Accountability Accountability can be described as the process of being held liable or responsible for an action or given task. Accountability goes hand in hand with being successful in any place of work. To be accountable would mean being willing to accept responsibility for ones actions. Being accountable shows moral discipline and portrays maturity. Accountability also correlates with knowing where a certain person resides currently or in the future. In the Army accountability represents organization, discipline, and control. Accountability becomes an obligation when you join the Army, it benefits every party involved. The importance of obligation with the Army. Your obligations given to you as a soldier are there to help you perform your duties, much like guidelines to success. Obligations within a workplace are there to benefit those associated within the environment, in this scenario obligation to report our location and actions being taken were there to help our leaders to guide us towards success since their jobs are to ensure we are doing the right thing and to have our best interest in mind. Being that we are obligated to follow orders it represents a moral requirement or promise to follow out a given action. Following out your obligations show military barring and professionalism which is expected of us by not only our leadership but the civilians in which we swear to protect all over the world. Obligations can be utilized to protect ourselves and those around us. An example being that if we are obligated to perform a certain task to a certain standard and under a specific coordinated planning, we ensure security and success with that task. On the other hand if we are given a task with no obligation and only a task in sight there lies an opportunity to abandon the security and success. While in war you would be obligated to perform your duties to the best of your ability, might it be to protect the civilians of a village in Kuwait against insurgents or to ensure that they have suitable resources to survive. Whether you perform these obligations properly or fail to perform them you will be held accountable for your chosen actions along with those associated with you in that mission. This shows just part of how important your obligations could be, they could result in another person’s well-being. Performing your obligations demonstrates that you understand military values. It demonstrates selfless service because many times a soldier will be required to pass up on time with their family and friends in order to successfully fulfill their obligation to the Army. My obligations to keep my team leader updated of my presence was failed since I didn’t let him know that I was leaving my class to perform personal duties, which he would have prevented me from doing. If I had followed my obligations to refer to my team leader on what I can or cannot do than I would not have failed my leadership in not reporting. Responsibility can closely be related to accountability. Being responsible means that you can be trusted to execute an order or request given to you by another person. The responsibilities I inherited through joining the army are there to better me as a person. I am held responsible to uphold the military values and portray a role model character for those around me. Being that I represent the Army as a whole and that one’s opinion of me can easily be confused or related to ones opinion of the army. Thus expressing the importance I have to those also in the Army if though I’m just a private. I hold the responsibility to perform my given tasks and duties without questioning the reason, trusting that my best interest is being accounted for. Responsibility goes along with accountability because it takes responsibility for myself to make sure that I am at formations on time, in the proper uniform, and at the right place. Another example of being held responsible or accountable would be when during a deployment units may be held responsible for filling out or keeping track of patrol times, locations, engagements made, or by keeping notes on anything that may look out of place or significant. This specific responsibility could prevent others who go on patrols from making mistakes the past patrol made, possibly helping them to prevent contact from enemy units by utilizing the notes made about enemy locations. Being held responsible is a serious thing, if someone doesn’t think you’re responsible they won’t trust or respect you. Thus leaving them uneasy when in times of need. The decision I made was irresponsible because I chose to ignore specific directions I was given, which were to inform my team leader of where I was at all times, and to let him know if I was leaving, where I would be going and why I would be going there. Being respected within your workplace will make it easier to communicate with your peers. A lack of respect might provide your peers to doubt what you say or question information you could provide. If you can be held accountable for your actions and people respect you they are more likely to listen to you when you speak, which creates a positive work environment and build trust and relationships between peers. Having a common respect with those you work with will allow you to express your concerns or present questions you may have about any given subject. But if you aren’t able to be held accountable it is likely that most people will not respect you which creates a negative relationship. Having a good relationship with those that work with you is very important because it makes it easier to accomplish given tasks by having trust and respect for one another. My actions showed a lack of respect for my team leader but putting him in a situation where he was failing to perform his duties even though it wasn’t in his control. This portrays a lack of respect because I didn’t think about how my actions could affect him and I went around his accountability of my being. Discipline is another thing that I think goes right along with accountability. It takes discipline to inform others of your whereabouts at all times that way they can make sure you aren’t doing anything that may cause harm to yourself. Having the discipline to go out of your way in order to inform leadership on what your doing, why your doing it, and how your going to do it shows that you have the discipline to follow orders even if they are inconvenient. Discipline can be as simple as standing still or laying down in the prone for hours on end without movement, such as a sniper may have to do. That amount of discipline can save not only the snipers life but the lives of many others down on the battlefield. In my situation my lack of discipline was shown by taking the easy way out in asking someone who wasn’t in my chain of command if I could leave my place of duty to perform personal duties. Showing proper discipline would have been to call or text my team leader asking if it was appropriate and if it wasn’t, to find out when it would be appropriate. Accountability has a huge role in the lives of soldiers considering there is never an excuse because there will always be a resolution. In this case I wasn’t accountable for my team leader which may seem minor but it relates to a much larger picture. If we were overseas in a combat zone and I failed to be accountable for a weapon or a piece of important gear and I had misplaced it, it could provide useful for enemy forces against innocent people or even us. Thus one example as to why being accountable could be so important. My team leader has my best interest in mind by keeping accountability of me at all times to ensure that he knows what I’m doing and where I’m doing it. If he doesn’t know where I am and I get hurt or disappear nobody will know where to look to help me. Today when I wasn’t accountable by my team leader I could have crashed my car and hurt myself, but since my leadership didn’t know where I was they would not know that I had gotten hurt until it was too late. But if I had told him that I was leaving he would be tracking that I was going from point A to point B and would know I made it there safely. What I did made me look irresponsible, immature, and showed a huge lack of discipline to do the right thing. Among those things it was a huge disrespect to my team leader and leadership because I ignored the orders they had given me which left them unable to perform their given duties. Accountability is something that plays a major role in the success of the Army in that if we aren’t accountable of everything we do we can’t cover our asses when shit hits the fan. In order to prevent this from happening again I plan on making sure that my leadership has full knowledge of what I plan on doing. Along with that if I have any questions I will refer to my team leader for answers that way I can better myself as a person and a soldier, ensuring that I perform at the best of my ability.