A personal celebration of military leadership

Stephen Crookbain, Deputy Director at the National Leadership Centre, shares his thoughts on why military leadership at its best can be great

With a backdrop of the 75th Anniversary of VE Day and the deeply troubling realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s Armed Forces Week is worth celebrating.

Take, for example, the superhuman efforts required to plan and deliver the Nightingale Hospitals in record time, or the immense logistical challenge of transporting PPE around the country. Both of these feats offer examples where military leadership has made a huge and tangible difference.

A team of veterans stands guard outside Nightingale Hospital in Birmingham. Image credit: Jacob King/PA

The wonderful volunteering ethos of our veteran community has also been on show. Take a look at the amazing work of an army of Team Rubicon veterans, assisting community efforts to tackle COVID-19 across the country. And who will ever forget the inspirational example set by WW2 veteran Captain Sir Tom Moore, who in his 100th year managed to raise an astonishing £33 million for the NHS.

War veteran Captain Tom Moore at his home in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire. Image credit: Joe Giddens/PA

Our country owes its freedom to past generations of its Armed Forces and this year we owe them our thanks for playing a crucial role in keeping us safe from a very different threat. These unprecedented circumstances have shaped the Armed Forces’ activities this year, reminding me of the unique and distinct nature of military leadership.

Military leadership is different

Anyone who has ever met me will tell you that I can bore for Britain about having been a soldier. But I was only a very junior officer and whilst I served on operational tours, I left before the serious work of Iraq and Afghanistan had begun. There are plenty of better qualified commentators than me.

I have, however, spent a large part of my career working with leaders from a wide variety of sectors and I’ve learnt a lot about the different leadership styles that one finds in different places.

For me, three things stand out as different about military leadership at its best; especially when combined. They are:

1. Clarity of intent. How many people can honestly say that they have laser-like clarity on their organisation’s mission and specifically the role they play in fulfilling that mission? Are we like the fabled NASA janitor? Or do we exist somewhere between ignorance and confusion?

There’s a story about President John F. Kennedy visitng NASA in 1961. Supposedly the President asked a janitor what he did at NASA, and the janitor replied “I’m helping put a man on the moon!” Image credit: NASA

Good military systems use an interrelated set of mission statements that cascade through every level of leadership, enabling everyone to understand their role and how it plays its part in the bigger picture.

This breeds a culture of valuing — and seeking — as much clarity as a situation allows, and being absolutely clear about expectations, deadlines and definitions of success. This culture extends up, down and laterally, and it means that things get done.

2. True empowerment. There’s nothing new about the concept of empowerment as a critical tool of leadership, but there are very few sectors where it is as inbuilt as it is in the Armed Forces.

The cover of retired Captain of the U.S. Navy L. David Marquet’s book ‘Turn the Ship Around!’ Image credit: Intent-Based Leadership

In a military context, empowerment is an absolutely key component of success and one which coexists with the last point on clarity. They call it mission command and it drives initiative and freedom of action, within defined constraints, down to the lowest levels of the organisation.

It’s about setting individual goals — linked to the higher intent — without stipulating how to achieve them. It means that military people are trusted with serious responsibility at a far younger age than most will experience in civilian life. This in turn builds maturity, expertise, an appetite for measured risk and calmness under pressure. All of which tend to serve ex-service people very well when they leave.

3. Strength of relationships. Many people I meet assume that military leadership is distant, cold and centred around orders being given and then unquestioningly carried out. In reality, military leaders ask their people to do some pretty extraordinary things, sometimes to carry out actions that the recipient knows may endanger their life.

Human beings have incredibly strong instincts of self-preservation and the blind followership one sees in films simply doesn’t exist. There is, therefore, a psychological bridge to cross if a person is to follow dangerous orders, and its critical foundation is trust. In such conditions people follow good leaders because they trust them, not because they either fear or respect their rank; considerations like this evaporate under fire.

The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst Crest, with the motto “serve to lead”. Image credit: @RMASandhurst

The best military leaders build this trust by taking time to get to know their people, way beyond the superficial niceties of standard office relationships.
This is reinforced through a track record of good decision making, setting a positive example, fairness and placing the welfare (and when circumstances dictate, the safety) of team members well above their own. The motto of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, where the British Army trains its officers, is Serve to Lead. For me, this sums it up. It’s the concept of service through leadership; serving your soldiers, your unit and your country. In that order.

So there it is; my take on some of the things that make military leadership great. Of course, nothing is ever perfect, and military leadership also has its limitations; but that’s for another day. It’s #ArmedForcesWeek after all!