🎥 Building a military brigade or an engineering team — is it that different?

This Monday, sergeant Markus, quite known person from Ukrainian military, has released his talk on the topic of "Desertion".

Well, it's named this way, but what it really is — it's a talk on the topic how teams are built and the role of the leader. He starts from the question — which reasons might be there, so that soldiers leave their position? And, from his perspective, there is only one main reason — bad work of their leader (sergeant in army terms). Bad work, because they were not able to build an effective motivated team — their troop. While the rules of building a motivated troop are almost the same, as building a motivated team in your IT company.

Then he goes over the principles of the new formation, which they are building — 47 brigade. First and foremost one is the continuous learning. They expect everyone from the brigade to learn and keep learning. And it's the leadership task to make this possible. Leaders shall be a role model for their subordinates.

He firmly says, that they do not want people with the "victim" mindset in their brigade. Good thing that this mindset is not a curse and in good environment one may change that. So they try to create such environment using different tools.

They start to create a Myth around their brigade — special chevrons, legend of the mountain Magura, their own rituals like climbing that mountain. All of this will eventually help to build a strong team spirit within the brigade, even if it sounds awkward from the beginning. But the more people do that — the less questions others will ask and the more they will believe.

They also integrate simple cognitive behavioral therapy principles into their day-to-day life. For example, they prohibit to call something "a problem", but suggest calling it "a challenge". You are even allowed to correct your leader, if they use this word. Also, at the end of the day each sergeant shall ask their subordinates — what did you do today on your way to Magura? In other words — what was your achievement today?

This talk gives a perfect perspective that effectiveness of the group depends on the mindset. They try to apply the same principles which we know and execute in the IT environment in our attempts to build lasting organisations.

I'm curious how would this work in army, which is definitely different from IT. But I expect it will work, it definitely will make things better comparing to the setup where these practices are not applied.

The talk is in 🇺🇦. Have you watched it? What do you think?