Posted on Jan 30, 2015
"I will always place their needs above my own..." NCO Creed. Can you take care of your Soldiers best without taking care of yourself first?
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I'm looking for arguments either way. Do you support this phrase in the creed? Can you care for your Soldiers better if you take care of yourself better? What say you?
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NCO Creed
NCO Creed
Edited 9 y ago
Posted 9 y ago
Responses: 13
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There's a mental exercise we used to use for young Marines long ago. Don't know if they still do.
It's you (Senior man) and two other Marines (junior to you). You have 1x MRE (only food), and plenty of water. You are stranded, and you need to get all of you to safety.
How do you split the food?
I've heard a lot of answers to this scenario before.
a) Split it 3 ways. You are after all a team, and the weakest link is the strongest link.
b) Split it 2 ways. Give it to the junior Marines.
c) Give it to the junior most Marine. You always make sure the junior Marines are fed first.
One of the best ones, and the one I tend to like the best however is:
d) Break up the meal. Main meal (Protein) goes to you. It will help you think and make decisions. Everything else (Carbs) goes to the junior Marines, which will give them energy. The overall calories should be 'about' evenly divided.
So what has this got to do with the NCO Creed?
Your needs are THEIR needs. They need you thinking clearly. They need you strong. If you make yourself a weak link, you hurt them.
Take too much on, and you take yourself out of the fight. The beauty of a chain of command, and the military structure is that we can delegate. You don't have to do everything. The entire command structure is actually built on that concept.
It's you (Senior man) and two other Marines (junior to you). You have 1x MRE (only food), and plenty of water. You are stranded, and you need to get all of you to safety.
How do you split the food?
I've heard a lot of answers to this scenario before.
a) Split it 3 ways. You are after all a team, and the weakest link is the strongest link.
b) Split it 2 ways. Give it to the junior Marines.
c) Give it to the junior most Marine. You always make sure the junior Marines are fed first.
One of the best ones, and the one I tend to like the best however is:
d) Break up the meal. Main meal (Protein) goes to you. It will help you think and make decisions. Everything else (Carbs) goes to the junior Marines, which will give them energy. The overall calories should be 'about' evenly divided.
So what has this got to do with the NCO Creed?
Your needs are THEIR needs. They need you thinking clearly. They need you strong. If you make yourself a weak link, you hurt them.
Take too much on, and you take yourself out of the fight. The beauty of a chain of command, and the military structure is that we can delegate. You don't have to do everything. The entire command structure is actually built on that concept.
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I think you can take care of yourself AFTER taking care of your Soldiers, SSG Robert Burns. Of course you have to take care of yourself, and there are times when you will come before your Soldiers, but for the most part and for most needs, I think Soldiers can come first and you can take care of your own needs afterwards.
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I voted for the first option -- but just to clarify, I looked at this in an absolute sense. If a leader's professional and personal life is all messed up, then in my opinion that leader is less likely to be able to take the BEST care possible of his/her subordinates. The leader should have his (or her) life squared away. Otherwise, that leader is prone to have his mind elsewhere at times -- not necessarily all the time, but frequently enough to where it would take away from providing the BEST leadership possible for those subordinates.
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Lt Col (Join to see)
If you keep putting off your own problems and needs, sooner or later it will catch up with you and that's when your ability to take care of your subordinates effectively gets compromised. Little case in point - one of the sad things about our pay and personnel systems is that after all these years, it's still set up to treat transitioning from extended active duty back to guard or reserve status as a "separation or retirement" action in the pay and personnel system. People being people, this almost always ends up in the member not being paid for an extended period of time, dropping out of DEERS, things like that. The last time I went from a Title 10 extended active duty tour back to Title 32 AGR status, it took over a month and a half to get paid - working full the time the entire time too, and also getting into it with Tricare and the local MTF whether or not my family was covered or not. I had to decide how much of my time was going to be split between trying to correct these problems and working issues for the airmen I led. There was a point in that month and a half where I had to put the airmen second - why? "God and country" is what calls us to duty, but you can't run an ATM card at the supermarket called "God and Country" same thing when your kid needs shots. What happens during this kind of period, is that distractions increase, you get angry (and it wasn't my unit, or the losing unit, it really pinpointed back to AFPC, ARPC and especially DFAS for a series of mistakes) and that affects your ability to lead effectively - you try to put keep it out of view, you try to put on the poker face, but after a while it wears on you, if you can't fix the issue at least fairly quickly.
A lesson I learned from a friend when she was in a command tour was "try to always take about 30 minutes a day to work on your own stuff" - for one thing, this seems to prevent small paperwork issues from snowballing into complex ones - i.e, starting out as something your S1 shop can fix but ends up requiring HRC (AFPC in AF-speak) or something like that. And, it will give you peace of mind - it calms you down. But yes, overall, if you let personal issues fester as a leader, it will affect your ability to lead and command, even if you can mask it for weeks, months, years, it will catch up to you - when it does, the biggest problem is that everyone else will be able to see it, if they couldn't see it building all along. Soldiers, Airmen, whomever - they're not dumb, they're not blind. You're better off fixing yourself which maybe means giving them only 75-80% for a while, but it's a solid 85% and not a half-@$$ed 100% where you ignore your own problems and they get worse.
A lesson I learned from a friend when she was in a command tour was "try to always take about 30 minutes a day to work on your own stuff" - for one thing, this seems to prevent small paperwork issues from snowballing into complex ones - i.e, starting out as something your S1 shop can fix but ends up requiring HRC (AFPC in AF-speak) or something like that. And, it will give you peace of mind - it calms you down. But yes, overall, if you let personal issues fester as a leader, it will affect your ability to lead and command, even if you can mask it for weeks, months, years, it will catch up to you - when it does, the biggest problem is that everyone else will be able to see it, if they couldn't see it building all along. Soldiers, Airmen, whomever - they're not dumb, they're not blind. You're better off fixing yourself which maybe means giving them only 75-80% for a while, but it's a solid 85% and not a half-@$$ed 100% where you ignore your own problems and they get worse.
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