More Than Just ‘Don’t Be A Dick’ By Dave Crosbie In my last week of Sub-Unit Command, I was having a coffee with a friend. We were discussing the crux of good leadership at any level and mused that it probably boiled down to ‘don’t be a dick’. Whilst this thoughtful, lucid observation does have…
Imagine, Align, Communicate: How To Provide Vision By Major Paul Cooper “We need to destroy – not attack, not damage, not surround – I want you to destroy the Republican Guard. When you’re done with them, I don’t want them to be an effective fighting force anymore. I don’t want them to exist as a…
The Five Dysfunctions of an Army Team How to build a cohesive team using Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team model By Joe Kay, Principal Consultant at The Table Group and former Army Officer When it comes to leadership and team performance training, the Army often leads the way. When I went through Sandhurst…
Conflicted: Why Arguing is the Right Thing to do. Interviewed by The Army Leader For years Ian Leslie was fascinated by the question of why public and private disagreements go so badly, so often. In public, they descend into acrimony or get stuck in a grinding neutral gear. In private, disagreements should shatter groupthink or…
An Anti-Fragile Approach to Leadership By Lieutenant-Colonel Alastair Luft, Canadian Armed Forces COVID-19 has exposed the fragility and uncertainty of a complex, modern world. Considering the number of recent geopolitical analyses (such as the latest Global Strategic Trends) that identify uncertainty as a rising threat, the lesson was unnecessary. Unfortunately, despite growing calls to address…
The Acceptable Face of Wargaming: Risk-free, Cost-free Combat Leadership? By Dom Wiejak Wargaming gets a bad rep. Like reading doctrine, or wearing yesterday’s underpants, it is not something you necessarily want to admit to in public. We are coloured by our predjudices; wargaming is either the horror step of Course of Action development or something…
Get Your AR Right – Every Year By Brig James Cook The Army’s reporting system often gets a tough ride. People do not always get the job they want and we are in a competitive business with high quality people. That said, it is well recognised that, as in any office environment, there are things…
Rethinking Planning and Improving Survivability By Des FitzGerald On the evening of the 10th June 1944 in the chateau at La Caine, 18km Southwest of Caen, the officers of the Headquarters Panzer Group West had their evening meal disturbed by an air raid warning. They rushed into the gardens to watch what was happening, coincidentally…
Leadership Lessons from the past: Operation Market Garden, 1944 By Neil McLennan This week is the anniversary of Operation Market Garden, a bold plan by British military leader, Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery. The military operation could have brought the Second War to an end a year early. The plan was to advance at speed…
Do Not Take Leadership for Granted: An Interview with Major General Charlie Collins By The Army Leader Team Major General Charlie Collins commissioned into the Royal Green Jackets in 1995, beginning a career that has seen him deploy around the world for over 25 years, preparing and deploying light combat forces on operations. Between 2012…