The Things We Forget as Company Commanders

Taking company command is as daunting as it is exciting. The question I asked myself most often in the first few weeks was “what am I supposed to be doing?” This is often answered intuitively since Company Commanders attend meetings, presumably fall into a prescribed battle rhythm, and accomplish tasks inherent to their position like planning training and checking a variety of Army systems. As time progressed and I developed a level of comfortability with my focus, I began to ask something different. What am I missing? This is a more dangerous, nuanced question. This essay is a review of the various answers to that question that I encountered during the roller coaster ride typified by command.

For full disclosure, these considerations are not a list of things I “knocked out of the park.” Often, they are questions that arose from a crisis or were presented to me by a smarter, wiser soldier, NCO, or officer. Also, these questions generally flow from the requirement to manage your soldier’s experience under your command, a wicked challenge compared to everything else that will steal your time as a commander. As a company commander, you will likely succeed at least marginally at the crucial tasks like planning and executing training, or the menial ones like staying on top of MEDPROs and IPPS-A. There are too many guardrails in place to utterly fail at these tasks. Your S3, Executive Officer, Battalion Commander, and others will not hesitate to correct and assist you when you show signs of falling off course in these areas, as they should. It is entirely possible, however, that in the hubbub of accomplishing these tasks, as you check the boxes in your green book, you will forget to consider, “do my soldiers feel connected to their mission and to each other?  

The Retention NCO as a Force Multiplier

Who is your retention NCO? Are they the right person for the job? The reasons to consider this go far beyond confronting the current recruiting crisis. If provided with clear intent and purpose, the retention NCO can act as a conduit between the company commander and soldiers. In the interest of determining reenlistment options, soldiers will communicate their career wishes, personal life considerations, and gripes to a trusted retention NCO. A weekly or monthly touchpoint between the commander and this individual can reveal the motivations and concerns of soldiers, and the overall climate in your company. It can enable a new company commander to connect with soldiers by understanding what is going on at the ground level. Moving the needle on your reenlistment numbers is a bonus to the knowledge you may gain about the lives, motivations, and fears of your soldiers. This information enables you to connect with your soldiers and gain a sense of what is going on at the ground level of your company.

The Mission Beyond Training

What real-world mission is your company aligned against? Do your soldiers know what that mission is? This question is increasingly difficult to answer in the era of renewed great power competition. What was previously a solid and intuitive line between company-level training and a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan may now be a hazy line to a contingency operation somewhere in an assigned area of responsibility. Geopolitics aside, soldiers want to know why they are being asked to train as hard as they do. “We have an NTC rotation coming up” will not answer that question in a meaningful way for most, nor should it. Soldiers join the Army and stick around for many reasons, but a common denominator is the sense of shared purpose imbued from collective training and hardship. The Stryker driver who spends 90% of their time in their driver’s hole during two weeks of the Company situational training exercise may be the first to ask this question, and the last to receive an answer. Iterative disregard for this will inevitably breed resentment.

Social Media

Does your company have a Facebook page or other social media presence? If so, who controls it? Social media is a tool, and can be utilized effectively or inappropriately. An effective use entails posting pictures of soldiers training, receiving awards, or being promoted. Keep it simple. I found that my company’s Facebook page was an efficient supplement to an FRG program challenged by time and distance. Families generally want to see what their soldiers are doing if they are away for extended stints in the field. I was surprised by how often the parents of my soldiers would reach out through Facebook to convey appreciation for posting photos of their son or daughter, or to express concerns. The latter was more helpful. More than once, a parent notified my First Sergeant and I of an impending crisis in a soldier’s life through Facebook Messenger. This enabled us to engage the soldier and provide assistance before a financial or relationship challenge became an unmitigated disaster.

Soldier Recognition

How and when does the company recognize the achievements of soldiers? Is it ad hoc or operationalized? Bottom line: make everything a big deal. Army Achievement Awards , promotions to PV2, and achieving a high rifle range or ACFT score are all opportunities for public recognition. People often disagreed with me on this. Several times I was challenged by those who would provide a variation of the critique “why are we recognizing mediocrity? They just did their job.” I often thought this question ignored the intent of recognition. Recognizing achievements in a public forum is motivating not only for the recognized soldier, but equally as importantly, for the soldier in formation witnessing the recognition. If a soldier feels they are in an organization that will recognize their achievements, they are more likely to seek opportunities for development and individual improvement. They want to be the ones receiving the AAM, being selected early for promotion, or being nominated for a school. A group of individuals striving for excellence and self-betterment will inherently lead to a more lethal organization. This is a task that you will likely fail at if you attempt to manage it by yourself. Charge your training room, platoon leadership, or First Sergeant to anticipate awards nominations, promotions, and other occurrences worthy of public recognition. As a leadership team, discuss how and when to recognize soldiers, and ensure they are aware they are being recognized ahead of time. This will provide them the option to invite family members and friends, which makes for an exponentially more memorable event.

The Training Calendar

What system does the company use to manage a calendar and communicate it to soldiers? News flash: the Digital Training Management System (DTMS) prescribed by the Army is not the answer. The management and posting of DTMS calendars is an Army requirement, and should therefore be carried out with care and detail (my former First Sergeant and fellow Company Commanders just threw up reading this statement of hypocrisy by me). However, their format is illegible and incommunicable for soldiers. This begs the question, what is the alternative? The simplicity and accessibility of a shared company outlook calendar is a fantastic collaborative tool, and makes for shared understanding amongst the leadership. Translating this product into a navigable, informative product to post in your company area is a relatively simple task for the average junior officer PowerPoint wizard. The utility of managing a training calendar goes beyond just training; its purpose is to inform and provide predictability to soldiers struggling to balance work with their personal and family lives. I often thought that the constant preaching of “work/life balance” by senior leaders was disingenuous, and often resulted in unmanageable expectations of soldiers and Lieutenants new to the Army. If a consistently stable work/life balance is at the top of someone’s list of priorities, the Army may simply not be for them. Instead of attempting to constantly manage the unmanageable dilemma of time contrasted with Army readiness requirements and training, leaders should instead focus more on the highly manageable problem of predictability. As a company commander, it is unlikely that you will consistently deliver on the promise of an unquantifiable balance between work and life, although you must attempt to when able. It would be more productive to quantify how many of your junior enlisted soldiers can tell you what training they will be participating in 6 weeks from now.

Maintaining Perspective

The difficulty of company command is non-negotiable. The Army has elected to increasingly push requirements to the company level and pile tasks upon the heads of company commanders. There are innumerable systems to manage, property items to inventory, and slides to update. Time is never on your side, and the tyranny of unpredictability inherent to military organizations is ubiquitous. The inherent peril is that you will never consider what the newest soldier in your company thinks about their decision to join the Army a month after arriving, or why one of your Platoon Leaders has a bad attitude.

The rewarding nature of company command is by contrast, completely negotiable. As time progressed in company command, I found myself simply laughing at the amount of work I needed to accomplish. While this did not necessarily assist in accomplishing the work, it did help maintain perspective. The reality is that, like most things in the Army, company command is over before you know it. I will not remember any of the training meeting slides I updated or the amount of rifle ranges we executed. I will, in fact, remember individual interactions with my soldiers, or time spent with my First Sergeant and XO. As a wise senior NCO once told me, the Army is about people, not systems. I found that I made better decisions when I remembered this advice, and I hope others can do the same.

Captain Jay Pasquarette is an Army Strategist currently attending graduate school at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Prior to becoming a Strategist, he was an armor officer and commanded a Cavalry Troop and Headquarters and Headquarters Troop (HHT) at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM), WA. He lives in Alexandria, VA with his wife and two children.