Get off Their Backs! A JNCO’s Guide to Avoiding Micromanagement By Ben Hayden I walked down the stairs to the company offices ready for the obligatory 1030 post-phys roll call. At 1020 I was welcomed by the sight of 72 Guardsmen, stood in the rain in three ranks, nearly ten minutes early on a wet…
Locked Up Potential: Thief, Prisoner, Soldier, Priest By The Army Leader Team Does the leadership style or the lessons learned in one institution translate from that organisation to the next? Paul Cowley MBE is a man whose life has been spent working in and around different institutions; he served time in a young offenders’ prison…
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…
Honest Mistakes and Better Soldiers By Lance Corporal David Griffiths My Company Commander once briefed my company on how to make honest mistakes into positive experiences. He explained how they were, in retrospect, good if not essential things. We can all read about leadership and talk about being better soldiers until the sun goes down…
Leading as a JNCO: An Army Reserve Perspective By Huw Davies How do you lead a section that ranges in age from 18-50 and contains civil servants, police officers, students and executives? How do you motivate soldiers for whom the Army is not their primary source of income? How do you career manage soldiers you…
Sympathy or Empathy? How feeling enhances leadership in training By Oli Wettern Any aspiring leader should be familiar with the maxim that “no one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”. The meaning is clear: those that are in your command will listen to you and follow you only when…
The Reimagining Defence Interview By The Army Leader What are the most important ideas and trends that every military leader must understand? Grey Zone conflict? Information warfare? The evolution of urban conflict in megacities? Right now there are plenty of contenders for ‘most important trend in defence’. Last week I spoke to two military officers…
Lockdown Leadership: A Guardsman’s Perspective By Guardsman David Griffiths As you read these words the lockdown may well be relaxing and almost over. But when I wrote them, I was, as you probably were, in the sixth week of a lockdown that changed all our lives perhaps more than we thought it would. It led…
Personal Development: Tips from a Year in the JHub By James Kuht “If you keep learning all the time, you have a wonderful advantage” Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway. The law of compound interest (that a 1% improvement in your knowledge each day would make you doubly smart within 70 days) makes a compelling case for…
Leadership: Tips from a Year in the JHub By James Kuht In the previous article on GSD (“Getting Stuff Done”) I talked about the criticality of assembling a small-but-perfectly-formed team – this article explores how you might lead them effectively. Now I am certainly not a born leader, naturally quite introverted in fact, and am…