Leadership while in the line of fire

From the Financial Times, by Stefan Stern

When the markets turn nasty, a pseudo-military cry of “tin hats on!” goes up. But this is just a joke. Livelihoods may be at stake in business but not, usually, life itself.

The young men and women training to become British army officers at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) in Surrey, south-west of London, do not take matters of life and death so lightly. They are learning what it means to lead people in perilous situations. They may be only weeks away, some of them, from a posting to Helmand province in Afghanistan. This concentrates the mind.

The military and commercial worlds are different, and do not on the face of it have a lot in common. But perhaps it would be useful for business people to hear a bit more about the Sandhurst view on leadership, these being serious times, even if the lazy metaphors of the business world – “cut-throat competition” or “nuking the enemy”– should still be avoided.

In an understated way, Sandhurst can offer some radical and surprisingly progressive thoughts on leadership. “The reason we focus so much on leadership is because we have no choice,” says Major General David Rutherford-Jones, commandant at RMAS. The stakes are high. “The fundamental difference between what my brother-in-law, who works at Schroders, does and what we do is that ultimately an army’s purpose is to fight, if that is what the nation requires of it.

“We are by implication putting people’s lives at risk. They are in harm’s way. We ask people potentially to put their life on the line for a greater cause, and this is fundamentally against [the] human psyche. And that’s the bottom line for our business.”

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