Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 42

and skills…and who allayed their soldiers’ anxieties that they would respect their lives by avoiding
wasteful casualties—these leaders led units that
were the most combat effective.”26
Trust of superiors. Fifth, experienced junior
officers are less likely to be subjected to micromanagement by their superiors, which reduces stress
on the organization, increases the young officers’
job satisfaction, and possibly their organizational
commitment and retention in the Army. This is a
broad statement, but again, current learning lends
evidence. The landmark Army Training and Leader
Development Panel report sought to identify issues
within the Army’s culture and climate that were
contributing to dissatisfaction in the officer corps
and decreased retention rates over the decade following the Persian Gulf War. According to this 2002
report, junior officers were “not receiving adequate
leader development experiences . . . [which] leads
to a perception that micromanagement is pervasive.
They do not believe they are being afforded sufficient opportunity to learn from the results of their
own decisions and actions.”27 The Army chose to
make the causal link between these complaints and
poor officer retention and instituted several changes
over the next several years in an attempt to reverse
the trend.
Of course, micromanagement and its negative
impact is nothing new. The Vietnam-era U.S.
Army provides an interesting precedent of the
organizational perils of inexperienced leadership
“corrected” by micromanagement. In this example,
NCOs created from the post-basic training, “shake
and bake” Noncommissioned Officer Course were
considered too inexperienced to be left alone to
execute their duties and care for soldiers. The
alleged micromanagers? Junior officers. As related
by historian Ernest Fisher, “Because of a chronic
shortage of experienced NCOs, many officers, especially at the company level, resumed the practice
of bypassing their noncoms when dealing with the
troops…this eroded the sergeant’s proper role as a
small-unit leader and pushed him to the sidelines
where he became a spectator instead of the focus
of the action.” The chief irony of this practice,
Fisher adds, was that it occurred exactly at a time
when, “because of the nature of tactics employed
in Vietnam, the small-unit leader was more needed
than ever before.”28
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Creating Capable Junior Officers
This brief survey of leader development literature in these five categories suggests that previous
military experience, along with sufficient education
and training, creates a junior officer more capable
of immediately performing with competence and
confidence upon implementation. This may have
as much to do with the way humans learn as it does
with the various complex tasks a junior officer must
master. According to a leadership textbook used at
Fort Leavenworth, humans learn from experience
through a process called “action-observation-reflection.” Typically, humans engage in actions, observe
the results or outcomes, and eventually reflect upon
what went right or wrong, including whether or not
to repeat the same action and how to i \