Author: NoBrakes
The topic of Guide or Information: Effective Leadership
Last Edit Date: Wed Nov 11, 2020
I made a post a few weeks ago now about effective communication and it was fairly well received. This is a follow-up to that post, but I want to be clear about two things:
- Even if you never plan on being a fireteam lead or squad lead, you should still read this so you can understand the kinds of things that a unit lead has to think about. I am also planning to do an “Effective Leadedship” article in the future, too.
- This is my personal approach to thinking about unit leadership. If you ask some of the other players on NAK Squad, you’re likely to get all sort of potentially conflicting opinions and advice that either isn’t listed or isn’t even in my brain to begin with. I would hope that people read this as some helpful guidelines rather than hard and fast rules, and takes the input of other leaders into account. As I say at the end of this article, the best leaders are the best students.
The OODA Loop
To be dead honest, this is a thing I’ve understood intuitively for a while, but never had the words for, so I want to start by thanking TEXN for giving me this term: OODA Loop.
As a unit lead, you’re going to walk through four general tasks in a pretty consistent order and loop through those tasks repeatedly as the mission continues and the situation develops. We can use the initials OODA to remember it:
- Observe
- Orient
- Decide
- Act
In order to successfully execute as a unit lead, you have to get through all of these things. You should always be working to improve your actionable intel so that you can make better decisions which result in a more effective action. Keep that idea in mind as you read through the rest of this.
You Are a Leader First
The biggest mistake you can make as a leader is to not do the actual task of providing leadership. While there’s certainly a case to be made for leading by example, that’s not all of the equation. The best leaders are the ones who prioritize doing the mental (and physical) processes of situational awareness and decision making over other tasks like shooting their rifle or driving a vehicle. If you are a leader, you are going to be less effective if you are tied up in some task that is not providing direction to your unit. I’ve found that the most effective leaders on NAK servers are generally the players who stay near the back line of an engagement or who ride in the back of a vehicle. These leaders are prioritizing the OODA loop in many ways. They’re keeping information flowing between command and their unit; they’re looking at their surroundings to gather intel; they’re opening their map to provide clear diagrams for tactical progression; so many tasks that a rifleman doesn’t ever have to worry about. The natural consequence is that sometimes it feels like you’re never getting into much action yourself as a leader, but effective leaders realize that this can be just as mentally engaging as executing somebody else’s orders and set themselves up in a way that lets them do what they need to do.
If you are too busy driving or shooting, then you have a unit below you with no clear instruction. A unit without clear instructions is not generally making effective progress on mission goals.
You are not Superman. You can’t do it all on your own. Delegate what you can so you can fill your role on the team.
Trust Your People
As a leader, you need to have faith that the people below you are capable of doing the things you ask them to, and you need to give them the space to do it. When you delegate, you need to detach your mind from the minutiae of the task and pull back out to manage the larger picture again. If you’re constantly coming with successively more detailed instructions or requests, then the delegates you’ve assigned won’t be able to do the communication they need to do to actually carry out those requests. Be clear about what you need done and who should do it, but then take a deep breath and let that thing happen while you move onto the next OODA loop.
I’m about to contradict myself in the next section, but duality is the nature of life, so bear with me on this ride.
Specific Communication Is Key
I really recommend going back and reading the post I made about communication. The biggest issue I see from unit leads is that they say what they want done but don’t give clear direction about how to do it. I used the analogy in my communication article of a CPR trainer who says to always point to a specific person and put the onus on one person to call EMS rather than leaving it up to a crowd who will individually decide that the responsibility falls to someone else.
For and in-game example, if you’re defending an area, simply saying “Give a 360 watch at that outpost” is a surefire way to put a unit in an outpost, but you generally won’t get a good 360 with all sectors covered. If you instead assign specific fireteams to specific sectors (or specific buddy pairs) then you’re more likely to get something that matches the distribution you have in mind. This same thing applies to many tasks. If you just say “Somebody drive this vehicle” and you don’t get a response, don’t just sit there waiting for an answer; pick a specific person and tell them to drive. If you need a buddy pair to run out under the covering fire of the rest of the unit, name two specific players to move (and implicitly you’re then setting the expectation that everybody else is the cover).
Decisive Communication Is Also Key
There’s something to be said for listening to the suggestions of the players under your command, but you are still the leader and you need to set the tone about what’s acceptable and when you’re done taking suggestions. Some leaders have a tendency to freeze up when too many suggestions come in, not wanting players to feel unheard. The unfortunate reality is that sometimes you need to cut off that discussion to then decide and act. You’re going to make tactical mistakes and you’re possibly going to annoy somebody, but at the end of the day it’s your job to make the final call and say when to execute it, and its your unit’s job to carry out the decision you made.
Check In on Your Players
Part of your responsibility isn’t just to be a clearinghouse for game intelligence and decisions, but also to make sure that people are having fun. When there’s a bit of a break in the action, check in on people and see how they’re feeling. Are they of a good mindset about the mission? Are they experiencing any technical issues? Are they experiencing any in-game needs like ammo or medical? Make sure to check in with yourself, too. It’s easy when you are the helper to forget to also help yourself. It’s also easy to get overwhelmed in command and need a brain break. If you need to pass on the leadership to somebody else, just do it! I’ll admit to having a few missions lately where I felt like I was in over my head for one reason or another (mostly non-Arma life things like lack of sleep or just having a bad day) and I’ve delegated leadership to somebody in my unit so I could de-load myself and just do a little bit of mindless carrying out orders.
Be Aware of Your Players’ Personalities
There are all kinds of people playing on NAK and all of them are here for different things. Keep a bit of tabs on the players under your command and see what kinds of things excite them and what kinds of things bore them, then play to those natural tendencies.
- Do you have a player who loves racking up kills? There’s your vehicle gunner.
- Do you have a player who’s always talking about the group moving too fast or too slow? There’s your point man.
- Do you have a player who likes to bring high-powered rifles with higher-powered scopes? There’s your recon element.
- Do you have a player who always impresses you with how he clears a room? There’s your door kicker.
- Do you have a player who logs into the Zeus server and immediately asks if you need a pilot? You get the idea (and if you answered “no,” then you should quit lying
).
If you give players a task they enjoy and are good at then they are more likely to actually do the things you ask of them and they’re more likely to view you positively as a leader. That’s not to say that there’s always something to do that will fit everybody’s main interests, but everybody will show you what kind of player they are if you just watch them.
Similarly, you sometimes get a new player that isn’t always totally clued in, and you’re gonna have to spend a little effort either holding their hand yourself or you can designate a more experienced player to show them the ropes. It’s up to you about how to do it, but being aware of who on your team could use some coaching is the only way to get that player the coaching they need to improve and fit the NAK Squad approach.
Be Aware of Your Tactical Resources
You should always know what kinds of resources you have and who has them or where they are. Fireteam leads should know who on their team has AT or explosives, who has a good long-range rifle, who is in a crew slot of a vehicle, and so on. Squad leads should know which squads have AT/DMR/vehicle crews. It’s okay to flatly ask “Hey, who in here has AT?” and keep that information in the back of your mind. You might forget exactly who as the mission goes on, but at least making the effort might save you pain later. On this note, I generally like to put my units through a gear check while still at arsenal just so I have a baseline expectation of what resources we have before we step off.
Be Aware of Your Tactical Location
You should try to stay at least peripherally aware of where the members of your unit are as well as a good awareness of the location of enemy (and civilian) contact and the general geography of the battlespace. If you don’t have a clear understanding of how those three elements fit together, you’re liable to make some preventable mistakes. Try to make the terrain and positioning work for you, and leverage a clear ROE to make sure that you engage the enemy from the most advantageous position at the most advantageous time.
In this case “position” isn’t a static point in at a fixed time, but your awareness should include how that is going to change into the future. What direction are enemy patrols moving? How hastily are you moving from one place to another and is that haste worth the relative lack of concealment or hard cover (including defilades)? What enemy unit is going to be the most important to remove from the battlespace first? How can you best leverage the tactical resources given the terrain and positioning? Don’t forget to observe and orient before you decide and act.
Practice Makes Permanent
My parents are both retired band teachers, and they’ll tell you that practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does make permanent. This does not mean that you’re forever bound to be bad, but rather that in order for practice to help you improve, you need to make conscious efforts at improvement. Listen to the feedback you get in debrief and try to work on those things.
The Best Leaders Are the Best Students
Part of making a conscious effort at improvement is a willingness to study the craft. That means taking some time outside of missions to learn principles of tactics and leadership. That study time could be as part of a protracted debrief, or maybe you’re spending some time reading materials that real-world militaries publish for their own training.
Obviously this would bore some people to tears, but there have been a few times that I’ve been in a mission that started at midnight on the Zeus server, and we’re still debriefing it at 3:30 AM going over each decision. 3:30 AM isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but asking other peoples’ opinions about “What would you have done?” is a great way to open your mind up to other viewpoints and sometimes even hear ideas that never even crossed your mind. You’ll find that NAK players have different experiences both in game and in their non-game lives that bring so many different perspectives and realms of expertise. While it’s good to be a willing teacher, don’t forget to be a willing student of the people you play with even when they don’t know they’re teaching.
