Page 17 - Signal Summer 2019

Scrolls of graduation for the Senior & Junior C&S Courses
communication and negotiation skills, keeping the staff on their professional toes, the syllabus and syllabus development on an even keel and most importantly, they provide timely morale boosts which are often desperately needed in the winter months around the Curragh.
The JCSC
The C&S School does not have its own version of leadership education nor does it solely own a segment of any officer’s leadership development. Like all other DF courses, the JCSC facilitates a student’s potential leadership competency development. The JCSC does not commence leadership education from scratch, it simply builds on the competencies that formal professional military education and professional experience to date has delivered. The JCSC reinforces the foundations required for subsequent strategic leadership development; be that through further PME, civilian education, executive coaching/mentoring and most importantly further professional experience.
In recent years, the average Irish student arriving on the JCSC has 20 years’ service and four overseas tours of duty, and while all students will have developed their formal leadership skills in a similar fashion it is their career experiences that uniquely shapes their application of leadership. The more diverse experiences that one holds at each rank across command, training and staff appointments is irreplaceable in terms of opportunities (in particular while serving in the operational/strategic civil military environs) to evolve and demonstrate one’s leadership competencies. The JCSC is structured to draw on these rich experiences, by providing a platform for students and instructors to collaborate through various lenses of academia, exercises, assessments, discussion and debate.
The JCSC is designed to deliver theoretical lectures on leadership up front, further complemented by learning style and personality self-assessments. This provides each student with a theoretical
| LEADERSHIP: COMMAND AND STAFF |
appreciation of the roots and demands of higher-level leadership but equally important a lens through which they can self-evaluate their subsequent learning and performance through a formalised reflective portfolio.
With this base, the course requires a student to subsequently embrace and explore what is on offer in terms of further exposure to academics and seminars focused on global defence and security issues and current and emerging defence policy and capability development projects, opportunities and challenges. This embrace and exploration will broaden an officer’s understanding of the intricate and nuanced operating environments that challenge senior military leaders in either developing a military response to a crisis or developing a military organisation that can continually evolve to enhance the domestic defence and security of a sovereign state.
Leadership does not appear in neon lights through all course modules however, we expect students to recognise the opportunities on offer to grow personally and professionally in the leadership domain and to actively engage, reflect and debate as required. Leadership development is subtly threaded through planning scenarios; masked in ethical dilemmas that challenge commanders in balancing the political demands on military responses with national interests, the humanitarian space and winning the information war. Leadership challenges appear in self-evaluation, peer critique, peer leadership and the requirement to deliver rapid and coherent military advice on multifaceted issues.
We expect that an enhanced organisational awareness facilitates different avenues for competency development on graduation. Simply put, there is no C&S school template to take away, the education delivered still needs that individual complementary experiential learning, accompanied by self-drive and a healthy dose of ambition. Hopefully, the course will also provide graduates with the confidence to recognise a potential mentor or coach and engage accordingly to close a self-recognised gap and hone the development of their competencies; but more importantly, provide graduates with the tools to enhance the capability of the people we lead in the same manner by which we expect to be led.
Biography:
Commandant Niall O’Hara
Having Joined the Cadet School in 1996 I was commissioned in 1998 and appointed to the 3rd Inf Bn based in the Curragh. After 5 years, I was posted to serve as an Instructor in the Cadet School. I have spent a significant portion of my career serving in DFHQ in J1, J2 and SPB. I thoroughly enjoyed serving as a Company Commander with the 27 Inf Bn and deploying with them to South Lebanon. Most recently, having returned from the United States Command and General Staff College, I have served as an instructor in the C&S School with the primary responsibility of delivering the Joint Operational Studies Module.
My overseas service has seen deployments to Liberia, BiH, Kosovo, D.R. Congo and South Lebanon and I am currently preparing to deploy in July 2019 as the Assistant Military Representative to the DFAT NATO PfP Mission in Brussels.
| SUMMER ‘19 | | 27