Photo By Tech. Sgt. Victoria Nelson | New Hampshire Air National Guardsmen enact a mock scenario involving a troubled Airman...... read more read more
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A Progressive Discipline Bootcamp seminar for supervisors, junior officers, and members who would benefit from training on documenting informal and formal counseling was held in the Loy Auditorium here, March 4.
The goal of the class was to shift the responsibility of documenting counseling from squadron commanders to the other members in the supervisory chain who have a more in depth knowledge of the member’s actions, character, and performance, while educating students on the benefit and importance of counseling to the member.
Major Natalie Friedenthal, deputy staff judge advocate with the 157th Judge Advocates General office, created the event with the support of the wing commander and staff.
“We need something practical,” said Friedenthal. “What would it have to entail to help these sergeants and technical sergeants who don’t write formal counseling because they feel that it’s overwhelming and it’s mean?”
The workshop was created to be an enjoyable, dynamic and interactive class to both teach and encourage proper documentation of leadership’s efforts toward rehabilitation of a member prior to issues reaching the command-level.
“The commanders don’t have time. They’re not sitting around writing [letters of counseling] and [letters of reprimand] the supervisors should be doing that,” said Friedenthal. “But they don’t get any training on it.”
Progressive discipline is something missing from the whole Air National Guard, Friedenthal said. It is something that guard bases with part-time people have a problem with because it’s barely taught.
The workshop was organized into segments, each enacted by students to humorously convey a behavioral pattern appropriate for counseling, allowing them to see how to analyze the situation, determine the appropriate course of action and properly document it in the proper format and within the Air Force guidance for counseling.
“The students received updated manuals so they had good information to use and the opportunity to draft disciplinary documents,” said Staff Sgt. Kevin Noonan, 157th JAG member. “Some people just didn’t know how to find the information in the books so providing hypothetical scenarios enabled them to try and figure out reasoning to find the specific rules that were broken and the required discipline.”
Friedenthal expressed that she wanted to turn the workshop into something positive that challenged the supervisors to critically consider issues that arise in the progressive discipline process.
“I wanted this course to be a memory,” said Friedenthal. “I wanted them to have this template that looks distinctive that they could pull out and refer to in the future. I wanted them to remember someone doing a handstand and lock that memory in and whenever they had to counsel someone to remember key things from that. To say phrases like ‘help me understand’ and to remember that counseling is to help and assist and guide.”
Friedenthal said she tries to explain to supervisors that all of their Airmen doing bad things have two paths to choose. By avoiding documenting discipline you have made the second path invisible and they are going to continue down the bad path until maybe they are have too high of a rank and then it will really hurt. So give them the opportunity, let them choose and if they can choose the better path just because you gave them an LOC, the LOC was a good thing not a bad thing.
| Date Taken: | 03.04.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 05.03.2017 08:37 |
| Story ID: | 232383 |
| Location: | PEASE AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, NEW HAMPSHIRE, US |
| Web Views: | 123 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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