Field Officer leadership is an important step. Up until now you’ve been a team leader. You’ve been leading a group of under 150 or so, able to recognise the face of every person you are responsible for. Now (apart from sub-unit command) you’re an organisational leader. The influence you wield over those at the bottom of your organisation is through others. Field Officer leadership is exercised much more frequently through writing, policy, planning and creating organisational culture. As a result your influence is wider but can be less satisfying. It also requires some different skills.
This is the Field Officer’s leadership problem: To have the most effect you need to be capable at organisational leadership. To have a happy immediate team you need to use the team leadership skills that your displayed as a junior leader. To go back to John Adair, you need to think about the three circle (task, team and individual) at two levels at once. Organisational leadership will deliver the organisation’s task. But you still have to think about your immediate team’s task, team and individual needs.
If you are tasked to run some leadership development for your subordinates, you’ll find some leadership development videos you can use here and some articles and advice on leadership development here. You’ll also find it useful to subscribe to HBR – their business leadership articles are normally focused at the organisational level.
If you wanted the latest leadership advice, written by and for Army leaders like you, then subscribe to The Army Leader and you’ll get it straight into your inbox.
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Media Credit: Image © Crown Copyright under Open Government Licence v3.0
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Christmas Leadership Book List 2019 By Tim Heck, Book Reviews Editor Each year, with Christmas around the corner and High Street full of holiday sales, The Army Leader reaches out to respected military leaders, scholars, and authors to ask them for a recommendation for our Christmas leadership book list. This year we sought a more…
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We Happy Few: A Call for Inclusion By The Army Leader The 25th of October is St Crispin’s day, a festival that celebrates the martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian around 286 AD. It is also (and perhaps better) remembered as the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, part of the Hundred Years’ War between…
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