Stung

This past Friday I had a great idea -- I would invite the staff officers for a tour of the barracks so that they could see what their enlisted Soldiers' living conditions are like.

So I spoke to the staff individually, then spoke to the battalion commander. He said he'd come, too, so it was all set.

Except for one detail: I didn't talk to the executive officer. When the staff officers told him about the schedule, he didn't appreciate that (nobody likes to hear about things from their subordinates). So he asked the battalion commander about it, and the BC told him that I'd already cleared it with him (nobody likes getting left out of the loop, either).

As you can guess, It wasn't too long after that conversation that I got a phone call and an earful.

This highlights one of the pitfalls of being an HHC commander -- if you can't work well *with* and *through* other people, things get difficult very fast.

Definitely learned from that one.