Flowers of Leadership Wisdom

I have found myself immersed in the outpouring of shocking personal testimonies of people who serve and served in the Armed Forces. 

Fill Your Boots (X: @MilitaryBanter) is doing a brilliant job to catalogue the extent of this.  I wrote a blog in Oct 23 about the awful evidence submitted to the HCDC for Women in the Armed Forces Report. 

This week has felt viscerally worse.  It has been a bad week for the Army.  I am reminded of my conversation with the thoughtful Balissa Greene.  She talked about how the need to do better.  Maya Angelou said “Do the best you can, until you know better and then when you know better, do better.” 

Balissa Greene – “Culture in an organisation is about the things that the organisation values and that drives a particular type of behaviour.  Behaviour doesn’t exist on its own.  Behaviour continues if it is rewarded.” 

The absence of action to address poor behaviours is unacceptable.  “My door is always open” can be a hackneyed phrase unless you are present in the room with the person and you. “Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply” (Stephen Covey).  We should focus on discerning whether, as Siobhán Sheridan will say in her episode (in series 2 of The Culture Colonel), the person wants to be heard, held or helped. 

• Tim Grimley – “I think we need to do more in terms of the bystanders.  There is a great quote by an anonymous Army contributor to the HCDC written evidence.  She said, “Until the observers are punished as severely as those who perpetrate the crimes, the culture will never change” 

• Ruth Hake – “I think people are a lot more able and aware to call out really toxic leadership where that happens.  It’s important to call it out at a very junior point in someone’s career.” 

• Sim Rezazadah-Wilson.  “I definitely believe that you need a purpose in life.  If you don’t have a purpose then why do you get out of bed every day?  I need to bring my best version of myself to work every day and set a good standard for the people at work.” 

• Victoria Kinkaid.  “A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step” – Chinese proverb.  When constantly fighting for a world that you want to live in, particularly from a social justice perspective, it is a great reminder that one step puts you closer to your goal.” 

The last 10 days has felt like the journey has only just begun AGAIN, but Victoria Kinkaid’s quotation reminds us of the importance to speak up in order to make progress.  It is also vital for all leaders to work hard to stay on the right side of the fine line that Richard Nugee describes as the sweet spot between confidence and arrogance. 

• Damian Jenkins gives excellent advice about working out what kind of leader we should strive to be: “One of the things that I see is the old person who is in a senior position, who’s like a tall tree in a rainforest. They grow tall and then they have to grow their canopy to grab all the light.  And they do it at the exclusion of the other tree and little trees underneath die.” 

• Toni Harding –“I do believe if you just keep doing the right thing, then good things will happen.  They will definitely be bumpy, but I think it’s a lot easier to sleep at night knowing you did the right thing by everybody.” 

Finally, as we look to Season 2 of The Culture Colonel (coming in March), you will hear more of Adrian Bird’s (Chief of Defence Intelligence) wisdom about how “power is a relationship; not a possession” and the importance of being excellent to each other.