Six Leadership Habits the Army Taught Me
That you can use every day in civilian life
Here are six practices that can help you get organized and perform at a higher level in any kind of work.
Pre-combat Checks: Avoid avoidable mistakes
Before we head out on a mission or training, Soldiers do a pre-combat check (PCC). These are informal checklists that are situation-dependent. They can help you avoid costly oversights for any mission, operation, or event. Colleagues go through the list of items needed for the mission and often conduct a visual inspection.
When done habitually, they help develop the mindset of preparedness.
As public affairs Soldiers, a PCC included making sure we had spare batteries for our cameras and memory cards. Every Soldier had at least one horror story of getting to an event without one of those items. That’s a mission failure.
In civilian life, it’s a high-performance habit to ask yourself, do I have everything I need to be successful at this event? It takes an extra four minutes to go through the checklist and it can save you from a world of hurt.
