U.S. Army photo by Elizabeth Fraser“Counseling is the most important tool that leaders have at their disposal. Clearly communicating expectations and standards provides a baseline for measuring performance and ensures that both the rater and rated officer understand expectations. This is especially important when managing your rater profile and justifying the contents of evaluation reports for both officers and NCOs.”
Have you ever added 30 minutes to your personal schedule to troubleshoot the commander’s video teleconference system before the weekly unit synch? Have you ever had a printer that didn’t work, but still took up space in your office? Ever tried to follow the secretary’s instructions for scheduling the conference room in an “easy outlook calendar that links to the last version of SharePoint but doesn’t work now?” These frustrations distract us from creating world-class units.
US Army photo by Spc. Ryan Lucas, 19 July 2019
Serving as a brigade, group, or regimental S4 is one of several possible key developmental (KD) assignments for Majors in the Army’s Logistics branch. There are nuances among brigades, groups, and regiments that have different force structures and different missions. Therefore, this article is meant to be universally applicable across diverse units.
In addition to serving as the brigade’s lead long-range logistics planner, the S4 has oversight for a variety of command discipline programs and policies that are key to enabling the brigade and its units to accomplish their mission-essential tasks. To oversee so many command discipline programs, the brigade S4 must be an effective manager of managers. His aperture is too wide to do anything else.
Leaders throughout the Army usually fall into one of two camps regarding operations orders. Those that complain that their higher headquarters is micromanaging them and doesn’t enable them to make decisions or, the ones complaining they don’t have enough detail to execute their mission properly. There is a difficult balance between too much and too little supervision, but many fail to realize that details are essential for subordinates to be able to make good decisions. So in the wise words of the Spice Girls, “tell me what you want, what you really, really want!”
I recently had a discussion with a CPT/P who was leaving Fort Irwin, California to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. We had a great discussion, but one topic he brought up really dominated the conversation. He stated that Majors were the most underdeveloped population in the Army and that no one seems to invest in developing them, specifically brigade commanders. My counter-argument was two-fold: first, Majors absolutely get developed and the brigade commander invests heavily in them; second, the CPT/P was looking at Majors’ performance through the wrong lens. He needed to link what he observed back to how that officer sought development as a Captain; specifically, as a Commander, during post-Command broadening, and through self-development.
Mt. Fuji beyond attacking B-29s. Photos by the Army Air Forces
Haywood “Possom” Hansell raced through the tropical downpour and bounded up the stairs to the door of the makeshift control tower erected alongside the airfield. There the Brigadier General stopped. Rain water poured off him as he stood and listened helplessly to the radio crackling with distress calls from his pilots.
It was 2030 on 13 December 1944. Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell was the commanding officer of the XXI Bomber Command. He had 84 B-29s returning from a 3,000-mile mission to Nagoya, Japan. The bombers were out of fuel, 31 of them damaged, their crews exhausted from over a dozen hours in the air, and Saipan was engulfed in a tropical storm so heavy that even he could not see the burning smudge pots out on the airfield in front of him.
In May, West Point commissioned 987 new second lieutenants – about one-seventh of the Army’s total. Faculty at West Point change lives as they educate, train, and inspire the next generation of Army leaders. This piece offers recommendations from two field grade officers, Major Zach Griffiths and Major Guillermo Guandique, who both recently departed the U.S. Military Academy, on how to make the most of your assignment at West Point.