[November 18, 2016] When soldiers complain, we are told, that means they trust you as a leader to help them. This was not to be the case when our commander one day told us to keep quiet about the poor quality of services provided by an army contractor. We were told that it was none of our business and to tell our troops to stop complaining about it.
There is no behavior that a leader can do that is more dispiriting and disrespectful than telling someone that they are to keep quiet about something they consider important enough to inform you about it. I’ve seen it occur many times in both the military and civilian sector of life. While one would think military leaders are more apt to order people to stop talking, that is not the case.
It’s been drilled into military leaders from the beginning that when soldiers complain, they are doing it because they believe in you as a leader and they think you have the time and resources to do something to help. This bond between leader and soldier is a treasured asset that should never be compromised because once broken it will likely never return.
The U.S. Army had invested considerable time and expense in developing a support system for military families. This system was conceived to fill a void that caused serious problems in the family-support structure for combat-deployed soldiers. The intent was good, the resources were abundant, but the army contractor tasked with the mission failed to provide adequate screening for their employees and didn’t give sufficient training or oversight for them.
This is what many army leaders were being told. In my unit, the commander told our soldiers to keep quiet about it. He was admired by everyone until that point. I was amazed at how quickly our commander lost his credibility and respect so freely given to that point. His decision to ignore the problems of the army contractor effectively told our soldiers that their observations and studied assessments about the army contractor’s performance were unimportant and wrong.
Surely our commander feared for how his superior would react to him reporting a serious problem the army had invested in so highly. His moral failure to report a problem upwards in the chain of command had the result of prolonging the problem and turning his soldiers against him for telling them to unethically brush it under the carpet. Everyone was a loser in this well-documented case; soldiers, families, poorly training contractors, and, of course, the commander.
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