CHAPTER 7

FUELLED FOR FLIGHT: WHAT ALLOWS LEADERS TO LEAD

What abilities do leaders need?

Why do leaders need to be trusted?

What is it that leaders need to learn?

INTRODUCTION

For leaders to be allowed to lead, to be followed, they must have some ability. Some of that ability will be innate but much of it can be learned. They must be clever enough – they don’t have to be the cleverest in the team – but they have to have sufficient intelligence to understand the contemporary context. They need the emotional intelligence to understand people as after all, leadership is about people. They need to be seen to be successful at getting things done, so they need the political intelligence to know how to influence the right people in their organisations and how their organisations work to get things done. They need to set the right example and have the resilience to see things through.

Without trust, leaders will not be allowed to lead: they need the trust of their own leaders to give them the freedom to do things; and they need the trust of their followers to enable them to create teams that will work. Their example, integrity and success will earn them the trust of their leaders. Their example, integrity and success will earn them the trust of their followers. Success in leadership is about the achievement of the task without breaking the team and the creation of hard-working teams that are fun to be in. Leaders’ resilience to see things through and keep achieving must be seen by both their own people and their leaders.

Leaders are the people that make sense of things. They are the ones that see the patterns in the kaleidoscope of working life and show this to their people. They are the ones that demonstrate that tasks can be achieved. To keep doing this they need to keep learning. Learning to keep up with the context in which the business works. Learning to improve their leadership. Learning to keep up with what technology can do. Learning about people, resilience and trust.

ABILITY

Just how clever do leaders have to be? I have had fierce debates over this, with some advocating that intelligence is all-important while others say that emotional intelligence is more important and that IQ is secondary. Daniel Goleman is the best-known advocate of emotional intelligence,1 and considers it more important than IQ, while Andrew Kakabadse considers, for strategic leaders, that only a sufficient IQ matters.2 One problem for many psychologists is that there has been no reliable measure of the sort of emotional intelligence that those of us who advocate it want – that is, the affective, or the feeling part, rather than cognitive emotional intelligence. After all, cognitive emotional intelligence looks rather like plain IQ anyway. There are certain things that leaders at all levels need to think through and get ‘right’. I add inverted commas, as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are not always the best paradigms to use here and it might be better to say that good leaders need to come up with sensible, possible solutions or ideas that are likely to have better outcomes than other ideas. They must have enough intelligence to think through these things. A very valid question, then, is how much is enough? I could not put a figure on it. The thinking through of things that leaders have to do need not be original to them, provided they listen to those that can and are able to see the arguments and that the leaders can pick the ‘right’ answers that would be good enough. I think that Andrew Kakabadse has a point, in that at the top of a large organisation, at board level, more intelligence would be needed than for a team leader running a small team at the bottom of an organisation. But, given that leadership is about people, you still need the emotional intelligence to get your strategies and ideas across to your people – all your people, not just your board – which makes the communication of it all that much harder and the emotional intelligence to be able to do it that much more important.

The things that leaders need to think through are, principally, the context in which the team and institution are working and how the organisation itself works. There are also the people with whom the leader is working, although this also falls under emotional intelligence. The context is the first one to consider in more detail as it is the widest ranging. Wherever a leader sits in an organisation, she or he needs to understand the whole context of the organisation, not just the immediate context of their team. If they do not understand the macro-context in which the organisation is working, they are highly unlikely to be able to understand the direction in which the board’s strategy is taking the organisation and so fully support their own leaders.

Shortly after I started the RAF Leadership Centre, I was talking to a large group of squadron leaders (essentially the second tier of the commissioned leaders in the RAF) and asked them if anyone had read the recently published ‘RAF Strategy’. Given they were on a formal education course at the time, I thought it reasonable that most would have done so. I was met with a rather embarrassed silence. Eventually, one of them was brave enough to admit that he had not, stating that it was so far above him it was not necessary for him to do so. After all, he said, Mission Command (of which he was a firm advocate) stated that he needed to think ‘2 up’ – that is, two ranks above him. Two ranks above him would still be some three ranks below the RAF Board level. He knew the circumstances in which his leader two ranks above him was working and that should be enough. Most of the time it probably would be. However, not knowing what the board of your organisation is thinking, and why, simply increases the social distance between the top and bottom of the organisation, which risks breaking-down trust in strategic leaders. Those leaders become the amorphous ‘they’ who do not know what they are doing because their decisions, which do directly affect those at the bottom, seem strange if not perverse – ‘they’ clearly do not understand what goes on at the coalface. In this case, the lack of understanding really belongs to the junior leader. Whenever any leader, from the top to the bottom of an organisation, finds themselves thinking, or saying, ‘they’ don’t understand, whoever ‘they’ are, that leader should consider whether the lack of understanding is really their own. For the strategic leader, there is also the problem of ‘them’ not understanding when the ‘they’ at the bottom of the organisation don’t get the vision, purpose and strategy. No matter how many times that strategic leader has told them, it is their communication effort of the circumstances and the strategy that is not yet complete.

How much of the macro-circumstances should a junior leader have to understand? Enough to ensure that they understand the direction that the board’s strategy is taking. They may still disagree with it, but it should at least make sense. The more immediate circumstances of the leader, at least ‘2 up’, need much deeper understanding. These circumstances are the ones that leaders must make sense of to their people, along with strategic direction. In this way, their own plans and strategies can then be understood by those they lead. They need to think through the things that will be coming that will affect their team, whether that be from political, social, economic, technical, environmental or legal changes, as these are the root of the organisational, regulatory, bureaucratic rule changes. They need to consider the risks to whatever it is that their team do, how these risks are being dealt with and if this is sufficient to prevent unwelcome things happening. There is a huge amount here for all leaders to think about and, again, it is not necessary for them to do it all themselves. Formally or informally, their team can and should be a good source of information, as should the various meetings, formal or informal, that they go to with their own leader or others in the organisation.

The second thing that all leaders need to exercise their intelligence on is how the organisation works. While this may start with the ‘wiring diagrams’, which may be useful for finding out who is responsible for what, it goes so much further than this. Knowing who is responsible does not tell you how it actually gets done. Leaders need to know both. This is the baseline knowledge that leaders need, but then they must think in systems. This is a subtler way of understanding the world in which we live. Everything exists in some form of system, where lots of things or people impinge on them and they interact with lots more things or people, with some form of influence being exerted at every interaction. The influence may be a natural outcome of the interaction or a deliberate act. For example, a tree exists in an ecological system with a myriad of things that interact with it, from rain, sun and soil to birds, insect parasites and humans. Should humans decide to eliminate a particular parasite to increase a nearby crop yield, it could allow the vast increase of another parasite that then destroys the trees, as happened in Canada.3 If you don’t understand the system, you can create unintended, and very poor, outcomes. Every pilot knows that to go up, you pull back on the ‘stick’. It’s how the system in which an aircraft exists works. To go up faster, pull back harder. They also know that there is a limit, at least in conventional aircraft, after which you pull back still harder and you will go down – possibly very fast indeed! The relationship is not linear. If a company wants to sell more things, it gets more sales personnel and profits go up. Eventually, taking on more sales personnel will make profits go down because other things in the system limit the profits – such as supply, competition or market saturation. Most likely, in this system it will be some combination of all these, and other things. However, again, relationships are not linear. Many leaders will have an intuitive grasp of a system (simplified in the mind), which leads to an intuitive understanding of which policy lever to use to effect change. Only it is easy to pull the lever in a direction that produces the opposite effect to the one desired if that understanding is not comprehensive enough.4

If you do not think in systems, it is easy to shift responsibility or blame for outcomes away from where it truly belongs. For example, the oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil price rises. Their actions alone could not trigger global price rises and economic chaos if the oil-consuming nations had not built economies that are vulnerable to supply interruptions.5 Leaders should also beware of simple management techniques, such as setting targets, in complicated systems. It seems laudable to set a target that should further the purpose of the organisation. However, targets should be SMART,6 and the purpose is not easily put in a SMART way. Targets are then set for things that are measurable, not necessarily things that further the purpose. The target quickly becomes the purpose of the organisation because people are rated on meeting their targets, and the true purpose is lost. The NHS, for example, is beset by this problem, creating perverse and wasteful behaviour. All leaders need to understand the system they are working in, and strategic leaders should have a deep understanding as the systems they need to think about are spread wider and can be far more complex.

The third thing that leaders must be able to think through and get ‘right’ is people. While intelligence is needed to think things through, leaders also need emotional intelligence. Leaders have to understand their superiors, peers and subordinates, as well as their customers and competition (or, for the military, their enemy). There has been a lot written about emotional intelligence, and from being very much in vogue it now has a lot of detractors, not least those psychologists who dismiss it because they cannot find a reliable measure for it. Yet for me there still remains the necessity for leaders to understand people, and emotional intelligence may be thought of as knowing what makes yourself tick, knowing what makes others tick, knowing how you affect others and being able to manage relationships by using that knowledge. If this is hard or impossible to measure, so be it, but leaders still need to do it. As Sun Tzu pointed out in The Art of War, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.7 For modern leaders it will be very much part of their success. If you can get someone to do what you want them to do because they want to do it (which is how General Eisenhower thought of leadership), then you are an emotionally intelligent leader.

Back in Chapter 1, when considering what made Mick Mannock (the First World War fighter ace) a successful leader, it was because he was a successful fighter pilot and successful leader. Being successful gives you permission to lead. When I was a young fighter pilot, we used to say of some of our colleagues that we would only follow them out of curiosity to see where they would go. They were not successful at what they did. It is no accident that to be promoted as a pilot in the RAF you must first get above-average assessments in the air. In other words, you have to prove that you are good at what you do before you are put into a formal leadership position (of course, you practise leading in the air before this, which is part of the above-average assessment needed). All organisations I have come across work in a similar way: people are hired to do something and when they get good at that they are put in positions of management – that is, formal leadership positions. The sadness is that, outside the military, people are rarely given the leadership education before or at the time they are moved into the leadership position.

It is well understood in the RAF that you may well be appointed to a formal leadership (or management) position, but that you will not be the leader of your people until you have been ratified as such in their hearts and minds. Another way to think of this is that leadership is a relationship, it is not something that one person has and does to another. In a relationship, it takes two to make it work. The follower always has a choice as to whether they will or will not do what they have been asked or told by their leader. As with all choices, there are consequences: if you choose not to follow, you may be sanctioned by your organisation; if you do choose to follow, you are party to, and also responsible for, what happens next. Thus, it is important that the leader leads to success. Success breeds the trust that the leader will not let the followers down. Success breeds success. However, leaders should beware of hubris. Just because they have been successful does not mean that they will always be so – it does not absolve them of the hard thinking, decision making and emotional intelligence that created their early successes. But leaders should think about how they can create small successes early on in their tenure of a position, to start off this snowball effect of success. Success comes from leaders understanding the context in which they work, understanding the organisation in which they work (how things get done and the system in which it sits) and understanding the people and being politically astute.

There are two more things that come under the heading of the ability that allows leaders to lead. The first is example. I have already said that leaders need to lead by example, to be part of the team, or organisation, that they are leading. To be part of it is not just to be a nominal member – it is to be seen to go through the pain and exhilaration that the team or organisation goes through when things go badly or well. Alex Haslam calls this prototypical.8 That is, not as in a prototype, but as in the most typical of the organisation. If you as a leader are thought of as the most akin to whatever your organisation represents, if you are the exemplar of it, then people will want to be like you and follow you. If you share their agonies and excitement, they will believe in you. That desire and belief helps to create the willing follower that enables the leader. Leaders should note, however, that that desire and belief can be destroyed far more easily and quickly by a perceived failure to be the exemplar, or share the difficulties, than it can be built up.

Finally, under ability comes resilience. I will return to resilience later in this chapter, but here it is important to note that leaders need to be resilient. A lot is demanded of a leader and a leader has to be able to cope with those demands. Sometimes it can feel very lonely. Leaders should not strive to be liked by their people; they should strive to be respected. At times, leaders have to make difficult decisions about people, and if they strive to be liked then this is hard to do impartially, and certainly to be seen to be impartial (which is vital for leaders). I learned this early in my career. As a junior officer, I was both a weapons instructor and an instrument flying examiner. As such, in both roles I had to remove people from their chosen career if they were not good enough at it. You can quickly gain a reputation doing this! At one point, I heard one of my fellow pilots saying to another, ‘Ask John’, and the reply, ‘I thought you didn’t like him’. ‘I don’t’, the first one responded, ‘but he’s honest and will tell it like it is’. I realised then that respect was so much more important than being liked, although it did make me feel a little lonely.

It came again, much later in my career, from a navigator that I thought did like me. I was returning to flying to be a squadron executive, after a period ‘flying a desk’, and was going through the operational conversion unit (OCU) for the Tornado F3, which I had not flown before. I had previously taught one of the instructors on a Phantom squadron when he arrived fresh from training for the first time, and now he was teaching me. We were in a group discussing things in the crew room when I said one needed to take care not to treat someone badly on your way up the promotion ladder as you were likely to meet them on your way down. This navigator gave me a long look and said, ‘You don’t remember do you?’ I realised that there was something going on here but was honest and said ‘No, what did I do?’. ‘You failed one of my checks’ (back on the Phantom squadron). ‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘was I right to do so?’. He laughed and said, ‘Yes, it is what made me the navigator I am today!’. He too was now a weapons instructor. The respect had turned into liking, but it would not have happened the other way around. You need resilience to get to that position.

TRUST

Leaders cannot lead without establishing trust. They must have trust both from those to whom they are responsible and from those who are responsible to them. Without the trust from their own leaders, they will not have any freedom to exercise their own leadership – to make decisions that are significant. Without trust from ‘above’, they will just be a supine follower doing what they are told to do and nothing else. In these circumstances, whatever else you may be, you are not a leader but perhaps, at best, a manager of a team. With trust from above, a leader gets the room to steer her or his team in their own direction to their own strategy, nested within that of their leaders of course (as described in Chapter 5). This trust has to be earned – sometimes hard earned.

Leaders earn trust by watching their own leader, or leaders, demonstrating their integrity and setting their example. Leaders need to be capable, to have the ability to do what is required of them and to do what they say they are going to do when they say they are going to do it. In this respect, it is always better to underpromise and overproduce. There is nothing worse than someone promising to have done something by a certain date and to find out that it has not been done when that date arrives. Leaders will not give tasks to people who fail to meet deadlines because they will not trust them. If they are forced to use such people, they will give far more precise instructions and ride them very hard indeed, never leaving them to get on with things by themselves and not allowing them to lead in turn.

There is a tricky dichotomy here, as leaders will also want their subordinate leaders to take risks, to be ambitious with what they can achieve, to be stretched and to meet ‘stretch targets’ (although all leaders should beware of how they set targets, always thinking in systems and how the system works). If there really are risks being taken and targets are truly stretch ones, things are not always going to work out. Sometimes risks will become issues – things that happen rather than might happen. Sometimes stretch targets will be missed as they were just too much to achieve. The manipulative will try to make the targets they accept look as if they are stretch ones while knowing they can be easily met. They will verbally build-up risks that are very unlikely to occur, to demonstrate they are taking risks when they are not really doing so. The bonus culture can be notorious for generating this sort of behaviour, but it is deplorable, and to root it out it needs trust to work both ways – up and down the leadership chain. People should take genuine risk and accept stretch targets. They must keep that risk and those targets under constant review: if the risk looks like becoming an issue or the target missed, they have to discuss this with their leader early, along with the actions they are taking to resolve the situation, so that their leader is not surprised. The superior leader here has to be benevolent with these conversations, or things will be hidden for too long before they are sorted and cause even more problems.

It is obvious that a leader’s success helps to build the trust that they will need from their own leader(s). It is important to establish that success early in the relationship, so leaders should not try to run before they can walk. They need to build their understanding of the system in which they work, the circumstances surrounding it and the people who work for them, as well as their own leader. Then they need to start small and ensure that they get things right. To build that trust from which success develops they must start from small beginnings. Mistakes will be made and, as it is always said, leaders should not make the same mistake twice. They have to learn from all the mistakes they make themselves, and those they see others making. One mistake that leaders often make is not to use the talent that is in their team; nothing is more frustrating for a leader of leaders than to see one of them letting a talented person go to waste. Part of building trust is, therefore, building high-functioning teams.

If leaders have earned the trust from those above them that gives them the space to lead, the freedom to manoeuvre, they also need to earn the trust from their team to enable them to get things done and to meet the stretch targets they have been given. The things that earn you the trust of your leaders are also the same things that will earn you the trust of your followers: your integrity, your example and your success. Followers want to be led by people who do what they say they will do, who achieve the things they say they are going to achieve. If there is risk in your endeavours, they too face that risk, they too face the stretch to meet the targets. Followers want to be able to talk about these things openly with you so they can be managed without a sense of failure on their part. They will need to feel that they are being listened to and trusted in their turn, as was advocated by Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham:9

Arthur Tedder is the epitome of a leader who earned the trust of his superiors and subordinates alike, as well as those with whom he worked. The fact that he was able to walk among the men in Cairo who were mutinying at the end of the First World War, explain what was happening and get them back to work, shows how much he was trusted by them. Yet Tedder was essentially a quiet man – not the extroverted, limelight-seeking sort many associate with leadership. Vincent Orange’s biography of him is titled Quietly in Command for a reason. Tedder was perhaps too honest when given his first high command in Egypt in the Second World War. Asked by London what the relative strengths of the Luftwaffe and RAF were in the North African theatre, he gave honest estimates showing that the Luftwaffe (combined with the Italian Air Force) had more aircraft than the RAF. What he did not add was that he had no doubts that the RAF was better equipped and more serviceable than the Luftwaffe, and that he would win through. Churchill, to whom these estimates were inevitably going, and who had promised the Australian leader that the Allies were better placed than the Germans in North Africa, wanted him sacked. The fact that Tedder had not fully appreciated who would see the estimates, and why, is a failure of political astuteness on his part. However, Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, had trust in Tedder. Portal used a masterly bit of ambiguity to allow Tedder to redeem himself in Churchill’s eyes, and he did. He went on to engineer huge mutual trust between the RAF and Army leaders in North Africa, to great military effect. After his time in North Africa, Tedder went on to become the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander under Eisenhower – a position he would not have gained without Churchill’s trust.

Tedder had enormous integrity, he led by example and was prototypical of the efficient Air Force officer. He was successful in what he did. He listened to his people and explained what he was trying to achieve. He trusted his people, and they trusted him. Trust allows Mission Command to work. It allows a leader to give away as much of her or his power as s/he can, and power given to many is multiplied by the talent of the many. It is amazing how powerful a leader can become by giving away their power – something they can only do having generated the requisite trust.

SUCCESS

I have talked a lot about the success that allows a leader to lead – success that forms part of the leader’s ability, that is part of the bedrock of trust – so it is apposite that I look at success a little deeper. It is true that success is born from understanding how things get done in your organisation, understanding the system that is your organisation and in which your team works, and from understanding the circumstances in which your institution exists, from macro to micro. It is also born from understanding the people for whom you work, the people who work for you and the people with whom you will have to work. When your team is stretched and enjoying that stretch – in ‘flow’ as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls it10 – then great achievements can be made. However, it can be a long road to get to this place. The frustrations of dealing with recalcitrant people who seem to be determined not to understand, those who will deliberately try to block what you are trying to achieve for whatever reason, will require constant effort to deal with. Some you may be able to move out, some you will have to take with you; either way, you will be required to make a huge effort to keep going. Sometimes the path you choose may not work at first. Whether you persevere with that path until it does work, or change direction to find another that does, is a decision you alone can make with all your knowledge and understanding of the things around you, as well as the help of the people around you. But it will take resilience to get there.

Leaders also need to give a huge amount of time to their people. Their diaries get filled up with meetings, one-on-ones, regular management meetings, meetings with customers, their own leaders, their remote teams… the list can go on and on. The demands on a leader’s time just keep on growing and require time and effort just to regulate. It takes resilience to keep up with this. There are times when leaders know things that they cannot yet pass on to their people for a multitude of reasons. They sometimes have worries that they feel should not be discussed with their people. All these things require resilience to deal with, as the leader still needs to get on and deliver. While these are the downsides, it is important to remember the upsides as well. When leadership is working well and you have a high-functioning team that is achieving stretch targets and overcoming the risks being taken, it is hugely rewarding. And fun. And because it is rewarding, that too builds resilience.

Resilience is something that is both inherent and learned. It can be helped by yourself and those around you. Resilience is both physical and mental. Some work requires great physical effort and those people doing it need physical resilience. For those who do not expend physical effort to do their work, physical fitness is still very important as it helps to combat the stress that all leaders will face through their careers. Exercise helps to calm the mind. Leaders will face crises and have to lead through them. Crises tend to raise the flight or fight response; indeed, many leaders love the adrenaline rush of this type of leadership. However, a word of warning: the flight or fight response also reduces people’s ability for rational thought. It is designed to allow the body to react quickly and the muscles to perform supremely well, but this speed of reaction is done best through an emotional rather than rational reaction. If you step off the pavement and see a bus out of the corner of your eye, you can step back on the pavement very quickly indeed. You don’t think about it, this is simply the flight or fight response at work. One other thing that happens is that your heartbeat rises very quickly and becomes less regular. However, general exercise regulates your heartbeat and allows you to regain access to your rational thinking, so it is very helpful in boosting your mental resilience. Undoubtedly, Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, the UK’s senior military commander in the Second Gulf War, understood this as he exercised daily (as did many senior military leaders before him).

Resilience is also affected by leadership: poor leadership reduces it; good leadership enhances it. You as a leader can help the resilience of your people by being a good leader. And your leader can help you. If you know you are going to be looked after, it is much easier to face tough circumstances for a long time. What does ‘good’ leadership mean here? The ultimate answer, of course, is that it feels good to those being led, which is a circular argument. One place to start is leaders having respect, integrity, service and excellence – the core values of the RAF. These are, after all, the foundation of the trust and ability that I have outlined, and which allow leaders to lead.

THROUGH-LIFE EDUCATION

As a pilot and an instructor, I came to understand very quickly the need to keep learning. However much I thought I knew, there was always more to find out, and as your learning increases you begin to realise how little you really know and how much more there is to learn. As an air accident investigator, I confirmed this view, as the largest single cause of accidents was pilot error. Tragically, at that time too many of these ended in fatalities. From that experience I used to say, when I returned to flying, that when you stopped learning it was time to stop flying. The same is true of leading. The consequences of failing to keep learning as a leader can be equally fatal, as almost every industrial disaster shows.

There is plenty to learn. Your business will be constantly adapting and changing as people make minor improvements looking for ever-greater efficiencies. If it did not it would risk becoming a dinosaur. Leaders need to keep up with these changes and learn what they mean. As leaders grow and become more senior, they will have to learn about other parts of the business that have not been seen before. As their span of control widens, what they have to come to grips with tends to expand exponentially. Yet if they get one piece wrong, the whole will be affected. As strategy is implemented and the future unfolds to become the present, leaders need to ensure that the strategy remains relevant and to correct and adjust it – reviewing and changing it appropriately. New circumstances become possible, new technology is invented, new vistas open up. All need learning about and thinking through.

Then there are people, and politics. The two are, of course, intertwined. There is always more to be learned about people: what the intergenerational differences and similarities are; how to attract new young people to your organisation; how to develop the people you will need in order to meet the future that you have divined; how the culture of your organisation and those around you have changed; and what you need to do to influence people in these cultures and to get things done. As leaders become more senior, they need to learn how to influence others, such as those in the education system, to ensure that the people with the necessary skills become available at the right time. Schools cannot do this without the input from those leading the organisations that will employ their pupils, sometimes influencing politicians to create the political circumstances where their business can thrive (always remembering the ethics of course).

Lastly, there is leadership itself. As I have said, leadership changes as leaders work their way up the greasy pole to the top of their organisations. Leaders must master these changes. Frequently, things that work well for leaders at one level can become things that will work against them at a higher level. Leaders that do not learn this are highly likely to derail and fail, some spectacularly. This is not good for them or their organisation. Leaders need to learn how to develop other leaders coming behind them and to make sure that those with true potential for strategic leadership positions are selected. This is one of the most difficult things to do well. Gauging the potential for a person to do well at the next level from their performance at the level below is very hard. They may well think highly effectively at operations, but can they turn that into strategic thinking? Not all can. Successful team leaders do not necessarily make successful strategic leaders. Some excellent tactical leaders cannot move up to the operational art – the level below strategic. How biased is the information you have on people from which you are judging their suitability? How can you counter such biases?

The RAF created a through-career education system to help deal with the need to keep learning. It covers all ranks. Those in the non-­commissioned ranks have short courses that accompany each promotion to ensure that those selected are prepared for the demands of their new rank. The commissioned officers have a much longer education system as they have to broaden their thinking faster and further than is asked of most non-­commissioned ranks. Leadership is a central plank of this education, right up to the most senior ranks who have the Strategic Leadership Development Programme for those on the cusp of promotion to those ranks, and the Senior Leadership Team for those who have made it to that level. The RAF also uses external providers to ensure that thinking is not too insular – making extensive use, for example, of the Windsor Leadership Programmes and the ELP, run by Exeter University, as well as the many programmes run by the Military Academy at Shrivenham. Officers are also encouraged to learn in their own time in the years that will pass between these programmes. However you do it, encouraging and helping your people to learn is vital for the survival of your enterprise. Everyone needs to be prepared for the level of leadership they are being given before they start at that level.

SUMMARY

Leaders can be appointed to a position where they are expected to lead; this is often called a management position (or a command in the military). However, people will not be allowed to lead until they are ratified as a leader in the hearts and minds of their followers. Leadership is a relationship: it has to be built before it will work, just like any other relationship and (like any other relationship) requires constant work to maintain it. It is not just followers with whom a leader needs to form a relationship to be allowed to lead. Almost all leaders have people to whom they report: their own leaders. Leaders have to build a relationship with their own leaders that gives them the freedom to lead.

Leaders must demonstrate their ability in order to win the confidence of their followers and their leaders. Their ability in this respect comes, in part, from having sufficient innate intelligence that enables them to understand and make sense of the circumstances that surround their team and organisation and to understand how the system that is their organisation works. From this, they can make sense of things for their followers and create plans and strategies that achieve successful results. They must be good systems thinkers.

The ability of leaders also springs from their emotional intelligence. Leaders have to know the people around them well, know what makes them tick. They must know those who work for them to ensure that their needs are met and that their team functions well to create the achievements necessary. They must know those for whom they work in order to be given the freedom to lead. They must know their peers, customers and competitors to ensure that they are not stymied or moving in the wrong direction. They must have the political nous to be able to influence the right people to get things done.

Leaders have to exemplify what it is their organisation, their department, stands for – to lead by example. They must go through whatever it is that their team goes through, to be with them in more than just spirit. They must have the resilience to keep going through all the huge demands on their time, the disappointments and failures that will occur before they achieve success.

To be allowed to lead, leaders need to build trust with those who lead them, from which they gain the freedom to carve out their own strategy and direction that will make their organisation and team successful. They have to gain the trust of their followers, and trust in them, to build a high-­performing team that will achieve the ends that they desire. They should gain the trust of their peers and customers to make their efforts more productive.

All leaders need refuelling to keep leading, and that refuelling is through-career education. Leaders need to learn what leadership they are getting into before they get into it. They need to keep learning about the technology that rapidly develops and that will affect their people, strategies and decisions. They need to keep learning about the world about them, the circumstances in which their organisation operates and about how those will change in the future. They need to keep learning about people, how to influence them and whom they need to influence. If they stop learning, they should stop leading.

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. ■Leaders need to be clever enough, in both straight intelligence and emotional intelligence, to understand:
   1. ■The circumstances in which their organisation works, macro to micro.
   2. ■The system that is their organisation – how things get done.
   3. ■The people with whom they work – above, below and around them.
2. ■Leaders must have the resilience to turn this understanding into success.
3. ■Leaders have to generate trust with their leaders, their followers, their peers and customers to enable them to multiply their power by giving it away.
4. ■Leaders must keep learning throughout their career about their circumstances, their organisation and their people.