: Military

I’m this paper I need to Discuss 1 area of weakness in the U.S Army subordinate leader development programs and propose 3 recommended improvements to address that weakness.

ANSWER

Remedy to US Army Subordinate Leader Development Programs weakness

The leadership development program in United States Army allows scrutinizing how subordinate leaders are developed in the traditional workforce. Us army training is essential for all soldiers. The development of a leader is the most crucial purpose of army training which is substantially coordinated through domains such as operational, institution, and self-development. As such, each domain has a holistic contribution towards the subordinate leadership development of every soldier. However there are problems encountered while trying to harmonize the domains in the training ground to develop and equip subordinates with skills that would make them serve the nation diligently, thus adequate and efficient mitigation is needed to address the weaknesses in the programs.

In soldiers’ leadership development programs, they often exclude the leadership study, subordinates are left to discern the leadership lesson that is appropriate to them from the rest of the lessons. The followers must show the desire to learn, be observant and sieve the leadership qualities they require and internalize them. Notably, the subordinates are not only required to keenly use their intuition capabilities but also use time and mental energy while attending to duties of their present position. All these responsibilities are cumbersome and are a lot to expect from the subordinates in one. To grow leaders instead the programs need to emphasize training leadership competencies. Leadership competency includes topics such as self-development, example settings, learning from failures, building trust, and protecting the army team (Holenweger et al, 2017). Concisely if the leaders fail to uphold these teachings explicitly during leader development and training events, less should be expected of subordinates to mold their behavior and become noble leaders by themselves.

Secondly, US soldiers alternate between their home and combat for several years that take a toll on their psychological well-being. To some extent, this brings significant levels of distress that negatively impact followers’ performance, readiness, and personal relationships. To remedy such noteworthy repercussions it is imperative to incorporate the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) program in army leadership development. The CSF program is proactive and an integrated approach to developing psychological resilience in our combatants, their family members as well as soldiers’ civilian workforce. The CSF program works by using all dimensions in psychological resilience such as social, emotional, physical, family, and spiritual (Sreenivasan et al, 2018). This program employs several teaching plans in classrooms as well as the web to reach a broader army community. The web training strategy helps subordinates to self-assess and identify their resiliency strengths and to train the master resiliency trainer.

Furthermore, there is a notion that training conditions provide minimal opportunities for a subordinate to overcome adversity, exercise initiative, and consider innovative solutions, such inadequacy may not enable them to acquire maximum growth and development in the long run. Nonetheless, attempting to achieve numerous training objectives and unsuitably evaluating the readiness of the unit will bring forth destructive impact. To counter these challenges, training programs need to incorporate lessons from the most experienced and effective army leaders so that followers can ideally learn classes more appealing (Lacelenza et al, 2017). Additionally, leaders can generate a systematic tactic to advance leadership development by exposing juniors to many experiences in an organizational context. Moreover, an army transformational leaders make subordinates feel valued, raise a sense of ownership within an organization and motivate them to achieve things out of ordinary.

References

Holenweger, M., Jager, M. K., & Kernic, F. (Eds.). (2017). Leadership in extreme situations. Cham: Springer.

Lacerenza, C. N., Reyes, D. L., Marlow, S. L., Joseph, D. L., & Salas, E. (2017). Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1686. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000241

Sreenivasan, S., Rosenthal, J., Smee, D. E., Wilson, K., & McGuire, J. (2018). Coming home from prison: Adapting military resilience training to enhance successful community reintegration for justice-involved Iraq-Afghanistan veterans. Psychological services, 15(2), 163.  https://doi.org/10.1037/ser0000206