Michael Grinston started an initiative called "this is my squad" immediately after being sworn in as the army's sergeant major. The main objective of this initiative was to establish more cohesive teams all through the United States. This initiative is meant to bring team units together and help leaders with effective problem anticipation and solving. It came after the army’s chief of staff, “army people strategy," which focused on managing the army's talents to increase readiness. SMA Griston requested a team to evaluate the TIMS notion, foresee any challenges that affect team cohesion and provide a possible solution. Among the factors discovered by Team 3, one of them ensured proper leadership development by new trends.
New Trends
The development of this idea was to help the new soldiers to be alike with their squad leaders. The Team 3 committee proposed developing a mobile application that can change how the supervisor receives and incorporates soldiers into the system (Benavidez, 2020). The mobile app would comprehend all the essential elements in the military records of every soldier. This includes the soldiers’ reception and assimilation, rating, and counseling files. Readiness and training, the chain of command photos, matters related to the unit and team principles, and random feedback elements.
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The squad leader, first sergeant, and platoon leader would technically foresee the new soldiers upload their profile by their staff. The new soldier joins the unit; the leadership team will access the soldier’s information completely without using a computer to perform the in-processing (Haley, 2020). Identification of the soldier’s data will be through identifying numbers by the department of defense or any other process that is not tied to personal identification.
The new mobile application will be a daily playbook because it will offer an innovative way for the leaders to link with the soldiers. It will also solve issues posed to the army's cultural values (Haley, 2020). The application will also evolve, but its immediate objective was to provide the unit leaders with information involving their management decisions.
One of the application's objectives is to control today's army sponsorship program. The program helps soldiers when moving into a different unit (Oriana, 2020). The app will then provide data about the new soldier to the squad's leader at their fingertips. It will help the soldier's transition since their leaders will know about their personal lives, like if the new soldier has a family, kids, and others, which will help the leader welcome the new soldier. Another objective of the mobile app is training management documentation. The unit leaders can use it to log members' training activities, for example, army combat fitness test performance (Oriana, 2020). Again, it can be used during live training by using the ACFT calculator.
The SMA said that additional information would be included in the app as part of its upgrading in the future. Examples of this new information include integrated personnel and the pay-system army called IPPS-A (Oriana, 2020). Other information that may be included in the change in benefits. The "TIMS app" will be used in the “squad leader” app. the previous app allowed junior soldiers access learning and development tools.
Conclusion
Developing this application, it is clear, will strengthen the cohesion between leaders and the squad members. This cohesion will help address issues such as sexual harassment, suicide, and morale. The "my squad" initiative will help the soldiers with positive thinking, and they will think about each other all the time. The initiative will affect the mission success positively, unit readiness, and advance soldier retention and recruitment in the United States.
References
Benavidez, LD. (2020). Ownership: This Is My Squad . Army University Press. https://www.armyupress.army.mil
Haley, B. (2020). Army Leaders Need An App For Leadership . Task & Purpose. https://www.task&purpose.com
Oriana, P. (2020). This Is the Army’s Newest Tool to Help Squad Leaders Connect with Soldiers. Military Com. https://www.military.com
