Abstract:

Leadership… one word, so many meanings, so many directions to follow. The concern for growing leaders and developing leadership skills in the future officers have been constant preoccupations of all the institutions of higher military education, including ours. Yet, as the world around us seems to be evolving at a much higher pace than before and time seems to be somehow compressing, there are dozens of areas of knowledge to be addressed before learning how to maximize your natural potential and build upon your in-born qualities as a communicator. The main purpose of the present paper is to show that, paraphrasing the old saying “the pen is mightier than the sword”, possessing adequate communication skills may prove just as critical for a military leader as all the combat-related ones. Being able to inspire people – peers and subordinates alike – managing to motivate them to strive for perfection in their daily tasks, creating and fostering a positive atmosphere are aspects that students usually learn by themselves, through contact with positive and negative examples, by using their intuition and, in the many cases by watching war movies or series depicting exemplary leaders.

Communication is often associated with the soft skills and yet it sometimes may prove to be of crucial importance in tough domains, including the military one. The importance of being a good communicator is vital for the military leader of tomorrow, just as analysis, planning, or decision-making. Officers definitely need to know how to use linguistic means carefully embedded into tactics and even strategies in order to build good and proficient relationships with their peers and superiors, gain the trust of their subordinates and create successful teams they could rely on to accomplish their duties. Communication skills are essential for knowing when and how to ask questions, how to “read” body-language and how to use it along with other non-verbal communication means to your benefit, how to avoid disputes or settle conflicts. Good leaders are good communicators – this axiom needs no demonstration; and everybody considers it as such, but little is done concretely to build communication-related abilities in cadets.

Using the experience gained with the Leadership module included in the Command Master’s Program within our university as well as theoretical knowledge related to public speaking, we built a questionnaire meant, on the one hand, to raise awareness in our cadets regarding the various aspects of communication they should develop and, at the same time, to use as an argument for introducing Leadership Communication inter-disciplinary module within their curricula. The aim of the present paper is to share the interesting results of this survey as well as the conclusions drawn resulting in the development of a cooperative-learning-based approach, involving a senior officer with expertise in Leadership studies and a teacher with expertise in communication skills. Thus, the hypothesis we started from, namely that no matter how good you are as a soldier, if you do not know how to speak, there are high chances you might waste a significant measure of your potential, was fully proven.

Keywords:

Military leadership, higher education, communication.