“Senior NCOs run the Army”. Even if that’s not true, Senior NCO leadership is certainly making the British Army’s companies, units and administration run. As a Senior NCO you’re an experienced leader but you are moving from leading at the front to making everything work behind the scenes.
Officers value your opinion, NCOs see you as a role model. But the chain of command also expects you to have a wider view. Everyone knows you could run the troop or platoon. You need to prove you can make the company, unit, stores or training team run. That’s a much bigger ask.
Good NCOs are not just born. They are groomed and grown through a lot of hard work and strong leadership by Senior NCOs.
William Connelly, sixth Sergeant Major of the US Army
You’re also a role model to your Junior NCOs, developing their leadership and helping them see the bigger picture as well. If you need some inspiration, check out these videos with some training suggestions. If you’ve been tasked to run a leadership development session then check out these leadership resources, books and some leadership quotes to spice up your presentations.
Great Senior NCO leadership is thinking of the bigger picture, being a first class role model and bringing the maturity and experience that junior officers can’t deliver. The articles below are for you.
If you wanted the latest Senior NCO leadership advice, written by other Army leaders, then subscribe to The Army Leader and you’ll get it straight into your inbox.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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 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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Biff! A Personal Reflection on Supporting the Wounded, Injured and Sick By Andrew Dodson Biff. Let’s face it. It is a word we have all used at some time in our career in the Army. Usually disparaging in nature and frequently preceded by four letter expletives. A word used to describe those on light duties…
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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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Failure: A Practioner’s View By Lt Col Fernando Garetto, Some authors say that failure is a key element of learning. Others suggest that leaders should share their failures in order to make their people feel more comfortable with their own mistakes, contributing to the generation of a creative culture. Ed Catmul dedicated a whole chapter…
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