last month! But yes, that’s not the whole story, and we’ve all got to step back and make sure we stay grounded in the fundamental mission of public service which is why we should all be here.