CHAPTER 8

FLIGHT PATH TO SUCCESS: HOW RAF LEADERSHIP IS DEVELOPED

If people achieve excellence in their professional life, such as a doctor becoming a consultant, why do we expect them to be able to lead without education or training?

How do people learn to lead?

How do we know when people are good leaders?

INTRODUCTION

Leaders in the RAF are both selected and developed. The development of leaders has three parts: education, reflection and practice. By far the most powerful is always practice, but practice is a much less effective way to learn without the education and reflection. The fact that RAF leaders are both selected and developed reflects the RAF’s answer to the eternal question of whether leaders are born or made. Leaders can certainly be developed, but there has to be a spark of it there in the first place. Whether that spark burns brightly or not to start with is immaterial.

For the commissioned officer corps, the selection of that leadership spark is made in the process of joining the RAF. For the non-commissioned cadre, that selection is mostly made when they are already in the RAF and the annual appraisal shows the potential for leadership and they are chosen for their first competitive promotion.

Both the commissioned and non-commissioned ranks of the RAF have an introductory course prior to being ratified as members of the RAF. The course for the commissioned ranks is longer and has a large leadership content, whereas that for the non-commissioned ranks is shorter and has little leadership in it. Both cadres go on to have leadership education throughout their careers, targeted at times when it is considered that it will have maximum benefit and impact.

Part of the education programmes for all ranks is to learn to reflect on leadership – to reflect on the leadership that they themselves initiate on a day-to-day basis, such as how they led a meeting, or how they got someone to do something. They are also taught to reflect on how others from the long history of the military, and particularly the RAF, have managed their leadership challenges. Then there is everyone’s ability to look about them and reflect on the leadership they see from others every day.

Finally, and most importantly, there is their own leadership practice. Leadership is a relationship with those about you. Everyone has to manage that relationship every day, no matter what formal position of leadership they have. Of course, education, reflection and practice are intimately intertwined. But all the leadership talk in a classroom, all the watching of films about other people’s leadership, all the reading of how past leaders managed, will not make anyone a leader until they try it for themselves. Leadership is relational, it is situational, it is contextual. What worked for one person in one group of people in one organisation, in a particular way and in a certain situation and context, will need to be adapted to fit the people, context, organisation and circumstances that another leader finds themselves in.

SELECTION

Selection for the commissioned officer corps happens over three days at the Officer and Aircrew Assessment Centre at RAF Cranwell. Of course, it includes medicals to ensure that those applying to join the RAF are fit for the jobs they want, as well as critical thinking tests, coordination and capacity tests, and interviews. The interesting part of selection, however, is the leadership assessments. In fact, what the Officer and Aircrew Assessment Centre does today has not changed in structure for decades, although it has been updated regularly with current thinking and technology. The leadership assessments have kept abreast of the RAF’s doctrine on leadership over those years.

Back in Chapter 1, I summarised the RAF’s leadership doctrine in two parts. First was the leaders’ need to understand:

1. ■the whole context within which they work;
2. ■a deep knowledge of how their organisation gets things done;
3. ■a real understanding of the people with whom they work – peers, superiors and subordinates (all organisations have some sort of hierarchy, whether or not it is explicit).

While candidates wanting to join the RAF can be assessed for their understanding of contemporary affairs, their knowledge of the whole context in which they will be working and how the organisation works will only be scanty, and a real understanding of the people with whom they will work, non-existent.

The second part of the doctrine was the behaviours, knowledge and skills that they will need to be successful:

1. ■Developing a strong moral compass
2. ■Determination to achieve the mission
3. ■Followership
4. ■Allowing everyone to lead
5. ■Understanding yourself and your people
6. ■Being technologically competent
7. ■Being flexible and responsive
8. ■Leading change
9. ■Handling ambiguity
10. ■Being politically astute.

The vast majority of these things cannot be objectively measured; some, such as leading change, can only be seen in practice, making the job of the staff at the Officer and Aircrew Assessment Centre doubly hard. They have to make subjective assessments in the short time available as best they can, using the expertise of psychologists, the long corporate experience of selection and their own education, reflection and practice of leadership. The assessments are never only from one person. Using the physical environment, they observe groups solving tasks, both with nominated leaders and when no leader is nominated. The groups wear bibs to identify them, so that any bias introduced by using names is eliminated. Their behaviours and how candidates manage relationships in the group is both fascinating and instructive. Those with that spark of leadership potential can soon be spotted.

While selection to join the RAF is the first step for those in the commissioned officer corps, the next one is the annual appraisal (after their initial officer training, which I will cover under the section on education). Both the commissioned and non-commissioned ranks are appraised annually by those to whom they report. The report is written by both their immediate superior and by her or his superior. Some reports, for those with particularly high recommendations for promotion or who are in critical command positions, will have a third, more senior, reporting officer. This is all to make the report as fair to the individual as possible. While there is also a formal mid-year appraisal (written but not retained at year end), first reporting officers are responsible for the development of those under their command. In the RAF they are encouraged to use a mentoring mindset to do this.

Within the annual report, the most important factor is leadership, and it is mandatory for reporting officers to comment upon this. Although the RAF does not do formal 360-degree assessments, it is important for reporting officers to understand how the leader they are reporting on is viewed by those they lead. Leadership has to be discussed between the reporting officer and the subject of the report at least twice a year. In this way, the appraisal system forms a very important part of the leadership development of all RAF personnel, and a huge amount depends on their command chain and themselves.

The ultimate proof of someone’s leadership comes with their selection for promotion in competition with their peers. For everyone in the commissioned officer corps of the RAF, the first competitive promotion is to the rank of squadron leader and then for every rank thereafter. In the non-commissioned corps it is to the rank of corporal. Individuals are selected for promotion by a board of officers two ranks above the one to which they are promoting people. This board has to read all the annual appraisal reports for a number of years for every individual eligible for promotion. Each member of the board scores every individual using only the information in the reports, and every member of the board has equal weighting in their scores. Those with the highest scores are promoted to fill the numbers that the RAF needs. The system is simple and as fair as possible, with all its checks and balances in reporting officers and board members. Of course, it has its flaws like any other system, but I have not yet come across a better one. One of the flaws the RAF system does suffer from is ‘assessment creep’, as commanders endeavour to get their best people promoted. Another is that it has become impossible to report failure as it does not read well, yet we tend to learn far more from our failures than our successes, and while failure helps to keep people humble it also shows that people are willing to take risks to achieve more.

The competition for promotion becomes a great incentive to improve one’s leadership skills. The single most important item that is reported upon in the annual appraisal is leadership, and the annual appraisal is the only thing that will get a person promoted. People are therefore keen to ensure that they perform as well as they can in leadership. Of course, it is important for the subjects of reports to ensure that their leaders know what they have done and how they have done it. The various conversations between reporting officers and their subjects become very important here. Selling oneself (in a way that is acceptable to peers, superiors and subordinates alike) is a skill that must be learned – part of the political astuteness that every leader must learn.

All organisations need leaders, and there must be a system for recruiting and selecting them that reduces favouritism, bias and the selection of like-minded people. It is very easy to fall foul of bias when reading CVs, most of us having in-built tendencies to select those just like ourselves, whether that be by gender, race, the way we speak or any other factor. Many organisations I have looked at have a tendency to recruit people for their skills, yet this is the easiest of things to rectify. Choosing recruits because of their fit with the values of the organisation, their leadership abilities (providing they are being recruited to be future leaders) and their behaviours would make more sense, as long as their basic interest, knowledge and skills in the specialisation for which they are being recruited are sufficient. Values and behaviours are far more difficult to inculcate. Whatever system an organisation chooses, it should introduce as much independent thinking and opinion into the selection panel as it can – actively seeking contrary opinion as a counterbalance to any bias there may be.

EDUCATION

The RAF makes a distinction between education and training. Training is something that imparts a skill to a person. It can be done ‘just in time’ – that is, you can train someone to do something, such as how to use a computer program, just before they need to be doing it. It is far more efficient to do that training just before it is needed, because if the gap between training and use is too long then much will be forgotten and have to be relearned. Training covers something that is known. Education, on the other hand, covers knowledge, understanding and behaviour and covers the future that we cannot know precisely. In other words, it is not just in time, it is ‘just in case’. For leadership education the RAF follows Kolb’s idea that just 10% of your time should be spent in the classroom learning, 20% should be spent reflecting on what you do and 70% of your time should be spent doing leadership. You learn most from practice, but without some indication of what to do in the first place that practice is not best directed.

The first course taken by all commissioned officers on joining the RAF is ‘Initial Officer Training’. This is a 26-week induction course into the RAF and the single largest subject within it is leadership – a subject all commissioned officers must be versed in as soon as they start productive service. The cadets are commissioned into the RAF on completion of the induction course and all officers go on to their specialist training to be a pilot, engineer, supplier, administrator and so forth. Some of these courses are longer than others (pilot training, for example, can take over three years) and contain more, or less, further leadership training. The Initial Officer Training course covers both education and training in leadership: education in the theories of leadership, the RAF doctrine for it and some background history; and training in practical exercises, leading small teams of their peers in physical tasks. In this way, they are prepared for the team leadership they will be expected to perform as soon as they complete their specialist training.

The junior officers are given top-up education courses approximately every two years through their junior officer career and, among other things, leadership is a main thread of the curriculum. After that, there is another course for the officers every time they are promoted, until they join the Senior Leadership Team of the RAF. Once past the initial course, more and more emphasis is put on learning rather than practical exercises: learning more about theory and new theories, learning about past leaders and how they performed and reflecting on leadership. The officers should be getting plenty of experience in their workplace to replace the training. In the Senior Leadership Team programme, time is spent thinking about strategic leadership challenges for the RAF and how to deal with them. The whole focus of the education programme is to ensure that leaders are prepared for their next challenges – that they have the knowledge that they may need and are given time to reflect on their past leadership and any future challenges. Practice in the reflection on leadership helps to make it an everyday thing.

History is a powerful leadership learning tool and the RAF uses the ‘Staff Ride’ to extract the best learning from it. A Staff Ride is constructed so that attendees can learn the detail of the history of an event and the circumstances surrounding it, the leaders involved in it and the organisations in which they worked – the three prime things that RAF leaders must know for their own leadership. Then they visit the locations where these things happened so that they can further immerse themselves in the issues – for example, the lie of the land is crucial in military affairs. They discuss as a group the leadership given at the time, the decisions made, the behaviours and the ensuing results, endeavouring all the time to draw out what they might learn from it that will help them in their current and future leadership.

As an example, the Staff Ride I used to help those on the Strategic Leadership Development Programme think about strategic military leadership looked at strategic leaders at the end of the First World War, how the British, French and Germans developed their military strategies between the wars and how those strategies were played out in 1940. We looked at the land south of Verdun where Trenchard set up the Independent Force – the world’s first strategic bombing force, whose aim was to disrupt the German munitions factories and troop concentrations far behind the front lines. We examined the importance of the land to the French Army and how Trenchard managed his relationship with Generalissimo Foch, the Supreme Commander of the French Army and overall Allied Commander. In particular we looked at Trenchard’s support for the Battle of St Mihiel, where the American Army under General Pershing fought its first battle independently of the French or British. And at how Trenchard mentored Billy Mitchell, who was Pershing’s Air Commander, and how Mitchell commanded that air battle over the St Mihiel salient – one of the largest air battles ever fought, involving 1,500 allied aircraft.

The Staff Ride went on to look at how the French defended Verdun and how Petain became the ‘Saviour of France’, while looking at the same time at how the Germans went about attacking Verdun, and why. Interestingly, Guderian was an intelligence officer on the German side at Verdun, while Maginot was there on the French side. The Ride went on to look at how the French decided on their military strategy in the 1920s and 1930s at a time of financial stringency from the Great Depression and a demographic trough caused by all the deaths in the First World War. Fortifications were the only answer for them – the Maginot Line. The British relied on the English Channel, the RAF and the Royal Navy – choosing not to have a large standing Army. The Germans looked to fast-armoured warfare, with tanks not acting as infantry assistance but in divisions of their own – a doctrine developed by Guderian.

The Staff Ride concluded by looking at the defeat of France in May and June 1940. How Air Marshal Barratt led the RAF wings and squadrons, many with obsolete aircraft, deployed to France to support the British Expeditionary Force (initially, in 1939, just two divisions with two reserve divisions, but building to ten divisions by May 1940, in contrast to France which put 88 divisions into the field, and the Germans’ 134 divisions). It looked at how the French fighters were split between the French army commanders from the Channel to the Mediterranean, and how many were not able to be deployed to where they were most needed. Guderian used fast-armoured strikes into the French line at Sedan, using airpower to substitute for artillery in his attack across the Meuse. This caught the French by surprise as they were expecting a pause while Guderian brought up his artillery through the 150-mile traffic jams behind him all the way back to Germany. The Staff Ride looked at the fact that Guderian was operating so far inside the French OODA-loop (Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act) that every time the French tried to create a force to stop him, he was past the point where they were trying to defend. Finally, the Staff Ride finished at the tiny village of Stonne, where the French and the Germans fought a fierce battle – the Germans protecting Guderian’s flank while the French were protecting the northern end of the Maginot Line. Essentially, for the French, the Maginot Line, which was intended to be an instrument of their strategy to defend France, became an object of that strategy because, in the mind of many French Commanders, the Line itself had to be protected at all costs while the Germans were concentrating elsewhere. The case provides an object lesson in understanding and executing strategy.

From all this, there are five general lessons to be learned that apply to all organisations, not just to military action – fascinating though that may be:

1. 1.A total of 84% of managers report that they can rely on their boss and their direct reports. However, only 9% say they can rely on colleagues in other departments, functions, units, etc. There is, therefore, huge duplication of effort, promises slip (reinforcing the lack of trust) and opportunities have to be passed up. This failure to coordinate leads to conflict between units. Such a failure is evident in the French efforts of 1940, while in contrast Trenchard’s and Billy Mitchell’s leadership did manage the requisite trust and coordination.
2. 2.As Helmut von Moltke the Elder first said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. All plans will need to be modified as they are executed. Innovative leaders at the operational and tactical level are not avoiding strategy but trying to achieve it. Guderian was very innovative. Halfway through his advance he was sacked by his immediate superior for this ‘innovation’, but only 24 hours later he was reinstated by the higher German command. The French, on the other hand, were rigid in their operational thinking to achieve their strategic aims.
3. 3.Most managers believe that ‘communicating’ equals understanding, but they usually misinterpret communication for telling. They ‘tell’ their people by whatever means, the worst being email (or text), and assume that all their people have the same understanding as they do. However, if you talk to a room of, say, 100 people, only half will leave the room with an understanding of what you said that is similar to your own understanding. Petain is well remembered for saying that the Ardennes was unsuitable for modern (tank) warfare; most people forget that the second half of his sentence was ‘if you take suitable precautions’. It is arguable that the French did not.
4. 4.Performance management (meeting the numbers) does not help to execute the strategy. Meeting the numbers is usually the biggest driver for bonuses and promotion, but the strategy will need agility, teamwork and ambition. (For teamwork refer to the first point.) Agility needs experimentation, which is usually avoided because of the risk to meeting the numbers – managers become cautious. Ambition means that you are looking to stretch the possible, the risks increase and the numbers are less likely to be met. Cautious managers are not ambitious. In 1940, the French had a great opportunity to counterattack against the Germans on the evening of the 14 May. The French reserve tanks had come up to the German bridgehead across the Meuse and the Germans were demoralised as they had just been attacked by their own aircraft. The bridgehead was not well supplied because the bridges over the river had not yet been built and everything was being ferried across. Brigadier General Flavigny, with the support of his Commanding Officer, General Huntziger, dispersed the tanks in defensive positions among the infantry – the cautious approach – despite the arguments of General Georges, the overall French Commander, to attack. Flavigny planned to attack at 06:00 the following morning, but the ambitious Guderian had by that time consolidated his bridgehead and moved to attack the ill-prepared French.
5. 5.Top-down drive can miss nuances and complexities, so distributed leadership (Mission Command) is the best way to achieve things in complex ambiguous circumstances. But the subordinate leaders must understand the strategy. The French had centralised both command and control in 1940, guided by their successful experiences of the First World War. Subordinate commanders were given little freedom to manoeuvre. Guderian and all his subordinate commanders, by contrast, fully understood the strategy and were given full authority to manoeuvre. Guderian was thus able to work well inside the French decision cycle, negating every plan they put forward. The RAF was also using similar command methodology, where all aircraft were available to be directed to the place they were most needed (in contrast to the French dispersal of their fighters to individual army commands). On the other hand, the British reliance on the RAF and Navy, with a very small standing Army, left them hopelessly ill-prepared for the defence of France in 1940, where large numbers of troops were necessary.

The point about learning from history is that it can be very powerful; in military history the consequences of decisions are often stark and obvious. However, the lessons must be carefully assessed against the present and putative future circumstances to ensure the right lessons are learned. The five points I have highlighted from the history of British, French and German strategy making and execution from the First and Second World Wars are very relevant to today’s circumstances, even though I have only sketched the history extremely briefly.

Overall, every organisation needs to ensure that its leaders keep themselves sharp and up to date with current and future circumstances surrounding that organisation. It does not matter if some, or even most, of those leaders are not the ones having to devise strategy to deal with future circumstances – they still need to understand it. If they do not, they can hardly enhance the communications of whatever strategy is devised by those that do. If they do not understand the strategy, they are far more likely to misunderstand the reasons for it and to vehemently disagree with and argue against it. Leaders who do not ensure the continuous education, by whatever means, of all their leaders in the circumstances that face them will set up the conditions for those leaders to become what some have labelled the ‘frozen middle’ – a masking of the senior leader’s abrogation of their own responsibility first to understand and then to be understood. As Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge said in his lecture to the Windsor Leadership Trust in November 2003:1

Much the same is true of all leaders’ need to continuously sharpen their leadership. Education is vital to bring people up to date and prepare them for the next phase of their leadership journey, or just to refresh their leadership. It is a huge subject and there is always more to learn to improve people’s leadership. All leaders need to ensure they understand that, as they rise up the promotion ladder to more senior positions and ever-more demanding ones, what made them good leaders at one level may not necessarily make them good at the next. For those not promoted, they need to refresh their leadership thinking and learn new ideas and methods to keep them in tune with new generations of people whom they will be leading and managing.

Leaders who fail to learn and subsequently derail are toxic to the organisation. Leaders who fail to learn and become stale can be equally disastrous. In either case, trust begins to disintegrate up and down the leadership ladder, which colours the way communications are understood – and misunderstood. The lack of trust also means that senior leaders are reluctant to entrust the middle-ranking leaders with the very information that would allow a modicum of understanding to be restored and communications to therefore work better. What you have are the ideal conditions for the ‘frozen middle’ to be blamed for things not working out as senior leaders think they should. In reality, what is happening is not a failure of middle management, but a systemic failure set up by the structure and the establishment.

An example may show this more clearly.2 I have already used this example briefly in a previous chapter, but it is so important that I make no apology for repeating it here. At the end of the First World War, the brigadiers of the British Army were largely blamed for the massive slaughter in the trenches that caused such revulsion and adverse reaction to war at that time. One of the outcomes of that blame was that they lost the word ‘general’ from their title. Up until that point, the rank was ‘Brigadier General’, but after the First World War it became just ‘Brigadier’. The rank is still ‘Brigadier General’ in the US and other armies. The British brigadiers of the First World War had become the ‘frozen middle’. Yet closer examination reveals that it was no more their fault than any other leaders’ and was simply the nature of modern warfare.

First, it is important to understand the massive advances in technology around the time of the First World War that led many now to categorise it as a time of revolution in military affairs. Principally, the advent of the machine gun, barbed wire and off-field artillery (big powerful guns that could reach the enemy from well behind their own lines) had made defending a position far easier than attacking one. All three of the major European powers, the French, British and Germans (and subsequently the Americans when they joined the war), concluded that the only way of successfully overcoming this advantage of the defence was by what the British Army called the ‘fighting spirit’ of the soldier – that is, charging into the gunfire and, by sheer weight of infantry numbers, overcoming the defenders. The use of horse-borne cavalry was proven to be very ineffective. The French Army under Nivelle became famous for its massed infantry charges and its consequent huge loss of life. The French Army eventually mutinied because of it. (Tanks were invented during the First World War but only took part in the latter stages.)

Next, General Haig, the Commander of the British Field Army in France, arrogated to himself the promotion and sacking of all officers of the Field Army.3 If an attack failed, GHQ considered that it was because of the lack of fighting spirit of the men, not their own plans. And a lack of fighting spirit was a failure of leadership, so the senior officers, the leaders at the front, the brigadiers, were removed. This became so prevalent that the Army, in its own inimitable way, invented a word for it – being ‘degummed’ (which allegedly came from the French word dégommer, meaning ‘dismiss’).

The elephant in the room that was not being spoken about was the horror of the conditions at the Western Front, in which the soldiers having to carry out the plan were fighting. In places, the mud was so deep and treacherous that a wagon pulled by six horses carrying forward shells for the artillery left the makeshift wooden road when the horses were frightened by a nearby explosion, and the wagon, ammunition and all six horses disappeared into the mud before anything could be done. The outriders on the front horses only just managed to escape.

These systemic issues (the right to promote or sack people lying with those who also had to judge why their own plans were not working) caused the trust between senior leaders and those at the front line to break down. It was not that either group were intrinsically bad, nor that the plans were intrinsically wrong. It was that the communications had broken down, so that neither side really understood the difficulties of the other because of that loss of trust. It is said that one staff officer visited the front line personally and burst into tears when he saw the true conditions.

All organisations have to keep up the education of all their leaders at all levels about the real conditions that they are working within. They must educate themselves about leadership and keep up good communications (not just telling people how it is) to generate the trust that, in itself, will facilitate the communication that is necessary to make it all work. The more you just ‘tell’ people, the more they will push back, and the more trust will ebb away, making the situation worse. Leaders must influence people and get them to want to do things their way; education and two-way communication are part of that process. I have had senior leaders say to me that they do not have time to do all that. But when you look at the consequences of not doing it, I have to say to them that they do not have time not to do it!

PRACTICE

The area where leaders learn the most about leadership is by actively doing it. Practice, as they say, makes perfect – or at least improves performance. There are many opportunities in everyday life for people to lead, many more than most realise. And that includes all those people who are not in a formal management role. Leadership can be shown in meetings, not just from the chairperson. It can be shown in organising a party after work, as well as among a group of co-workers in conversation. Junior people can show huge leadership in showing their manager the way, or picking up the baton and helping their peers see the way. In the RAF, leadership is expected from all ranks – no matter how junior.

Of course, in the RAF, there are many opportunities for personnel to show leadership when they deploy on operations. The story of Senior Aircraftswoman Marie White (see Chapter 1) is typical of the expectations the RAF has of junior people to ‘step up’ when the need arises. These sorts of opportunities also arise in other organisations. The emergency services have to do this when their people attend the incidents and crises that demand their attention. Overall commanders are appointed at bronze, silver and gold levels as the need requires, but every person attending will need to step up, as every major incident has shown. These opportunities can also arise on the shop floor or in the office, whenever more than one person is working together on something where the output requires everyone’s input.

For some things, the RAF formalises the extra stuff that people are asked to do under the heading of ‘secondary duties’. These can be anything from looking after buildings, holding inventories and organising social events, to being responsible for building evacuation plans or planning for continuity of working in the event of emergencies. All these things give those made responsible a chance to demonstrate leadership. Managers looking for sparks of leadership in their people have ample opportunity to find it, nurture it and promote it. The RAF also teaches leadership in a more formal way in the flying arena, whether that be leading the crew of a large aircraft or leading a formation of fighters. A lot is expected of all aircrew in this regard, which is why all, not just those joining the commissioned officer corps, go through the Officer and Aircrew Selection Centre.

REFLECTION

Everyone intuitively learns by doing things, particularly practical tasks, and leadership is no different. Some, of course, will learn more than others just by their nature. But no matter who they are, everyone can make so much more of the opportunities they get to practise leadership by taking time to reflect on what happened. The power of reflection is backed by both education and experience. There are three areas where leadership can be reflected upon: most obviously, there is your own leadership, no matter how small an incident of leadership it was; second there is the leadership that you will see about you, both by those in formal positions of leadership and when anyone else steps up to lead in situations where that is necessary; and third there is reading about leaders in history, as there is an enormous amount to learn from reading about past leaders in your own organisation and elsewhere – how they succeeded in their circumstances and how that may benefit you in yours.

How people reflect on their own leadership is very personal. The first step is to recognise when you have exercised some leadership! We often go through a day without realising that we have done any. If you have influenced someone to do something, then you have led them in some way. Think about how that went: what did you do or say that went well and what did you do or say that could have been improved in some way? This self-questioning can be taken further. Think about what surprised you about your leadership and what didn’t, and ask why? What did you notice and what, upon reflection, didn’t you notice, and why? Many people ruminate over this informally on their journey home or into work, or when they are taking their exercise. This is a great way to use that time. Other people reflect more formally by having a leadership diary. For those who are climbing the promotion ladder, I would really encourage using a diary to record leadership thoughts and to reflect on the day’s leadership events when they reach their first really important management or command position. Apart from being an interesting record for later in life, it is a very powerful tool to help you keep learning about, and improving, your leadership.

Reflection on the leadership of others around you can be done in a very similar way, but it can be taken so much further. In the RAF, I used to arrange for leaders in significant positions (the RAF’s station commanders, who typically are in charge of 2,000 to 5,000 people with large budgets to match) to do a leadership exchange with someone in an equivalent position in another, non-military organisation. The exchange was not to do the other person’s work but to observe them in their leadership and for them to observe the RAF station commander in the same way. While great benefit can be had from longer observation, these exchanges were only for one full day as leaders at this level are extremely busy and it can be difficult to arrange diary time for both that is any longer than this. However, one day can still reveal much about your leadership. Each leader is asked to provide feedback to their exchange partner at the end of the day on what they observed. Of course, there are ethical issues that must be kept in mind. The feedback is not to give advice, nor to say how you would have done it. The feedback is simply for what you observed happening: how things made you, the observer, feel and what you noticed in others interacting with the leader being observed.

The leaders also learn much when they consider the day that they are going to be observed. They have to think about what they are going to show the person coming to observe them, about what it is that they do day to day that is leadership. How they actually prepare for and run meetings, what they do and say to their people as they meet them casually during the day, and formally at prepared interactions. If you are in a formal position of leadership, every interaction is a leadership opportunity. I also insisted that every RAF leader taking part in a leadership exchange should write informally to me about what they had learned. While this did provide a library of ideas and issues about leadership that was useful for dissemination to others approaching the same leadership challenges, the real purpose was to ensure that the leaders themselves crystallised their leadership lessons from both events in their own minds. Formalised reflection in this way is very powerful.

All reflection on leadership emphasises the eternal circle of formal education in leadership, experience of leadership and reflection on it. Where do you start? Education cannot make you a leader – leadership is much more about you and your personality. Trying to lead when you know something needs to be done but you are not sure what, can be disastrous and prevent any future chances. Reflecting on your leadership is impossible if you have not done any leading. And it is very hard to reflect usefully on another’s leadership if you have no experience yourself. To break the circle, I think it is necessary to give a little education on the subject and allow people to practise in a benign environment, to reflect on that experience and learn more and to see and read about others’ leadership to enable more reflection, which, in turn, enhances your ability to lead when the next opportunity comes along. This then gives you more to reflect upon. This is precisely what the RAF has done for all its leaders for over 100 years.

Those who will be put in positions of leadership are given the basics in the classroom. They are then sent out to lead a group of their peers who are also doing the same leadership course, on a task in the outdoor environment under supervision. Mistakes can be tolerated and learned from, they are not career limiting. Leaders have time to reflect and improve before their leadership becomes critical. Finally, all officers upon graduation and all non-commissioned officers at a suitable point in their career are given the RAF’s Leadership: An Anthology, which I put together at the RAF Leadership Centre (now the Tedder Academy). It is a book full of leadership stories, some of which appear in this text. They are mostly from other RAF personnel, but it also covers stories from the Army, Royal Navy and other nations’ services with whom the RAF works so closely. It is a book intended to be used to reflect on leadership over time – not to be read in one sitting.

SUMMARY

Developing leadership among all of an organisation’s people is essential. No organisation should rely solely on one person. Indeed, no organisation, once it grows beyond a certain size, can rely solely on one person. There are four elements to developing leadership:

1. ■Selection
2. ■Education
3. ■Practice
4. ■Reflection.

If a person is going to be put into a position of leadership (some might call this to be a manager) then they should be selected for their leadership potential. If you are hiring someone who is expected to be a leader in the organisation, then the hiring decision should be on leadership potential, values and behaviour, not skills for the job. Skills can be taught, values cannot, and behaviour takes a long time to change. Sadly, most people are hired for their skills and sacked for their values and behaviour. Selection should be as objective as it is possible to be about the values, behaviour and leadership potential that the organisation needs. The RAF’s values and leadership knowledge, skills and behaviours have stood the test of time. While some of these things cannot be measured reliably and independently, they can be assessed and judged. People should not be chosen because they are most like you but because they get leadership results – not just that they get people to do things, but that those people do them willingly. A leader who gets results but whose people do not follow willingly is storing up resentment that will cause more trouble than it is worth in the future. Leadership is not, however, about popularity, which usually causes division among people, but about respect and understanding.

It is vital that potential leaders are educated in what is expected of them prior to them starting to lead. You would not allow people to operate dangerous equipment without the requisite knowledge, skills and behaviours, and leadership is no different. But leadership is a huge subject, with more being written about it every day. Organisations must decide what sort of leadership they want that will stand the test of time and educate their people. The eternal leadership learning circle of education, practice and reflection should start with the education of the basics, then a little practice in a benign environment and continue with reflection on that to improve. Education has to go on throughout life, as there is always more to learn, and the higher up a large organisation you go the more the subtle changes in the way leadership works must be understood. The things that worked well as a junior team leader will not necessarily stand you in good stead as a strategic leader. Derailment is always just around the corner.

Practice needs resilience. It can feel a thankless task, particularly in the middle orders of leadership in a large organisation, where the strategic leaders expect you to perform and get the task done with ever-leaner resources, and those in your team or teams expect you to protect them from the stresses and strains of work and the seemingly ever-increasing workloads. Yet practice is where you learn most about your leadership and how you can improve. Learning from practice starts with understanding when you do leadership in your everyday life and how you manage the relationship between you and those that follow you.

Reflection on your leadership is a huge aid to learning to become better at it – the little thoughts taken whenever possible about how a leadership event went, whether that was a formal one such as a meeting or a more informal one such as a chance meeting in the corridor. Writing a leadership diary is a great aid to reflecting on your leadership and learning from it in a more structured way. Doing an exchange with another leader is a powerful and insightful way of formalising leadership reflection even further. Reflecting on others’ leadership, both those whom you see day to day and those whom you can read about, is another way of enhancing your own leadership.

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. ■Leaders should be selected as objectively as possible for leadership potential, values and behaviours.
2. ■All leaders should be educated before they are put into a position of leadership, and then throughout their career.
3. ■All leaders should learn through practice, which necessitates reflection on what they do, what others do and what they can read about leaders.