Do Army Leaders (Military Leaders) really understand counseling and leader development?

Sir, I am glad you bring this up because I feel strongly about it. So here's my thought.

The Army emphases the importance of counseling and how much our success depends on it. However, there is little to no emphasis in developing counselors. In other words, it would be as if we wanted everyone to have 300 on an APFT, but we never do PT. But because we really do emphasize PT, we do it every day, we are graded on it very strictly, our career depends upon our performance in it, and we even send individuals to school to become Master Fitness Trainers. So yes I buy that we think PT is important because our practice shows that.
On the other hand, lets look at counseling vs PT.

PT vs. Counseling
Frequency Daily(twice for failures) vs. Monthly/Quarterly for NCO's (if it's done)
Performance Measure APFT vs. None
Specialty School Master Fitness vs. None
Retention Standard Failure=discharge vs. None
Awards PT Badge vs. None

I could keep going but you get the point. I could make the analogy for just about any other metric besides PT. So we want good counseling but we don't make good counselors. We don't train them properly. Look at your own credentials you listed to be a counselor as a civilian, and then look at the Army's. There are none. Anyone and everyone is and can be a counselor. We require them to be. So there's no credentials to do it but there must be training then. Well if you count a couple of hours of power point slides in your NCOES, then yes, we provide training. Probably about the same amount of training a Lab Tech gets on head space and timing on the 50. More often than not, an NCO is doing his counseling based off of the little blue book called the Mentor and just copies and pastes what someone else and wrote. Why? Because that's how he was counseled. If we say that counseling is important, then we have to treat it that way. There's zero accountability for failing these "requirements."
Fail a APFT and you're out, fail to counsel, well just have your subordinate write his own eval. Would we let them grade themselves on the APFT or write their own card? No that would be ridiculous wouldn't it? Yes it sure would, and yes it sure is.
If we want good counseling, we need good counselors. If we want good counselors then we need to make them. We are not.

There is an art and science to counseling and it takes practice to learn to blend them to best tackle the situation at hand. You cannot approach every situation the same, and you cannot approach every person the same.

Sometimes its best when you take the directive approach: "you will accomplish the following .....and I will be there to inspect these requirements, you will meet me on ____date to conduct a follow up assessment to this counseling".

Sometimes its best for the counselee to use a participatory in the counseling session: "you decided the best plan of action was to accomplish x,y,z......I will be there to assist you in accomplishing these tasks, we will conduct our follow up assessment on _____date"

Sometimes its best to use a combined approach: "after reviewing your performance, we both decidced the best plan of action to correct the performance was to ........, I will be with you during the period of you completing the corrective action to assist as needed so the desired outcome is achieved. We will assess your performance on ____date during our assessment counseling."

The biggest part of all is actually communication, use of empathy (when appropriate) and having a candid conversation to correct whatever the performance gaps are. Most Soldiers really want to do a good job and they do not want to fail, you have to reach them (on their level) to get the maximum performance from them.

Reading through this discussion, I am struck with how, almost without exception (nod to COL Jean (John) F. B.), everybody has redefined counseling into a form-driven exercise in filing an interim EER/NCOER/OER, frequently just as a blatant prelude to subsequent disciplinary action.

Pardon me while I properly position my soapbox....

Prepare to copy. Message follows:

YOU DON'T NEED A FORM TO EFFECTIVELY COUNSEL A SOLDIER, AND YOU DON'T NEED TO BE SITTING DOWN EITHER.

COUNSELING IS MORE THAN GOAL SETTING AND PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION,

AT LEAST 90 PERCENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING A SOLDIER RECEIVES SHOULD BE WHILE HE OR SHE IS WORKING AND SHOULD BE GIVING IN SMALL, EASILY COMPREHENDED PIECES. IF YOU AREN'T DOING THAT, SPENDING ONE WHOLE HOUR EACH MONTH READING A PIECE OF PAPER ISN'T GOING TO DO A DAMN BIT OF GOOD.

As I step off my soapbox, I will add that, in my stubborn, words-have-traditional-meanings view, anybody who defines counseling around filling out a form is very likely in need of a flag-rank-rated recto-cranial extractor. Counseling is not creating a paper trail to designed to justify busting somebody's fourth point of contact.

Counseling includes informal counseling, which is a key component in mentorship and effective individual training. If your immediate subordinate could not, at any formation, verbally summarize at least 90 percent of what you would put on his or her written evaluation at that point in time, you are failing to provide effective feedback, which means you are failing to adequately counsel that soldier.