Duty Cadet: Three Demands, Four Hours
You are the duty cadet on a Tuesday night. At 21:40 three things arrive together. (1) A recruit in your block reports a knee that gave way on the stairs; he cannot put weight on it, and the medical post is 900 m away with no vehicle available. (2) The duty sergeant hands you a stores return that must be emailed by 06:00 or the unit is reported to battalion. (3) The 07:00 kit inspection needs your section's lockers laid out, and two of your people are still out on a night exercise until about 05:30. You are on duty until 08:00, and there is no other staff available to you tonight.
1. Set out the order in which you would handle these three demands over the next four hours, and give the principle your ordering rests on.
Read the worked answer
Principle: risk to a person outranks a compliance deadline, which outranks routine preparation. Order things by what is irreversible, not by what is loudest.
1. The injured recruit - immediately, ahead of everything. A knee that will not take weight is a possible fracture or ligament injury, and a recruit left to hop 900 m in the dark may make it worse or fall again. The action is not 'walk him over': it is to keep him still, send for the duty medic or arrange transport, log the time and the report, and inform the duty sergeant. This also protects the unit - an untriaged injury at 21:40 becomes a far larger problem at 06:00.
2. The stores return - start it by 22:30 at the latest. It has a hard 06:00 deadline and a consequence attached to missing it. Starting early also lets someone else finish it while you sleep.
3. The kit inspection - schedule, do not do. It is at 07:00, your people are back at 05:30, and the work needs their kit, not yours. Lay out what you can and brief them on arrival; expect to accept a slightly lower standard rather than damage the earlier tasks to perfect it.
2. For the stores return you have two options: do it yourself in about 90 minutes, or hand the figures to the duty clerk, who has never done one and would take about two hours plus your checking. Which do you choose, and what makes the difference?
Read the worked answer
Choose the hand-over, with a check - unless a second condition fails.
Why hand-over wins here: it is 21:40 and the return is not due until 06:00, so there is slack. Handing over plus checking is roughly 2 hours of clerk time and perhaps 20 minutes of yours, which leaves you free to manage the injury, the log and the 05:30 arrival. Doing it yourself locks up 90 minutes of the one person who cannot be replaced tonight.
The conditions that would reverse the choice:
- If the return were due within the hour, the hand-over cost would swallow the margin and you would do it yourself.
- If the figures were ones only you could interpret, or an error would be serious and hard to detect, the supervisory cost of the hand-over rises and the arithmetic changes.
How to hand over well: give the clerk the source documents, a stated deadline well before 06:00 (say 04:00), and a fixed point at which you will check the totals - not 'let me know if you get stuck'. Delegation without a named check is abandonment with paperwork.
3. Two work-style statements are put to you. (A) 'I would rather finish a task myself than explain it to someone who might get it wrong.' (B) 'I would rather hand work over, set a clear deadline, and check it afterwards.' Which is the stronger indicator of cadet potential in this situation, and what does the other statement genuinely risk?
Read the worked answer
B is the stronger indicator - in this situation, and generally for a cadet.
B describes what an officer actually does: allocates, sets a standard, holds a check. Statement A describes reliability, which is real but does not scale - a duty cadet who cannot delegate becomes the single point of failure on a night like this one.
Be fair to A, though. It is not laziness or arrogance; it is usually a fear of being blamed for someone else's mistake, and it is attached to a genuine strength - high personal standards and follow-through. The honest reading is that A predicts good performance as a subordinate and B predicts good performance as a leader.
What B risks: handing over and then not checking. 'I delegated it' is the classic failure, and it is worse than A, because the error surfaces later and further up the chain. The safe version of B always includes the check.
What A risks: overload, no succession, and a section that never learns, because the person who does everything teaches nothing. The test is not which statement you prefer - it is whether your behaviour contains the check that makes delegation safe.