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…
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 Through Crisis: An Interview with Lt Col Langley Sharp By The Army Leader In June 2020, as part of its mission to develop leadership across the British Army and to work in concert with other parts for the public sector, the Centre for Army Leadership published Leading Through Crisis; A Practitioner’s Guide. The new…
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…