December 16, 2020
How to build more resilient and innovative US special operations teams
The military is looking for the wrong solutions to support the force. Building resilient, ready, and innovative teams require leaders to release pressure on the force, not treat the fallout from it. This process starts in garrison, and it demands bold leadership. To support people, each leadership team in U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) must take a proactive whole-of-person approach. This requires culture change beyond current approaches, one that needs to focus on redefining mission objectives to better support personnel and reducing unnecessary requirements.
The military is looking for the wrong solutions to support the force.
The services broadly, and SOCOM specifically, tend to view pressure on the force as caused by external and environmental factors — like high operational tempo, deployment stressors, and injuries — and subsequently take siloed and reactive approaches to fix the fallout. That fallout manifests itself in suicide, substance abuse, sexual harassment and assault, and loss of talent. Currently implemented solutions show the services view high operational tempo, deployment stressors, and family tensions as the causal factors for these grim outcomes.
Read the full article from Task and Purpose.
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