In my office today, I thought about how fortunate I am to do a job I love with a team who respects one another.

Our public affairs office is about 50/50 male/female and 50/50 civ*/mil. I can trust every one of my teammates implicitly.

*Almost all vets &/or mil spouses

How is this possible? Most important factors:
-leadership who walks the talk
-hiring the right people.
-expectations are high and uniform.
-staying busy. When you’re busy, you don’t have time to be a shit. Plus, you NEED each other to get work done

Can we apply this to the Ft. Hood report? Yes and no.

My office is still a different demographic in a lot of ways from most work environments at Ft. Hood. We’re old for the DoD, we’re middle-GS/FGOs. Without COVID, we do cool TDYs but we don’t deploy for real.

So the real question is how to adapt what offices like ours has for a slightly different demographic group, set of tasks, and environment.

But you can’t do any of that if you don’t fix the underlying cultural and leadership issues.

This isn’t a gender thing. My Col director and civilian deputy director are both dudes. They’ve also made it clear that respect for teammates is paramount.

Not only respect, but also—recognition of us as individuals. We have two multilingual cultural advisors...

One is from Tunisia and one is from Morocco. Relevant to our jobs, so tomorrow they start a short series of briefs educating us about their home countries.

We’re all storytellers, so it’s admittedly easier for us. But when you know someone personally and you know their story, it’s that much harder to disregard them. When you know each other, you bond as a team.

Those Officers NCOs at Ft. Hood failed in part because they didn’t...

... know their subordinates well.

If harassment and assault are committed, many times it’s because an “othering” as happened: the other person isn’t real/worthy of respect.

But sometimes it’s a bad apple. Sometimes we do have to kick people the team.