Leader development is the crux of turning Soldiers into Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers in the United States Army. For Officers, a lot of time and money is spent at West Point, Reserve Officer Training Candidate Programs, or Officer Candidate School. Educators and administrators work very hard to provide a wide array of resources, exercises, and tests to help develop future Officers into effective leaders. Once Officers graduate their commissioning source, their education shifts towards the technical requirements of their branch in classroom and field environments where their educators are clearly defined as TACs and Small Group Leaders. However, I believe that by inserting informal leader development opportunities into Basic Officer Leader’s Course and the Captain’s Career Course, we can create an expectation and culture of small group and informal leader professional development. 

While at the Signal Captain’s Career Course, I had the opportunity to participate in a leader development program that the schoolhouse called the Pathfinder Program. Students in SCCC could volunteer to mentor a small group of BOLC students for the duration of the BOLC class. I volunteered to lead one of these groups and was given free rein on what I wanted to talk about and the venue to do it in. My group decided that we would get breakfast once a week to discuss what I considered important topics to supplement a very technical education. In seven meetings, my group discussed the following topics: 1. Expectations of a Commander to a Platoon Leader and the importance of being a leader, team player, and communicator. 2. Tools of the Trade like LIW, FMS Web, EES, APD, CALL, ATN, and PBO/BLST that would help give them resources to succeed. 3. Maintenance and Property and the importance of conducting thorough inventories and documenting everything. 4. Personal Records and how to put together and what should be a part of the “I love me book.” 5. Counseling Subordinates and the types of counseling available. 6. Time Management and the difficulty associated with this. We discussed tools and tricks to help manage our time better. 7. Owning Your Future and the value of understanding the big picture and to always focus on the now, but keep an eye on the future. I ultimately decided to talk about these things because I asked myself what I would have wanted someone to talk to me about before I got to my first unit. While I learned many of these topics formally in ROTC and in passing during BOLC, I thought it would have been beneficial to hear this from someone who was not directly a part of my formal education. My group of lieutenants could ask me whatever questions they wanted with little concern because we were in a small, informal group and I had no pressure to teach them anything in particular. In short, we had the flexibility to go down whatever rabbit holes we wanted and were only constrained by our time together, not a set curriculum.

Talking with some of my peers, it seemed that experiences varied in this program. A classmate described a horrible experience in the Pathfinder Program and that he got very little out of it. I think this is where the leadership of the schoolhouses could come into play by vetting or interviewing potential candidates that want to lead in these programs. By interviewing with senior TACs and Senior SGLs, the Captain gets an opportunity to create and defend their plan of action. The Captain, in turn, receives a level of informal leader development and the schoolhouse leaders ensure that the BOLC students are receiving valuable mentorship.

While I cannot definitively say that Signal branch is the only branch that has a program like this, I can say that I had never heard of anything like it before I arrived to Fort Gordon. I believe that if all branches decided to create a Pathfinder-like program, it would create a better culture of personal/professional development and learning. I argue that eventually, lieutenants arriving to their units will expect more development from their Captains, while Captains leaving the Career Course would expect the opportunity to participate in the informal development of their Lieutenants. Majors and Lieutenant Colonels would begin to expect their company grade officers to lead this type of development and actively work with them to develop and mentor their own skills. All in all, I think that expecting informal, small group development at the schoolhouses will cascade into the regular force. 

In conclusion, I think that the field grade leaders of the schoolhouses have an opportunity to create a culture of small, informal development sessions across the entire Army. By bringing an idea like the Pathfinder Program to a branch’s Commandant, we can create immediate and effective change. Culture takes a long time and mass effort to adjust. By emphasizing the importance of small and informal leader development sessions, we can eventually build this into our culture at all levels of rank. As leaders grow up in the Army, they will be mentored in small groups and will later be expected to lead these groups in the near future. I think the act of leading these groups will encourage leaders to seek guidance and mentorship of their own. I’ve always heard that if you are truly proficient at something, you can teach someone else how to do it really well. The key is the informality of these programs. The ability to remain flexible and not results-driven gives both the mentors and mentees the opportunity and breathing room to have whatever discussions that they want. Leaders would learn to be flexible and adaptive mentors as they are forced to adjust their development sessions to the tide of their group’s discussions. I remember my very first small group development session. My Troop Commander brought me and his Platoon Leaders into his office to discuss the “I love me book.” He handed me an empty three-ring binder and brought out his book and we all had an informal discussion, much like the conversation I had with my group several years later. I still have that book, however much fuller, to this day. I don’t think I can remember much of any of the large group LPDs I’ve participated in over the years. By not being shackled to formal curriculums or topics, we can create an Army more dedicated to personal development and learning.

Captain John E. Plaziak is a Signal Officer currently serving as the Battalion S6 for the 19th Military Police Battalion (CID) at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. He previously served as a Field Artillery Officer at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. He writes a small blog on Leadership, Literature, and Technology that can be found at https://plaziakenterprises.com or on twitter @johneplaziak.

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