Lead with the best version of yourself.

Effective Communication

A Text to Garcia: Business Rules for Work Texting

by Joon Lee

“We do NOT use Signal as our primary means of communication!” my fellow staff officer exclaimed. I sympathized—in our years of service, we’ve embraced the tenet that “we train like we fight,” that we must exercise our tactical systems even in the mundane non-tactical operations. However, at the pace, depth and breadth of our current task, with initiative required at so many lower levels, I knew that he was wrong. We had to adapt or we would not be able to keep up. 

A strict adherence to this tenet felt trite in the complex and rapidly evolving situation. While on the advance team visit in a foreign country, I saw a problem coming. With our Battalion already on the way and the rest of the Division soon to arrive, unstructured and mass text messaging through personal devices had become the primary means of communication.

Though we anticipate restrictions of our personal devices in future conflicts, the digital language that we construct, train, and enforce now will be critical. Developing standards of clarity in digital language is vital and will carry over to tactical systems. No matter the system or medium, language and clarity still matter.

Warrant Officers Need to Write Well Too

by Mike Lima 

It’s not just officers who need to know how to write—it’s warrant officers too. 

Warrant officers now have many roles, including staff officer positions and numerous duties as action officers. As a staff officer, the primary role is to support the commander in decision-making and implementation. We provide analysis, make estimates, and make technical recommendations. As action officers, warrant officers create projects and lead action on packages for senior decision-makers. Each staff member has specific duties and responsibilities within the staff structure, regardless of their military occupation. 

Writing is arguably the most important part of the various roles of warrant officers. As for myself, I have had to write munitions-related appendices for Annex F (Sustainment). And not being in a staff position does not mean evasion from the requirement to write. I offer this stark warning to new warrant officers as someone who has learned from experience. 

As a newly arrived Warrant Officer 1 (WO1) in my first unit, my Company Commander put me on a battalion detail as an Army Regulation (AR) 15-6  investigating officer. I was required to assemble a final packet with analyzed facts and recommendations to present to my appointing authority. The appointing authority also was my senior rater, whom I had never met and would only see after he read my report. While I had experience writing, I needed assistance in this additional duty, not traditionally given to new warrant officers. You never know when your written communication will be your first impression to your chain of command. 

Communicating Your Intent: Overcome the Illusion of Transparency

by Dr. Yasmine L. Kalkstein and Brian Gerardi

My (Yasmine’s) early experiences as a leader, despite effort and good intentions, were fraught with failure. One problem I ran up against were complaints about my lack of communication. 

My subordinates would provide me with feedback like: “We didn’t understand how you were making your decisions.” “Why are we focusing on this?” Or “What is the point of this meeting?”

This took me by surprise, because, if there’s one thing I am, it’s transparent—or so I thought. Every question, concern, doubt, and humorous thought (unfortunately) echoes on my face. So, how is it that I was failing at transparency?

It turns out that feeling like you clearly communicated, while your teammates feel that you did not, is a common occurrence. Simply put, we often think we are communicating better than we are. In fact, communication issues are often at the heart of complaints about leadership. Why, in the examples I showed above, was I unaware of my lack of transparency?

Digital Tools for Effective and Efficient Writing

by Trent Lythgoe

I’m always looking for the latest digital writing tools. I suspect a few of my fellow professors secretly mock me for using technological writing crutches. But I feel no shame. Writing is hard enough—I see no reason to make it harder by using a typewriter, barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways. Tweedy technophobes can have my wireless mouse when they pry it from my cold, dead hand.

Here are a few tools I use in my writing process to make my work more effective and efficient.

Research

1) Google Scholar. Google Scholar is my first stop for academic research. A simple keyword search returns thousands of sources, sortable by date or relevance. My favorite feature is “cited by” which shows researchers the most influential sources based on the number of times they’ve been cited. Further, users can click the “cited by” number to get the list of citing works, and they can narrow their search to only that list by checking the “search within citing articles” box. These functions allow researchers to quickly narrow thousands of search results to only the most useful sources.

2) Zotero. Managing sources and building citations can be tough, but Zotero makes it easy. Zotero’s web browser plugin saves source information with one click. Once saved, writers can use Zotero’s Microsoft Word plugin to quickly create correctly formatted citations and works cited lists. Additionally, Zotero can easily switch citation styles. I once drafted an article using Chicago style but wanted to send it to a journal that uses APA. The style change would have taken several hours by hand. With Zotero, it took ten seconds and three mouse clicks.

FM-VOICE – A Framework for Improving Communications in Your Organization

By R.T. Rotte

You’re a company commander, and your platoons aren’t doing what you want them to. One platoon is always a little behind on tasks or unresponsive to key information. Another platoon is executing the tasks and preparing for training, but missing your overall intent. You feel like you’re putting out the same information to all of your soldiers, but are somehow having varying levels of success, everywhere from training execution to daily administrative tasks.

I’ve been there. I too was once a company commander, and found myself searching for answers to these issues. The simple answer to why each platoon was operating at such different levels was that each platoon had different leaders of varying strengths. The more difficult answer was that I was not communicating effectively with those struggling platoons. Communicating information effectively is a nuanced process. It not only involves the communication skills of the person who is trying to transmit information, but also of those receiving it and interpreting it. Whether in your own version of this story you have been the company commander, the struggling platoon, or the successful platoon, at some point, we’ve all witnessed the struggles and failures of communication in an organization. 

I want to offer you a framework to help solve that problem. You may have heard the phrase, “When you think you’re overcommunicating, you’re probably just starting to communicate enough.” As a junior officer, I did not grasp the truth in that statement–and I paid for it. I struggled to communicate with my troop commander, but neither of us made any noticeable attempts to adjust our tactics. Young lieutenant Rotte did not take many lessons from this struggle, just frustrations.

Stories of Service: Mentor Your Subordinate to Engage with the Public

By Brian C. Gerardi

Each year, our nation observes holidays centered on its service members and veterans. These commemorations—Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day and Veterans Day—often include invitations (“tasked” or “asked”) to senior service members and decorated retirees to speak on behalf of the profession of arms, to share stories of service and sacrifice. This article serves as an open call to senior leaders with decades of experience and frequent opportunities to publicly represent the profession of arms: consider selecting a more junior soldier to speak in your place. Coach them through this opportunity. It will benefit them, the profession, and the public.

The Department of Defense pays a premium for advertising, especially to major sports (e.g., NFL, CrossFit, and even NASCAR), to broaden its outreach in a challenging recruiting environment with an ever shrinking pool of qualified candidates for service. The truth is that every military service branch has a readily available ensemble of potential recruiters. Whether sharing with civilian friends about their military experiences or convincing a teammate or colleague to remain in service, our junior leaders are a tangible and more easily identifiable representative with whom to connect. Enabling our junior leaders to engage with the public leverages their connection with certain audiences and concurrently adds to their professional growth.

Three Reasons Junior Leaders Engaging the Public is a Win-Win

Our Sloppy Over-Reliance on Texting

by Jack Hadley

Farewelled by my unit and signed out on PCS leave, I stood at a German train station headed to the airport. Then my phone went ding! I reflexively glanced at it, feeling a small but noticeable tinge of stress. I was no longer a Company Executive Officer (XO), but my pavlovian response to text messages had been trained into me for months. The XO group chat. I opened the message. Just a request for help from an adjacent XO—no crisis. Still, the message sucked me back into the distraction-filled task execution I had eagerly awaited leaving behind. So right there, at the train station, I decided it was finally time to exit all seven XO-related group chats. A cathartic wave of relief washed over me. I finally felt free.

Why was my group text exodus so liberating? Because these group texts were the symbol and source of my greatest professional frustration while serving in a Brigade Combat Team (BCT): our sloppy over-reliance on texting. The effects of our poor text communication habits include spotty and ever-changing ‘guidance’, inefficient task coordination, normalized distraction, and, as a result, dissatisfied soldiers. These negative effects’ accrual will affect our combat readiness–if we don’t change our current texting norms.  

The Bear: A New, Relevant Source of Professional Development

by Zach Batton

By and large, military leaders are not diversifying their sources for professional development. 

Once and Eagle, Black Hearts, Black Hawk Down, and This Kind of War are just a few repetitive staples in most reading/watch lists. However, many junior leaders are bored with the same “assigned” material. 

For those searching for a different source for junior leader professional development, The Bear is a formidable choice. The series is loaded with common workplace situations like adjusting to new leadership as well as changing corrosive behaviors. Moreso, there are many similarities between those situations and the Army’s Principles of Mission Command (ADP 6-0) and Leader Development (FM 6-22). Though it does not take place in a military setting, The Bear can be a valuable tool for learning how to establish mission command and instill change within an organization.  

Deliberate Communication: What We Can All Learn from Observing Senior Leaders

by Don Gomez

Have you ever found yourself in a meeting or gathering expecting to hear one thing from a senior leader but instead hearing something completely different? Something seemingly unrelated to what you thought was important?

“What the hell was that about?” someone might ask as the gathering breaks up. 

Or have you ever received an email from senior leader echelons above you addressing a topic with care and candor in an unexpected way? 

Was there an odd way that the email was structured? Was the font a different color? Were there variations on bold, italics, or underlined words? 

Did it just seem…different? Maybe overtly deliberate?

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself paying closer attention to the behavior, speech, and messaging of senior leaders. I’m not talking about the senior leaders we all see on television or social media – the “echelons above reality” senior leaders. Rather, I’m referencing the senior leaders in our actual organizations. The ones that are closer to us, but who we might not interact with every day.

A Leader’s Guide to Navigating Social Media in the Military

A Leader’s Guide to Navigating Social Media in the Military

By Kristy Bell

Social media has blurred the lines between our private and professional lives in an unprecedented way, and has also, in some ways, eroded the idea of a “non-partisan military” that shores up our democratic ideals.

This came to the forefront recently when several senior military leaders engaged with Fox News host Tucker Carlson over Carlson’s comments about women in the military. The subsequent dust-up prompted some to decry the loss of the customary apolitical stance American citizens have come to expect from its military professionals.