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Informal Leadership In The Army

Decent Essays

The Army defines leaderships as the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization (ADRP 6-22). This is a fairly broad and open definition as it pertains to individuals in the Army and how we operate. It is purposely vague to allow for the application of leader to a wide range of people and circumstances; this has borne out the phrase, “everyone is a leader”. Warrant officers, however, have a very unique niche in the world of leadership. Not only are they necessary advisors of leaders in the organization, every warrant officer is a leader at some point in their career.
Leadership is differentiated by the Army as able to be formal or informal. Whereas formal leadership is granted to individuals by virtue of assignment to positions of responsibility and is a function of rank, informal leadership is not necessarily based on rank or position in the organization. Informal leadership arises out of knowledge, experience, or technical expertise and depends on the confidence of others in the person occupying that informal leadership role. Upon reading that definition of informal leader, it may seem to some as though it was written for warrant officers.
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Warrant officers are also responsible for the mentoring of junior officers, largely in the early and most impressionable stages of their careers. With a comparison of the average demographics of warrant officers and commissioned officers at the company level, there are some stark differences to note. Commissioned officers are usually between the ages of 22 to 24 for platoon leaders and 28 to 30 for thecommander. Platoon leaders are generally at their first operational assignment and the commander may be on his second or third in some cases. A good tenure as a platoon leader and commander is about 18 months

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