Overview
Choosing your drill team’s leaders is a tough task that can make or break a team’s performance throughout the school year.
There are a ton of factors to consider:
- Seniority
- Rank
- Experience Level
- Team Chemistry
- Teaching Ability
- Temperament
While there are many methodologies and ideologies when it comes to selecting a commander, there ARE a few key traits that will help both the incoming commander succeed AND help the team become even more effective followers.
Teaching Ability
One of the top traits any cadet LEADER, let alone a cadet commander, could possess is the ability to teach and transmit information to others.
Being a strong teacher necessarily comes with a few key traits that make for a highly successful cadet commander. Things such as positive relationship building, the ability to relate to others, and a natural sense of care for those you teach are all necessary components of being a strong teacher.
Teaching is also a clear-cut ability. You can tell when a cadet is a particularly good teacher because the results are evident.
Now, we need to be very clear. We are not talking about training. Cadets can be great at getting other cadets to DO things or PERFORM tasks successfully. Teaching goes deeper because it relies almost exclusively on positive relationships and building rapport.
This is why we generally recommend looking for great teaching ability in future cadet commanders!
Maturity
This one is obvious BUT many teams confuse longevity or seniority for maturity. While seniority and experience are important factors in EXECUTING the job of being a cadet commander, true maturity of worldview is a characteristic that many times evades both seniority AND experience.
Evaluating cadets for maturity can be tricky because we generally recommend looking closely not only at drill team performance or performance as a cadet but at that cadet’s interactions with others in the small moments. What decisions does someone make when they think the consequences are inconsequential? With what degree of empathy do they listen to others when they share with them?
Like teaching, maturity is one of those traits that also encompasses other important elements required of a successful cadet commander. Those famous Marine Corps leadership traits? Judgement? Judgement? Tact? Many of those traits are part-and-parcel of what true maturity is.
We bring this trait up because we far prefer it to seniority, rank, etc. when it comes to selecting leaders. An older, less mature leader can have a devastating and lasting impact on a team and while such a cadet might be an amazing contributor to the team, elevating someone into a command position based on rank or seniority alone can be fraught with challenges.
Temperament
When we refer to “temperament,” we’re talking about the generalized way in which a potential cadet leader responds to situations both casual and stressful.
This is incredibly important because, again, there are multiple positive traits that make a potential leader’s temperament a strong one. For example, how does this cadet treat others when they are clearly under duress? How do they respond to tense situations? How do they treat those from whom they can expect nothing in return?
Being a cadet commander is a tough place to be. Leading your peers is far more challenging than leading in almost any other situation and because of that, the smallest moments can sometimes have the biggest impact on the team. How a commander responds to a freshman in the heat of the moment at a drill meet can make a world of difference to not only a team’s performance but that freshman’s impression of leadership moving forward.
This is why we recommend looking closely at this trait!
Conclusion
Again, this is a vast and varied topic. Everyone has their own schools of thought when it comes to selecting a cadet commander. We recommend evaluating what your team might need most and make your decisions based on those elements! And we ESPECIALLY recommend resisting the idea that just because someone has the most experience, the most seniority or longevity, or the highest rank that they should automatically be the cadet commander. Those cadets can still be highly useful, contributing leaders to the team without holding such an influential job!