Communication in Canadian Military: Critical Review (Education Coursework)

Running head: COMMUNICATION IN CANADIAN MILITARY1
Communication in Canadian Military: Critical Review
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COMMUNICATION IN CANADIAN MILITARY

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Communication in Canadian Military: Critical Review
1. Part 1
1.1. Explain how communication and motivation can be leveraged to improve organizational effectiveness as a whole.
In military, commanders are mandated to communicate missions and convey a diversity of messages to several audiences making communication key to mission success and, more importantly, go above and beyond in developing leadership skills among subordinates. The connections between leadership, influence and communication is, perhaps, put succinctly and expressively as follows:
There are countless definitions of leadership in existence. Leadership models continue to be developed, and the ongoing debate flourishes with respect to the particular attributes that might best characterize the qualities of effective leaders. Yet there is a single common denominator, influence, which threads its way throughout the various meditations about leadership. No matter how one chooses to think about leadership itself, influence of leaders over their followers will always be a constant factor. For example, the recently published Canadian Forces (CF) doctrine on leadership offers a value-neutral definition of this concept as "directly or indirectly influencing others, by means of formal authority or personal attributes, to act in accordance with one's intent or a shared purpose.” Without even taking into consideration whether the leadership is good or bad, effective or ineffective, the influence aspect is firmly rooted in the definition. However, influence cannot possibly exist if leaders do not communicate their intentions. In short, without communication, there can be no leadership.
COMMUNICATION IN CANADIAN MILITARY

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(MacIntyre & Charbonneau, 2008, p. 114)
In current state of fluid and dynamic global affairs, leadership-influence-communication connections form a necessary prerequisite for commanders and subordinates to collaborate in order to coordinate mandated missions effectively and achieve operational and tactical independence for lower ranking officers.
From a motivation perspective, a vast body of literature has discussed ways commanders can influence subordinate behavior by means of motivation (Browne & Walker, 2008). CF has, in fact, adopted a fairly straightforward concept of motivation. Namely, rewards and recognition are emphasized in order to achieve individual satisfaction as well as group motivation for more enhanced performance (Browne & Walker, p. 422). This conception of motivation at CF, embedded in a business management-oriented approach, is aligned to CF overall mission of enhancing a sense of pride and duty among service people. To do so, catering to needs of individuals cannot be overemphasized to ensure a healthy and sustainable relationship between commanders and subordinates as well as among subordinates. Then again, military leaders are often overwhelmed by a lack of solid “motivation playbooks,” so to speak, in order to communicate and reward/punish actions accordingly. That is wh...