Call to action: share your leadership stories

The UK has now completed two very difficult and very long campaigns. The country is blessed with a generation of tough and experienced military leaders who have executed in the most challenging conditions imaginable.

But it is a dangerous conceit to think that experience once gained is never lost, that progress and professionalism are a one-way ratchet.

Sadly this is not the case. Already some of our finest soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen are leaving the military, and every month the training establishments churn out fresh and untested faces. It won’t be long before we have junior NCOs who never deployed to Afghan. Our battle-tested quality will inevitably be diluted with time.

British service personnel have always written but our tradition has always been primarily an oral one: stories in the mess, stories from SNCOs, stories on training courses. But the online world has given us a tool to dramatically magnify the impact of these stories.

The Americans, as is their wont, jumped on this early. Twitter and the blogosphere are full of American serving officers and soldiers writing about their experiences. Many focus on leadership: The Military Leader and From the Green Notebook are two great examples.

Here in the UK … crickets.

The chain of command has not helped by clearing discouraging any serving personnel from sharing constructive criticism:

The British response to the urgent need to learn and reform is in stark contrast to the culture of reflective self-analysis that the Americans have adopted. The British military hierarchy have taken active steps to suppress and neuter constructive criticism by experienced and well-intentioned officers. Those who do not toe the party line are ruthlessly censured and passed-over. This is perfectly illustrated by the official response this summer to the publication by a serving TA officer of an extremely well researched and persuasive paper in The British Army Review (the Army’s professional journal) called “A Comprehensive Failure: British Civil-Military Strategy in Helmand Province”, which was damning of official attempts to spin failures into PR successes. In response, the Assistant Chief of the General Staff, issued written instructions effectively removing full editorial control of the British Army Review from its editor and stipulating that political clearance must be sought before the publication of any such articles in the future, due to the embarrassment caused to politicians. What is more worrying was his further direction that in the run up to the Iraq Inquiry there must be no publication of “lessons-learned” from Iraq by serving officers, including those who were actually there. In effect, British officers are no longer free to propose critical and reflective ideas; fresh-thinking that is essential for success, if those proposals might embarrass the Labour Government. (link)

But there is a world of difference between taking on the big issues and sharing leadership insights and lessons.

So this is a call to action to serving and former army officers and soldiers to share their stories and lessons. There are thousands of young soldiers and aspiring soldiers who need to learn good leadership from you. And it won’t be long before your muckers need to be reminded, too.

Get writing: fire in any leadership stories — anonymous or for attribution — to durnure@gmail.com.