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Hear a lot of Leaders talking about taking care of Soldiers and the oldie but good buzz line of Getting back to basics. Here’s what I think the basics of leadership and taking care of Soldiers are. /1
Let’s start with counseling. I give 2 shits if there is anything written on a piece of paper. I do care if leaders are talking to and getting to know their Soldiers on a personal level. Do they have family, does their spouse work, hobbies, what hardships are they experiencing/2
How can the unit help with those hard ships, what are their goals, are there goals achievable, what are they doing to achieve them. That’s counseling. A form with prefixed sections doesn’t lead to this type of discussion. And they need to have this type of discussion monthly. /3
Training: train your Soldiers. Make them the best at whatever they are doing. Make the training hard, realistic and always include medical. With that said training doesn’t have to be a 24/7 suck fest. Let them de-kit let them smoke and joke when there’s a 110 minute break /4
Making everything suck and “train as you fight” every second of every day training doesn’t build the team that your trying to build. Sometimes training can be fun. Get creative the Soldiers will live you for it. /5
Down time. I know I know no matter how much down time we give them it’s never enough. But how much of their time are you wasting? Does your Soldiers sit around waiting for the “word”? Why are they still there? If you’ve just spent days or weeks training hard and have more /6
Training coming up why are they not at home by 1500? Is that 2 hours detrimental to your garrison mission? Because it will mean everything to that Soldier and their family. That could let Soldiers walk their kids home from school,spend extra little bit alone with their spouse /7
Schedules, plan training and post it. Schedule your training events out so Soldiers understand and have time to plan for and around it. This is day to day events as well. There is very few reasons for Soldiers to find out at 1600 they’re working until at least 2000 /8
Planning these things keeps Soldiers from having to worry about last minute childcare, or just seeing their family when they’re not deployed. It will cause less stress at home and lead to better work at work. /9
And the last bit I will go with is again know your Soldiers, know if their attitude is changing, know if they seem off, do they always talk about their spouse and they’ve suddenly stopped? Why? Are they a parent who doesn’t have custody of their child?/10
When’s the last time they took a pass or leave to go see their child? Maybe you ask them if they want to take a pass, maybe then you’ll find out they can’t afford to, which will let you get them to AER for budget classes if they need it. Just knowing little things and caring /11
About you Soldiers will do 100% more than a prefilled form, town halls, mandatory phone calls to families, or buzz words on videos ever will. Speaking of what i think is dumb but some people say it works calling families./12
If your unit wants to call Soldier’s families and you have done everything else that’s been laid out in this tweet storm, most Soldiers won’t care if you call. Why? Because they know you care about them and aren’t just calling because you were told to. But if they still don’t /13
Want you to call don’t hound them just drop it and continue trying to build the trust between a leader and their Soldier. As I’ve said before THEY DONT CARE WHAT YOU KNOW UNTIL THEY KNOW YOU CARE. /end
I lied not the end. Let’s talk living conditions. If you know your Soldiers barracks are crap, telling them to clean the mold isn’t helping, telling them it’s above you isn’t helping, telling them there’s a blanket ETP allowing them to live like shit /13
Isn’t fucking helping.If you’re not calling whatever level commander can fix it and your just letting it go because your higher HQ said it can’t be fixed is just screwing yourSoldiers over.Would you live in a crap house on post without calling everyone to fix it? Why should they?
