The defining challenge of leading in the Army National Guard (ARNG) is the friction of a Soldier’s two lives. That challenge hit me when I received a phone call while I was spending the evening with my family. It was a promising first lieutenant in my operations section telling me that his civilian employer had created a direct conflict with our upcoming drill, and that his presence would be crucial to meeting their project deadline.
What followed was the critical leadership work that happens far from the drill floor. I discussed his options, then worked with the headquarters and headquarters company commander to navigate the administrative process for a split-unit training assembly. Finally, I sat down with my operations sergeant during drill to personally craft a meaningful training plan for him to complete. A single Soldier’s conflict created a real workload, a reminder that our most important acts of leadership happen long before the first formation on Saturday morning.
This situation highlights a key challenge for leaders in the ARNG. That challenge is managing the often-strenuous balance between a Soldier’s military duty and their civilian career. This constant friction creates leadership challenges. Army leadership doctrine, with its focus on daily interaction, does not fully account for the intermittent authority and dual-career dynamics that define ARNG service, leaving leaders to fill the void on their own.
To strengthen the profession and make the most of a limited training year, ARNG leaders must augment military doctrine with principles from modern organizational leadership. Leaders can build more resilient and effective formations by understanding and mastering three core paradoxes of part-time service: forging readiness in the gaps, leveraging hidden talents as strategic assets, and forging cohesion on a compressed timeline.
First Paradox: Forging Readiness in the Gaps
The ARNG typically trains for a minimum of 39 days per year, yet its leaders still own 100% of the responsibility for their formations. This is the paradox of leading with, at best, 10% of the time for direct influence. Leading effectively simply cannot be confined to the drill weekend if the ARNG is maintaining readiness. It must occur in the gaps between drills, often at the cost of a leader’s own time balancing their civilian employment and social life. Forging readiness in these gaps requires a framework built on three pillars: trust, serve, adapt.
This framework was critical when my company supported an eXportable Combat Training Capability exercise in California. The foundation began months earlier, building trust with my key NCOs. The reciprocal, high-quality relationships we built during drills meant our calls in between drills were collaborative, not intrusive. I had to trust them to execute complex coordination, and they trusted my intent.
With that trust established, my role shifted to service. I identified a critical flaw in the plan. My maintenance platoon would be sidelined with no mission or area to conduct field maintenance, damaging morale and wasting a training opportunity. I felt a duty to remove that barrier by coordinating a plan with battalion staff and securing a partnership with the training facility. Driven by trust and care for my Soldiers, this created a valuable opportunity that my platoon leadership could then plan and seize.
Finally, this service was adapted to the individual. With my platoon leadership, I used a delegating style, giving them my intent and trusting them to build their plans. However, for a less experienced platoon leader responsible for ensuring our forward arming and refueling point, I adopted a coaching style. I helped him think through the challenges of distribution and supply by asking guiding questions instead of providing answers. This ability to flex from delegating to coaching helped make the unit perform more effectively. This combination of trust, service, and adaptation is how readiness is actively forged in the gaps, ensuring units arrive at collective training prepared for success.
Second Paradox: From Hidden Talents to Strategic Assets
Every ARNG formation is a dormant network of civilian professionals, yet the Army’s structure often obscures this talent. Units that fail to look beyond rank and military occupational specialty (MOS) are often overlooking their single greatest asymmetric advantage. This missed opportunity is not due to the lack of talent, but a lack of a system to manage it. Guard leaders can seize this opportunity by becoming deliberate talent managers, using a simple, three-step framework that any leader can implement.
The first step is to conduct a talent inventory. This goes beyond the Soldier record brief. At the company or platoon level, leaders must identify their Soldiers’ civilian occupations and skills during in-processing or annually. This inventory must include certifications, technical skills, and even hidden talents like photography or graphic design, all documented to highlight the unit’s true capabilities.
Second, leaders can look to build cross-functional teams. With a clear picture of the organization’s skill sets, these data can then be used when challenges arise to build functional teams based on civilian expertise, not just rank or position. This empowers junior Soldiers who may not be typically tasked with special projects and brings diverse perspectives to bear on complex problems.
The final step is to empower, execute, and recognize. Once a team is given a clear task, a purpose, and the authority to act, the leader’s role shifts from being the primary problem solver to one who empowers the right problem solvers. Crucially, when the team succeeds, the leader must publicly recognize their contribution. This reinforces the value of the expertise Guardsmen bring from their civilian professions and fosters a culture where Soldiers are motivated to bring their complete selves to the unit.
In action, this framework allows a leader to understand the problem and implement the team from the start of drill, saving precious time and effort. It is also scalable, allowing a squad leader to identify someone good at math, or a battalion commander to build a special project team. Ultimately, this shifts the leader’s mindset from what the Army gives them to how they can best use what they have.
Third Paradox: Forging Cohesion on a Compressed Timeline
Army Doctrine Publication 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession, states that trust and cohesion directly impact organizational climate, and leaders must integrate new members quickly to build teamwork. While cohesion in the active component is a byproduct of shared time, in the ARNG it must be manufactured. Much like an engineer using a blueprint, ARNG leaders must serve as architects of their unit’s culture. The goal is to aggressively accelerate the team through Tuckman’s stages of group development, which include forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. This is not to turn 39 days into 365 days, but to make every moment of shared time count.
The forming stage begins the moment a new Soldier arrives. At home station, this initial orientation is owned by full-time Active ARNG and Reserve staff. They are the cultural glue, providing continuity, initial counseling, and a sense of purpose that prevent the team from having to reform from scratch every drill.
In the storming stage, roles and processes are challenged and must be compressed. My deployed experience as an operations officer demonstrated the power of a shared challenge. The elevated tempo forced us to rapidly develop and refine our processes, moving through conflict to clarity out of sheer necessity. The lesson for home station is that leaders must create challenging, team-based training events that force these issues to the surface to be resolved quickly.
To accelerate the norming stage, a leader must make the team’s values tangible. As a forward support company commander, I personally funded a company coin to serve as a symbol of excellence. The ritual of publicly presenting this coin for hard work was not just recognition but a powerful tool for establishing group norms. It clearly and visibly defined what right looks like and created a shared standard to which everyone could aspire.
The result of accelerating these stages is a team that reaches the performing stage faster. A unit in this stage executes its mission with a high degree of autonomy and shared understanding. Instead of fighting processes, they solve problems, allowing them to focus their limited time on effective mission accomplishment.
Finally, the adjourning stage is a constant reality in the ARNG. Unique to this component, the team experiences a micro-adjourning at the end of every drill weekend as Soldiers disperse and return to their civilian lives. A cohesive, high-performing team does not truly dissolve during this phase. Instead, the team persists because the shared identity and purpose created by its leaders persist. The goal is to build a team strong enough that adjourning is merely a pause, not an end, ensuring the forming next drill is nearly instantaneous.
The Deliberate Leader
Leading in the ARNG is a unique endeavor, defined by the paradoxes of forging readiness in the gaps, leveraging hidden talents as strategic assets, and building cohesion on a compressed timeline. Mastering these challenges requires leaders to augment standard Army doctrine with a deliberate, adaptive, and human-centric approach. This means knowing our Soldiers beyond their rank and MOS, leading with a philosophy of trust, serve, and adapt, and acting as architects of unit culture.
The challenge, therefore, for all ARNG leaders is to look beyond doctrine and incorporate these organizational leadership principles into practice. Strengthening our profession begins with the understanding that the ARNG’s greatest asset is its people. The ARNG’s critical dual-mission role, at home and abroad, demands leaders who understand the unique human terrain of the citizen Soldier.
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CPT Jakob Hutter currently serves as a battle captain while deployed with Task Force Thunder, 130th Field Artillery Brigade. In addition to this role, he also fulfills duties as the knowledge management officer and future operations plans officer. He has completed several military training courses, including the Quartermaster Basic Officer Leader Course, Logistics Career Course, Knowledge Management Qualification Course, Support Operations Course, and Unit Movement Officer Course. He is also an active member of the Military Writers Guild, contributing to the professional development of military writing and thought leadership. He holds a Master of Science degree in organizational leadership with a specialization in strategic innovation and change management from Colorado State University–Global Campus.
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This article was published in the summer 2026 edition of Army Sustainment Professional Bulletin.
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