Sergeants School Seminar Program

Interpersonal communication skills are the cement that bonds conversations, relationships, and organizations together. Your ability to communicate effectively in your unit, and your life, is critical to your personal growth and success. You should have excellent oral communication skills to effectively inform your Marines, and to persuade your peers and seniors. One of the most common types of oral presentations is an informational brief or a training session with your Marines. This lesson provides the tools necessary to plan, prepare, and deliver an oral presentation. Ultimately, this lesson will provide you with an understanding of the basic skills necessary to communicate effectively.

Preparing subordinate leaders to assume greater responsibilities is a continuous process and shared responsibility. This is accomplished through direct experiences and strengthened through a combination of engaged leaders coaching, counseling and mentoring their Marines to achieve this desired effect. This lesson will cover the policies, strategies, and techniques to use while advancing the development of subordinates through coaching, counseling, and mentoring. Additionally, a Marine's interpersonal communication skills in delivering constructive feedback can greatly influence and motivate individuals or an entire command.

The objective of Marine Corps leadership is to develop the leadership qualities displayed by Marines, which enables them to progressively assume greater responsibilities within the Marine Corps and society. In order to support the objective of developing others, a leader must understand who those others are, what their true values are, and understand what motivates them. As a Marine leader, we can rely on the group values that our Corps provides, however that only scratches the surface of what it means to lead. Bonded by our group values, each member of our Corps is still very much individually motivated and contributes to the group in their own unique way. To gain increased influence beyond your billet or grade, you will have to understand the different personalities within your unit and what motivates those personalities. By recognizing these differences you will be better prepared to quickly handle situations that arise outside the unit's mission set and prepare your Marines for personal and professional success.

To understand the Marine Corps' foundations of leadership you will explore and analyze the development of warrior ethos, its values, and the different principles that improved great armies in history. You will also study the individual leaders that guided such organizations. Additionally, we will discuss how we integrate these concepts into our leadership and decision-making processes, regardless of whether we're in a combat or a garrison environment.

It is important for non-commissioned officers to have a common understanding of institutional events that demonstrate positive and negative examples of leadership and their impact on the Marine Corps. This basic knowledge of the effects of these positive and negative examples provides a point of departure for analyzing, and understanding how positive command climates mitigates incidents of sexual assault, hazing, and fraternization. Additionally, students will submit their written essay in response to their chosen prompt with their educated opinion about the topic.

This lesson is the first of the four warfighting lessons in SSSP. This lesson examines concepts important to warfighting, the nature and theory of war, and considers the relevance of these concepts as they pertain to all Marines, not just infantry. In this lesson, students analyze how the Marine Corps integrates these concepts into our leadership and decision making.