Junior Officer leadership can be bitter sweet. You’ve spent over a year on some of the best leader development courses in the world. You are fit, enthusiastic, driven and have the great privileged of leading the young men and women of the British Army. And yet you lack experience and credibility. As a Junior Officer you must be a sponge for information, yet also able to spot poor advice when you get it. You must be confident enough to inspire, yet sceptical enough to question the limits of your ability.
Developing yourself as a leader doesn’t finish when you leave Sandhurst. Nor does it stop when you become a Captain or even when you reach the heady heights of your unit or brigade headquarters.
This blog was stared because there is a wealth of Junior Officers leadership experience that you should be able to tap into. Check out these leadership videos with some training suggestions, either for you or for your team. There are selected podcasts here. And amongst all the reading you could be doing, don’t forget that every war story is full of leadership reflection if you look for it. If you want more our leadership book thoughts and recommendations are here. The articles below are also here to guide and advise you.
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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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…
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Leadership Lessons from the past: Operation Market Garden, 1944 By Neil McLennan This week marks the 76th 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…
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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 career that has seen him deploy around the world for over 25 years, preparing and deploying light combat forces on operations. Between 2012 and…
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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…
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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…
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The Future of Command and Control: Four Models to Provoke Thought By Will Meddings In 2019’s second Agile Warrior Quarterly an article considered the idea of the Conceptual Force (Land) 35, the ‘CF(L)35’. This capstone concept proposes new capabilities, a new way of operating, and a new force design for the period 2030-2035. The same…
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Names Matter: The US Military Must Take a Strong Stance on Bases Named after Confederate Leaders By Dave Hansen, US Army. The opinions in this article are his own and not an official representation of the US Army, DoD or the US Government. On Monday the 8th of June US Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy stated…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Getting Stuff Done: Tips from a Year in the JHub By James Kuht “Ideas are easy, execution is everything” John Doerr, Billionaire Tech Investor & author of “Measure what Matters” “Getting stuff done” (GSD) sounds so simple but is a skill held by remarkably few. I am not talking about simply being given a task to…
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Ideation: Tips from a Year in the JHub By James Kuht This is the first article in a series of four on my experiences of innovation at the jHub/jHubMed – UK Strategic Command’s innovation hub. They are intended for anyone who is interested or actively involved in innovation or entrepreneurship. I have attempted to write…
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LION Culture – A Practical Guide to Unlocking the Potential of Every Soldier. By WO1 (RSM) Joseph Fleming In recent years the Army has spent real time and energy emphasising leadership. The introduction of the Army Leadership Code has been the most obvious example, but the establishment of the Centre for Army Leadership (CAL) and…
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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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A Breath of Fresh Air: Project Oxygen and the British Army By Will Meddings It’s a simple question; an often-asked question that seems to have a million answers: what makes a good leader? It is worth asking this simple question, not because there is a simple answer but because asking it might just force you…
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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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A Veteran’s Perspective on Training and Development By Richard Clark Jocks, NCOs and officers are now far more transparent about their successes and failures than they were in my day (All those years ago!). It is a good thing, too. When I left the Army several years ago it was rare to talk about the…
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Why Should I Trust the New Lt? What Platoon Commanders Need to Do to Be Trusted by Their Chain of Command By Will Meddings There are plenty of stereotypes about new platoon and troop commanders. Whatever rank you are, you’ve come across them. Platoon commanders with poor administration. Troop commanders who get lost. Platoon commanders…
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Staff Ninja or Staff Monkey? By David Crosbie The British Army, like many other armies, talks openly about being a learning organisation. Review and reflection are actively encouraged, with a view to making the institution and its people better in the long run. We even have an Army Command Standing Order for it (ACSO 1118,…
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