How Has Writing Impacted You?

The results of last month's impact competition (Part I)

Please extend congratulations to CPT Dallas Meachum for receiving third place in our writing competition!

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While serving as a company commander, I set aside time every morning for professional reading. One morning, I read an article in Army Sustainment, “Deployment Readiness Includes Employment: Employed Troops Essential to Strategic Readiness”. While reading the article, all I could think about was sharing the insights from this article with the platoon leaders and warrant officers in our company. I pulled up my email, typed a summary about the article to each of them, and nearly hit send. However, after some reflection, I knew the email would be glossed over, if read at all. They were all busy with their tasks and responsibilities.

Instead, I came up with a better idea.

When the workday began, I hand-delivered each of them a copy of the article and asked them to read it. Then I scheduled a company-level officer professional development lesson. Company commanders don't have much bandwidth to conduct professional development sessions. I wanted to try it anyway.

The first session involved all of us meeting at the dining facility to eat breakfast. We ate quickly and then hurried back to the company conference room. We were quickly engrossed in discussing the article. It easily consumed the next 60 minutes. We concluded by selecting areas within our unit to improve and change to increase our deployment readiness.

The following week we met again. This time, we all grabbed to-go plates from the dining facility and hustled back to eat and talk. We adamantly continued our discussion of deployment readiness and measured our progress. These meetings repeated over the next several weeks developing camaraderie and our unit over breakfast. It enhanced our readiness, especially those of our maintenance support teams and packages. Importantly, however, these sessions also created a lasting bond of trust and friendship. In the months to follow, our company deployed maintenance successful support teams and packages to various joint missions locally and across the globe: to Albania, Guam, Japan.

Our readiness and success were a direct result of reading professional writing. Great leaders read. Great leaders also write. Had the authors not penned the article on deployment readiness, I would never have had the motivation to improve my organization. Our unit and mission benefited from professional writing—and yours can too.

Read together, share lessons, and strengthen our profession.