Advising and Inspiring: What I Learned from ‘Bottom-Up Blogging’ By Capt John Bailey I recently instigated an internal monthly blog within my Army Reserve RMP company. It began with me writing an example and publishing it. I then press-ganged others to follow suit. To begin, each month we covered a different aspect of the British Army’s…
High Morale: Lessons from D-Day to the House of Lords By The Army Leader …Remember Monty’s pep talks to us on the eve of the invasion? Then the emotional feeling as we threaded our way through the English countryside, heading for our embarkation points. I can recall some barracking dockers as we approached Southampton, shouting…
Make Your Guiding Principles Useful By The Army Leader Early in my first tour in the Army I received a copy of an unusual document I’d never come across before. Two sides of A4, typed and headed; it was the Commanding Officer’s Command Philosophy. ‘His philosophy?’, I thought. ‘Does he think he’s Plato?’ Since then…
Crossing the Stress Point By The Army Leader In the 2003 film Falling Down Bill Foster, Michael Douglas’s divorced and unemployed engineer, descends in a stress induced downward spiral, angrily fighting and shooting his way across LA to make it to his daughter’s birthday. “I’ve passed the point of no return. Do you know what…
Never Off Duty – Are You A Social Role Model Too? By The Army Leader Today I watched Padre Johanna Jepson and Lt Col Nick MacKenzie talk at the Centre for Army Leadership. The talk was livestreamed over Facebook. They talked about the inmate rehabilitation programme at Louisiana State Penitentiary in a talk titled ‘Unexpected…
Nail Your Meetings! By The Army Leader We’ve all sat through horrible meetings. In the Army and in civvie street, no one looks forward to meetings. In the US the average employee spends 37% of their time in meetings and 47% complain that meetings are the number one waste of time in their job. A recent…
Trusting Us and Trusting Them – A Leader’s Role – Part 2 By Maj Will Meddings In the first part of this article I mentioned the theory that trust is made up of integrity, intent, capability and proven results. In this part I’ll cover the next three ways to build trust between teams. The first,…
Trusting Us and Trusting Them – A Leader’s Role – Part 1 By Maj Will Meddings In 2015 the NATO Kabul Security Force created a joint UK-US integrated command battalion to provide security in Kabul. With a UK commander and a US Command Sergeant Major, it was the first integrated unit like this since the…
The Five ‘Universals’ of Great Leaders? By Maj Russ Lewis MC “You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle I left the Army in 2013 having had an incredible twenty year career. During that time I had the opportunity to lead soldiers in a variety of environments…
Drive The Power Train By The Army Leader One of the seven Leadership Code behaviours is ‘Encourage Confidence in the Team’. The guide to the Code says that leaders should inspire and motivate their team by showing confidence in their abilities and talking enthusiastically about success. Inspirational motivation. Fine words. But what does that actually…