Senior Rater Counseling is very important, make no mistake. However, I have only received one once, when I was in company command. One could argue that this is probably the most important time to receive one though, since company commanders are very influential. The counseling was not written, nor supported by anything concrete. Words and discussion are great, but when you’re trying to communicate your expectations, a piece of paper goes a long way, as far as retention goes. I do think that accessibility is important though. I was deathly afraid of talking to my senior rater. He was very intimidating and most conversations with him were very high stakes. I think an attitude of “my door is always open to you if you need guidance or mentorship on anything” is important. And I think it’s important to repeat that every chance you get. This was my guidance to my senior rated population, and even though I repeated it time and again, I’d still have SFCs come to me and say they were afraid to bring it up to me. The only danger is you run the risk of the individual going over their raters head.

One of my weaknesses in command was making time for formal senior rater counselings. To spare a bunch of details, I was the senior rater to over 20 individuals. Many had similar positions, so the counseling could be fairly similar. The problem was this made it seem very impersonal.

To get at the toxic leadership portion of your post, I think it’s important for the senior rater to occasionally stop by the unit and engage the Soldiers (like you mentioned). What do you think of your unit? How is CPT XXXX working out? Of course, there will need to be some caution with taking the feedback as true. Perhaps that Soldier just had an Article 15, etc.

Command Climate Surveys are also an option. The hard part is getting Soldiers to participate and to provide respectful, thoughtful feedback. On my initial survey, I received a lot of comments with profanity or disrespectful language. These comments were for the most part thrown out. However, the ones that intelligently communicated a problem, I took to heart.