I liked this post a lot and wanted to add to it.  To start, I am a prior enlisted Soldier and have been in for 13 years now.  I currently am serving as an Commander of a Trailer Transfer Point where I am on the only Officer in a group of 21 Soldiers.  It is challenging on a drill weekend to formulate a plan with so many other things going on and battalion usually implementing a training schedule.  I was lucky and was able to get on ADSO for the past 4 months which has taught me many of the systems the AGR Soldier uses.  A couple key things that I have learned in the past 4 months I would like to share with you here.

Create task lists before the weekend.  When I was an enlisted NCO, I normally ran my weekends by shooting from the hip.  I never had an Officer give me any information on what I was responsible for the weekend so I planned my platoons time based on what I thought the commander’s intent was the day of.  Often, I accomplished tasks that were important to me, but not always in the direction my Officer wanted.  In reality, this wasn’t my fault but my commanders. I am not placing blame here, but the reality is if you are not setting specific tasks for your Soldiers to accomplish, they will improvise believing they are performing what you want.  This has good and bad consequences depending on the trust level you have for your Soldiers. An important tool to use, I have never seen reservists use until recently, is T&EOs.  If you aren’t aware on how to accomplish a training event, pull up the T&EO from CATS and go by the numbers.  Write it down for your Soldiers, be there when it happens, and learn as your Soldiers learn.  Everyone will benefit and grow and your Soldiers will appreciate the training environment you’ve set and ask for more.

Get to know the systems your AGRs use.  This can be particularly difficult for many reservists who use the systems part-time, but I assure you it is worth it to know them.  Understanding how your AGR is accomplishing his or her tasks with the systems like RLAS, ePAT, MARRS, and eLAS will improve your visibility on your unit.  Talk to your full time staff on what forms you should complete to get access and permissions you need and submit them.  Schedule an RMA day and time with your AGR to teach you what each system  does and how to use it.  You don’t need to be an expert here, but understanding the scope of these systems will give brevity to your answers when you are questioned on how your unit is doing administratively.  Again, this is difficult to find time and funds to get yourself in there to learn, but I assure you will be a stronger in your duties if you understand how your AGR is working. If you explain to your BC, he more than likely will allocate the funds for you.

Follow up on your Soldiers.  This is probably one of the more important things to accomplish before you leave on a weekend.  Doing an AAR on how tasks were accomplished over the weekend will build your understanding on the challenges your Soldiers are facing.  Ask them to be candid with you, dig into the responses your Soldiers give you, and develop understanding as to why we trained this weekend.  If it was a failure, find the positive and discuss the shortfalls as to why it occurred and what needs to be done to change it.  If it was a success, learn what could be done better actively raise the bar for the next learning event.  But, don’t safe this for the weekend, followup during lunches mid-day and then in the evening.  I would suggest doing it twice a day to see how they are accomplishing the tasks you’ve set.

Those are the couple I have learned thus far in the past four months.  Thanks for the opportunity to post.