Warrant Officers are the pinnacle of a soldier’s career. A role model to junior soldiers and officers, your influence is deep and wide – for better or worse. A good Warrant Officer will will do their job, teach their junior and senior NCOs, mentor junior officers and (probably) juggle a role in the Warrant Officers’ and Sergeants’ Mess. Its a tough call because Warrant Officer leadership is the point where you transition from team leadership (where you can know the name of everyone in your company, squadron or team) to organisational leadership (where you lead people via intermediates). To make it easier, if you can live by the Regiment’s values, pursue excellence and not rest on your laurels then you’ll wield the greatest of respect and influence.
Gentlemen, my name is RSM J C Lord. J C does not stand for Jesus Christ. He is Lord up there (pointing up to the sky) and I am Lord down here (pointing to the ground)
Regimental Sergeant Major John Lord MVO MBE
If you want to develop your SNCOs’ leadership you can check out these videos with some training suggestions. If you’ve been tasked to run a leadership development session for the battalion or regiment then check out these leadership resources, books and some leadership quotes to spice up your presentations.
To develop you – and you wouldn’t have got this far if you weren’t always growing – the Warrant Officer leadership articles below are for you.
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Spinning a Dit: Leadership and Storytelling By The Army Leader I remember the afternoon pretty well. Sat in my OC’s office with a brew and a plate of sandwiches. The OC was a military history enthusiast – as we all should be – and we were spending the afternoon examining the battles for Monte Cassino…
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Start With Another Narrative: Leadership for the Information Age By Matt Offord At the end of my presentation, I looked over the rows of young military officers and I realised that I had failed to convince them that I could offer them anything new on the subject of leadership. I had failed to create that…
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Leadership in The Specialised Infantry: An Interview with Brigadier James Roddis The British Army has been training, advising, mentoring and fighting alongside indigenous armies since at least the 18th century. Whether formal or informal, these roles have tended to attract soldiers and officers of a particular temperament and character. Brigadier Ian Gardiner thought so. A…
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Christmas Book List 2018 By The Army Leader With Christmas approaching, The Army Leader has reached out to some respected army leaders, scholars, authors and role models to ask them for a recommendation for our Christmas book list. It includes suggestions from Lieutenant Generals Tye Urch and Richard Nugee, and WO1 Glenn Haughton, the new…
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Leaders: Myth and Reality by Stan McChrystal, Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone By The Army Leader Team “Leadership is not what you think it is – and it never was” Last week the Army Leader team went to the Emmanuel Centre in London to listen to General McChrystal talk about his latest best-selling book, Leaders: Myth…
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Change and Leadership By The Army Leader Change is coming – and leaders had better be ready. This was the message from the 2018 Army Leadership Conference, where 850 delegates from across the services (and civil service) heard from four speakers on the subject of leading through change. The speakers painted a compelling vision of change…
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Don’t Manage Your Time, Manage Your Tasks By The Army Leader In my early career I was often told I would need improve my time management. “Getting everything done is about managing your time better” was a common response when I asked how others got all their jobs done. I was recently told the same…
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Will your leadership strengths derail you? By The Army Leader There is a leader that I think we all know. They are intelligent; much more so than their peers and subordinates. They are an action person and get things done; in fact, they are the unit’s highest performer. And they are a detail person; nothing…
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Coffee and Clausewitz: Building Organic Leadership Development Communities By Dr Franklin Annis One of the biggest challenges for leaders in both the military and industry is to establish a culture of learning within their organizations. There are packaged programs available and consultants that can be brought in; these approaches often fail to leave lasting results…
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Most Read Army Leader Articles of the First Year One year ago, I launched The Army Leader, based on the view that when peers share their leadership experiences and understanding it improves everyone’s collective leadership ability. Over the last 12 months the site has had almost 90,000 visitors reading 40 articles. Over 1,200 people subscribe…
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Model Exercises and Mission Command By Des Fitzgerald In 2016 I was employed as a contractor on the British Army’s STRIKE concept experiment. The final element of the experiment was a three-week Virtual Environment exercise in the Combined Arms Tactical Trainer (CATT) for a STRIKE Company Group. There were a whole range of approved tactical…
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When I’m in charge, I will do things differently By H Halawi Over the years I have been in various positions of responsibility and authority, as well as being on the receiving end of some good, as well as some not-so-good, leaders and managers. I remember always thinking to myself ‘if I was in charge…
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What Got You Here Won’t Get You Further: On Success, Culture and Communication By Maj Will Meddings. If you are soon to take over your sub-unit, I expect you are feeling pretty good about yourself. I know I was. Over the 12 or so years leading up to company command I’d thought a great deal…
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James Mattis’s Leadership Philosophy By The Army Leader You’d have to have been living in a hole to not have heard of James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis. The current Secretary of Defense and former United States Marine Corps General has a legendary reputation in the US armed forces. It’s a reputation built on stories of his no-nonsense combat and…
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Counting the Costs of Winning: Doing the Right Thing, on a Difficult Day… When the Whole World is Watching By Martyn Cook. Leaders under pressure must keep themselves absolutely clean morally. The relativism of the social sciences will never do. They must lead by example, must be able to implant high-mindedness to their followers, and…
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The Lord Down Here. Discipline Lessons from RSM John C Lord MVO MBE By Maj Will Meddings RSM John Lord MVO MBE is a legendary character but one that is less recognised these days than he should be. He achieved two notable firsts: the first RSM of 3 PARA (on its formation) and the first…
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JP Morgan’s Guaranteed Formula For Success By The Army Leader Sometimes, in the Army and in our lives, we find ourselves confusing working long hours with working hard. And then we confuse working hard with achieving results. There’s no simple way to avoid this mistake. It requires us to constantly assess which task(s) will best…
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Advising and Inspiring: What I Learned from ‘Bottom-Up Blogging’ By Capt John Bailey I recently instigated an internal monthly blog within my Army Reserve RMP company. It began with me writing an example and publishing it. I then press-ganged others to follow suit. To begin, each month we covered a different aspect of the British Army’s…
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High Morale: Lessons from D-Day to the House of Lords By The Army Leader …Remember Monty’s pep talks to us on the eve of the invasion? Then the emotional feeling as we threaded our way through the English countryside, heading for our embarkation points. I can recall some barracking dockers as we approached Southampton, shouting…
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Crossing the Stress Point By The Army Leader In the 2003 film Falling Down Bill Foster, Michael Douglas’s divorced and unemployed engineer, descends in a stress induced downward spiral, angrily fighting and shooting his way across LA to make it to his daughter’s birthday. “I’ve passed the point of no return. Do you know what…
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