TRADOC Pam 525-3-7-01 - TRADOC - U.S. Army

TRADOC Pam 525-3-7-01intertwines with the operating environment and as Army leadership becomes amore socio-technological process. 118In today’s environment and in the projected OE, “…culturally literate Soldiers and culturallycompetent officers are…fundamental.” 119 There are three primary contributors to culturalcompetence: Cultural awareness, which is general understanding of another culture thatfacilitates openness and flexibility in dealings with people from that culture; cultural knowledge,which is familiarization with selected cultural characteristics, history, values, belief systems, andbehaviors of members of the cultural group; and cultural sensitivity, which is the realization thatcultural differences as well as similarities exist with out assigning values (for example, good orbad, better or worse). Cultural competence integrates these abilities and brings them to bear tooperate effectively in a different cultural context (for example, putting principle into practice). 120Cultural competence underlies a Soldier’s or leader’s ability to understand, communicate andcoordinate effectively with diverse groups of people including joint, coalition, and interagencypersonnel, U.S. and foreign civilians of all walks of life, and the media.Future leaders must excel in their ability to build rapidly adaptive, cohesive, and highperforming teams. Future Soldiersmust excel in their ability to beeffective team members andeffective followers. However, thegeographic space for practicingleadership and followership willcontinue to expand from a humanscale that facilitates face-to-faceinterpersonal contact, to one inwhich the information rich andtechnically charged environmentwill typically create physicalremoteness. Since team membersmay often be geographicallydistributed, there will be aheightened need for sharedconceptualization of thecommander’s intent and teamworkbuilt on trust. Information age communications methods (on demand teleconferencing, instantmessaging, virtual collaboration, email, text messaging, podcasting) will become the norm forinteractions among team members and between leaders and their teams. Teams and TFs willform and operate without opportunities for face-to-face encounters between leaders andsubordinates. Leaders and their followers must learn the principles of effective teamwork at adistance and understand the roles and impacts of various communication media in buildingeffective distributed teams:In the future, leaders will continue to work in their traditional teams/units, butalso may work on other types of teams, such as joint, multinational, or temporaryteams. In non-traditional teams, team member roles must be negotiated, norms109