Abstract:

In the military organization, leadership can be of crucial importance both to mission solving and the unit’s survival. Therefore, there are great demands on the officer's communication skills. The Norwegian Military Academy (NMA) has offered its cadets a five-day educational program using guidance as a leadership tool since 2003. The program is part of the NMA’s leadership development program. The main purpose of using guidance as a communication framework and a practical leadership tool is to develop professional competence. The pedagogical intention is to provide an educational short program that enables the officers to learn how to empower their subordinates using a reflective communication that can help lead the whole human being, both cognitively and affectively towards competent decisions and actions. The program is largely conducted through practical training in small groups where participants switch to being supervisors, guidees and observers. The educational idea is that the participants thus receive different learning experiences. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the learning experiences of participating in a 5-day guidance program. 117 cadets filled out a questionnaire three times during their participation in the program. The program consisted of totally nine exercises. Fifty-seven of the participants served as supervisors and sixty served as guidees. The questionnaire consisted of twelve questions related to the participants experience of the effect of the guidance dialogue. The first five questions were common for both supervisors and guidees. Furthermore, five additional questions were given to the supervisors, and seven additional questions were given to the guidees. A total of ten questions were thus given to the supervisors and twelve questions were given to the guidees. The questions were first grouped into three main categories, dependent upon whether the questions were related to building relations, conscious communication and goal-directedness, or impact. As several of the questions could be divided into more than one main category of questions, a total of seventeen questions were analysed. For three of the six questions related to building relations, an increase was found for both supervisors and guidees from exercise 1 to 5. However, a decrease was found from exercise 5 to exercise 9 for the same questions. This may indicate that the participants became gradually more aware of the increasing complexity of the exercises and perhaps of their own limitations in competency regarding guidance. For all the five questions related to conscious communication and goal-directedness, there was a clear increase from exercise 1 to 5 to 9 for both supervisors and guidees. This indicated that the participants clearly experienced that they became gradually more conscious and goal-directed in their communication as they progressed through the exercises. Out of the six questions related to impact the two questions given to the supervisors and the two questions given to the guidees showed a clear increase from exercise 1 to 9. We conclude that experiencing this five-day educational program in guidance resulted in an increased ability to communicate for both the supervisors and guidees.

Keywords:

Guidance, leadership communication, pedagogics, military leaders, leadership development, education, learning.