Tactical Leadership and Teamwork

Vietnam War

By your own orientation to cooperative work in a mission-driven organization like the armed forces, do you consider yourself a strategic thinker, a tactical planner, or a logistician? How do you determine that, and how does your own daily life and works to demonstrate that?

Military tactics are essential during warfare. Tactical planning enables the military to meet overall military and political goals. I am a strategic planner because I tend to apply strategies by short-term choices on the activities of soldiers and employment of weapons on the field of war. I use tactics in guiding my troops in battlefields. This has helped the military win various wars (Boje & Dennehy, 2010).

As a tactical planner, I always think about what needs to be achieved now. My tactical mind-set concentrates on the activities needed to move the military forward directly toward the big perspective. My tactical plans are intended to be short-term: created quickly, implemented strongly, and then changed by a new tactical plan in accordance with the new scenario. Fast implementation of my tactical plans moves us systematically towards achieving our strategic goals. For me, thinking tactically means creating a daily, execution-focused, tactical plan. In this case, I will concentrate on one primary venture with the aim of creating and realizing considerable results within the next 24 hours. The tactical strategy to planning motivates an action-oriented way of thinking. As I implement my tactical planning, I often find that instead of feeling that I am running around in circles responding to my environment, I tend to be in control, act more purposely, and get a lot done in a short while. Being tactical ensures that I am in charge of the momentum (Boje & Dennehy, 2010).

To demonstrate this in my daily life, I do not concentrate completely on the suspects. I concentrate on my personal activities, rather than what the suspect is doing. By keeping this focus, I become more effective in managing my own feelings. This has enabled me to make powerful and ideal choices and only increase the force, if necessary. This internal concentration defends me and allows me to create sound choices. This is the officer-based strategy to fixing any difficult scenario. Mental and physical mind-set and activities affect how the risk translates the crew's aggressiveness. A mind-set of full control must be managed throughout any military function.

2. Then, with your own understanding of what cooperation and support you need from others involved, what do you need from others in their roles to accomplish your own work successfully?

The significance of cooperation in accomplishing my work is a crucial and a key to success. In my case, cooperation determines the success. In the military, the crew understands working together because lives may be at stake. Survival means learning to depend on each other as well as every opportunity for the team to learn and grow. As a high-performing group, we must experience the benefits of teamwork too. This enables us to maintain satisfactory performance, especially under pressure (Boje & Dennehy, 2010).

However, there is a possibility of social loafing: people doing less work in a team than what they would be normally doing working independently. For me to reduce social loafing, I always make personal performance more noticeable while in a team environment. Developing smaller groups, specializing tasks to individuals, and calculating personal performance, can do this. I also reduce social loafing through improving worker motivation, by choosing workers who have previously shown themselves to be inspired, and improving job enrichment. In tests performed in the 90s, an increase in team cohesiveness showed up to reduce social loafing (Parker, 2008).

3. Finally, what strictly military lessons have you learned from the course so far that would help you accomplish your mission more effectively?

The military has left me with many strategic and functional experience and skills. However, it also provides life lessons that I will carry for the rest of my life. First, I learnt that leadership in the military is paternalistic and hierarchical. There is an absence of open-ended cooperation and dependency on the official rather than casual authority. Eventually, military activities are described, many observe by creativity-stifling restrictions and self-discipline (Parker, 2008). The "salute point" at which choices are made and where conversations or cooperation end seems to fly in the face of the messiness and openness required, for creativeness and advancement to succeed.