Leadership Funk

For those of you that where wondering, I've been in a little bit of a funk the past year. Last June I deployed for 4 months; during that deployment I had to deal with the death of a co-worker which made for some of the worst times in my professional career. While I realize now that the deployment was going poorly from the start, at the time I felt that his death was the catalyst for all the bad karma we experienced. What I've come to realize is that it was poor leadership at all levels, including mine, that let the deployment go sour. While I do put the majority of the blame for all the problems we endured on our commanders shoulders all of us in leadership positions had a hand in the declining moral. Even though we had a bad apple, it took a team to make us all feel like failures. Where I failed was not recognizing where the problem was and therefor was not able to help in fixing the problem. I'm not sure what the solution to that problem was other than time but now if I ever see it happen again I'm going to do my damnedest to stop it. This spring I was able to experience a deployment with a different leadership package. Initially I wasn't supposed to go but at the last minute I had to go to replace someone with personal issues the prevented him from going. I was very concerned about having to go and re-experience all those problems again but I really didn't have a way to "not go". This time however the experience was totally different. First; we didn't have a traumatic loss to deal with so that was one huge issue we didn't have to deal with. Secondly; we had a much more charismatic commander who had the best interest of each of us and the mission in mind. His leadership abilities and skills trickled do to all of us an the lower levels empowering all of us to do our job better. The entire experience for me was a 180 degree difference for me with respect to the previous deployment. I actually came home feeling better than I left and the experience changed my attitude about whether I can continue doing this job. It pulled me out of the funk I was in and has motivated me to stay around a little longer. The moral to all of this is simple; if you are in a leadership position you must be a leader. Don't let your team fail because of outside influences, and no mater what, maintain your strength. I know that we had some huge influences that created our problems but had we all handled them better we could have turned them into positive influences instead of allowing them to be negative results.