follow the leader

While we're on AFX stories...

On AFX I had a tacit disagreement with the adult officers about my role as a Cadet Under Officer.

I was a Syndicate Coordinator. Don't worry about what it means, except that it's just not the top job within our Course of 93 cadets, and I was responsible for 29 cadets (Y).

I led the way I liked, and they wanted me to conform to the CUO they liked. So you can see what went wrong there.

The way I interpreted my role was that I would plan stuff, find out what needs to be done, find ways to lift morale, and then pass it down to a Sergeant to actually get down and dirty with the cadets.

The way they interpreted my role was to go around and shout at the cadets myself, and give direct orders to the cadets. Now I didn't believe this was correct, and hence didn't engage in this properly, and ended up ostracising myself from the adult officers and instead developing better relations with my cadets (the other CUOs who conformed to the adult officer's views obviously ended up doing the exact opposite).

Now I'd like to mention that CUO Gao (Brian) led in the way that I intended to (that is, not much shouting at the troops. Instead, officers should be planning stuff and finding out things to fix, then passing it down to someone else to shout about). He ended up winning the Best Coy award (a Coy is a Company, a group of 60-80 cadets). He is a smug douchebag and you should punch him when you next see him kkthnx ;)

Here is the time to point out that, in Cadets at least, there is no such thing as a single good leader. There is only such thing as a good command team. There needs to be some magical chemistry from CUO to Warrant Officers to Sergeants to Corporal to the Cadets. If any of those links have bad chemistry in between them, then it all falls apart and no matter how epic the CUO is, it'll be difficult to run it spectacularly.

Even though Brian is smug forever that his Charlie Company won Best Coy award (don't forget to punch him), he knows that he couldn't have done it if his CSM and SGTs weren't also capable (except for a certain SGT who we won't mention here xP)

In that respect, being a "good leader" means firstly knowing how to make good decisions, knowing your role, then being able to connect with many types of other leaders (inferior or superior). There exists not a universally good leader, but only a leader that has the potential to lead well under as many circumstances as possible.Even the "best" leaders will find someone who they don't get along with, and things won't run as smoothly as desired.

Nextly, semi-relatedly, there's what I call "immediate" leadership and then there's "sustainable" leadership. In my mind, "immediate" leadership is the intimidating, rawrblargh in your face type, where shit gets done, and it getes done quickly, at the compromise of the happiness of your inferiors. It is effective in the short term, but it sacrifices morale, and in the end your troops will end up tired of your shit.
"Sustainable" leadership takes a while to get started, but it develops better rapport with the inferiors. In the beginning, the inferiors might think you soft and may not obey you. Also, without being rawblargh in your face, sometimes the message gets lost. But once it gets going, your inferiors will respect you (assuming that your actions and decisions to date have been good ones), and shit will get done with minimal input.

As Inception kindly pointed out, "positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time."

Here's my model atm for my interpretation of effectiveness:
- Don't say anything unless you are sure of what you want. When giving directions they should be clear cut and be completely unambiguous. Umm's and ahh's also make the inferiors doubt the solidness of your decisions, and hence get done with less conviction.
- Never let your inferiors know that you are flaming them because someone else flamed yourself first. Let's say it was because of rubbish. The CUO would wtf at the Warrant Officer, and the Warrant Officer will wtf at the Sergeant. Now the Warrant Officer should flame the Sergeant because letting cadets leave rubbish around is wrong (not because the CUO flamed the Warrant Officer).
- Don't deny comforts unless there is a good reason to, and you can justify to your inferiors. If cadets are cold and they ask "Can I putz on a jumperz lol?", it's bad for morale if you say "no." You instead say "Don't put on a jumper unless you don't think you're going to survive. The sun's not down yet and it's yet to get colder."
- It's okay if there is a gap in your own knowledge. You just have to know how to find out. For instance, all I knew about asthma was that people can't breathe and they should puff from their reliever. I had the fortune of having a cadet say "Sir, I can't breathe." I knew very little about asthma, but I made sure she was holding her reliever while I sat her down. Note that this was during the abseiling activity, where no adult officers were present yet, and the St John's standby team was yet to arrive. If there are any cadets here, want to take a guess as to how I obtained the knowledge of how I knew how to deal with this attack?
- There needs to be a balance between being close enough with your inferiors so that they can trust you, yet be distant enough that you can give them orders.

Now I asked on Formspring for people to rate in order of importance - Results, Intention, Method. Here again I come back to this to evaluate a situation. I believe that the officers rated my performance valuing method over results and intention. I also noticed on Formspring that almost nobody (only 2 out of 33 people) chose Method as the most important result. My personal view on the rank of importance is [lol jokes you can find out in the next post when I go into this in detail].

In the eyes of the adult officers, my Method was shithole, my Intention was assumed to be good, but it was undeniable that the Results were better than they expected.
The Cook-Off wasn't due to any input from leadership, but the mini Chief of Army Challenge was! Each platoon (~30 cadets) was split up into sections of 9-10 cadets. They went around to various activities as a "test of objectives" to confirm that the week's training was successful and they remember how to do their shit. Out of the 12 sections that participated, first place and third place went to sections in my platoon (3PLT cheer! Lol jokes nobody from 3PLT is reading this).
Due to the nature of leadership that I stated before, it's impossible to claim my cadets victories throughout the week in my name alone - I could only make sure my Corporals were happy enough to keep the cadets happy motivated enough to learn and participate. As cheesy as it sounds, it was a team effort.

Anyways, storytelling aside - what do you think is the most important and least important out of Results, Intention and Method? Remember your answer because my next post will be quite the epic if I do say so myself.