Leaders or Commanders?

Back in June I was very fortunate to be able to say farewell to an old friend – the RAF’s C130 Hercules which was being retired after over 57 years of outstanding service.??As I stood watching the final flypast at the RAF College Cranwell, where I undertook my Initial Officer Training many years ago, I took time to reflect that while the College was where I was initially taught ‘leadership’, it was only during the several years I spent flying on the C130 that I actually started to learn about leadership. Indeed, it was during my early flying career that I began to realise that the 'leadership' syllabus that was then taught at the College was, in fact, primarily focused on developing the ability to use command (i.e., authority) and management (i.e. the use of plans, systems and processes) to coerce individuals to act rather than the leadership skills required to motivate, empower and inspire people to act. The key difference being that with authority and management, people do things because they have to, whereas with leadership, people do things because they want to.?

As I have previously written, my research while working in the RAF Leadership Centre into how the RAF selected, developed, and promoted its future leaders also identified a perception that individuals were often promoted based primarily on their command and management ability rather than their leadership ability.?One consequence being that the Service philosophy of Mission Command, whereby leaders are required to 'empower' their followers to act, was deemed to be something that while taught in theory was not actually embedded in practice.?Indeed, when asked if they agreed with a former Chief of Air Staff who declared that Mission Command was fully embedded in everything the RAF did, research participants offered the following replies:

“Not from where I sit, there’s too much interference and not enough just leaving us to get on with it.”

“I think looking down our seniors think it is but looking up our juniors would definitely disagree.”

“It might be practised a little bit and people might talk about it and people might say “in this team we practice mission command” but scratch the surface and you’ll find that it really isn’t.”

“Very little. I would say that in many cases there is significant interference with the how. And an unhealthy obsession with detail at the high levels, which is simply not required.”

“I don’t think it is enacted and even at the one-star level, from just a conversation I had today is that there's a lot of scrutiny and a lot of classic, long handled screwdriver activity that goes on.”

My research also identified a tendency for senior leaders to change wicked problems, which require networks, collaboration and empowerment to address, into critical or tame problems requiring authority and process to address (as demonstrated by the recent RAF Recruitment discrimination case). This was also highlighted by Ulmer (1998), who proposed that in any military hierarchy, the tendency towards immediate task focussed action was often reinforced in the junior leadership years, and prompt, aggressive control of the tactical situation (i.e., command style behaviours) represented laudatory behaviour and was rewarded as such.?However, Ulmer (1998) also went on to suggest that the type of task-orientated behaviours that serve individuals well in their early careers was often counterproductive when they achieve more senior positions where the emphasis shifted from operating the organisation (task focus) to developing the organisation (people focus) in order to build the social capacity to deal with problems that had yet to emerge.?

I was therefore very interested to read the latest Armed Forces Continuous Attitude Survey (2023) that highlights, amongst other things, that only 18% of RAF personnel surveyed reported that they had confidence in the leadership of the RAF.?Furthermore, of those surveyed:

• Less than a fifth (17%) agreed that change is managed well (I see change as a wicked problem!).
• Only 26% agreed that senior leaders were keen to listen to feedback.
• Only 19% reported that they were satisfied with the fairness of the promotion system.
• Only 26% agreed that senior leaders communicated their decisions.?

The report goes on to highlight that RAF personnel ‘are now the least positive about their senior leaders compared to the other Services’.

So where does the issue lie??To my mind, it is not the individuals concerned (I did work for some very good leaders) but the system that rewards, and therefore drives, task focussed directive behaviours at the expense of people focussed behaviours. Indeed, I still recall a very senior officer speaking at an RAF Leadership Conference just prior to retirement who informed the assembled all-ranks audience that, having just had a period of coaching during resettlement, he now realised he had been getting the 'people' element wrong during his career and that:

"I was the arrogant, self-confident fighter pilot who knew best, who knew how to do things, if you shout a bit louder, people would just jump a bit higher, and that was definitely how I had been taught to think about leadership."

Below are some of the key lessons that I learned about leadership (i.e., the ability to influence without authority) during my time flying on the Hercules at the start of my career.

Seniority does not necessarily equate to increased leadership ability. Some of the best examples of leadership I witnessed emanated from the more junior non-commissioned aircrew (i.e., Flight Engineers and Loadmasters), some of whom I now recognise better understood the benefits of networking than I did as an officer at the time. A particular example I often cite is one Flight Engineer who always seemed to take an age getting onto the crew bus after a long flight home while the rest of the crew waited impatiently. I now know that he was taking the time to speak to the ground crew and personally thank them for their essential role in making the trip a success. Indeed, I later found out that he would also make an effort to visit the engineering section during his downtime to speak to the technicians about the aircraft and thank them for their contributions. This, in turn, helped explain why whenever I flew with this particular Flight Engineer and there was a technical glitch on start-up, the technicians always seemed to respond almost immediately to his radio request for assistance. However, when other individuals radioed for assistance, they would often get the 'it's shift change' reply, irrespective of the time of day, and a delay would ensue while the technicians finished whatever it was they were doing at the time.

The importance of embedding psychological safety ‘to speak up’ within your team. Another story I often tell is of the very junior technician who just happened to be on the flight deck while we were flying in the Gulf on a Medical Evacuation mission who questioned me, a much more senior officer, why we were flying so low at the time. In doing so, he made me realise that as a crew we had started to normalise risk by gradually lowering our altitude until there was hardly any margin for error. When I spoke with the technician after the flight to explore why he felt able to challenge me (and thank him for speaking up), he explained that his engineering boss continually emphasised the importance of speaking up whenever his team saw something that they felt was not safe, irrespective of who it was or where it was. Indeed, his boss also emphasised that if they were ever to be admonished by a more senior individual for speaking up, he would fully support them.?

The motivational impact of empowerment (Mission Command).? A colleague and friend of mine was stationed at an airfield in Iraq as the Duty Air Movements Officer (DAMO) where he split the 24hr Ops (2 x 12hr shifts) with his boss, the Senior Air Movements Officer (SAMO) and he told me the following story:?

“I was on duty one evening and the boss?(i.e. SAMO)?had gone back to the block when I got a flash message that a VVIP was inbound for a visit who turned out to be Vice President of the US.?I immediately contacted my boss to inform him, fully expecting him to take over the shift.??However, he told me that he had complete faith in my ability to oversee the arrival and in true mission command style, that his intent was for me to ensure a successful visit!?However, he also said that given the importance of the visit he would return to his office rather than go to bed just to be available in case I needed any assistance.?The visit was a great success and the VP asked for his personal thanks to be passed on.?I was buzzing and feeling more motivated than I had for a long time.?A few weeks later the boss went home and a new SAMO replaced him.?Within a couple of weeks, I was again on shift and received another flash message regarding a VIP inbound who turned out to be a fairly junior UK MP.??I was more than happy to oversee it and sent my new boss a courtesy message just to update him and tell him I would be handling it.?However, within about 20 minutes of receiving the message my new boss arrived in the office and told me that he was taking the shift because “..he couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong!”.??This effectively set the tone for the remainder of my deployment where everything I did was scrutinised by my boss to ensure that nothing went wrong.?Any motivation or discretionary effort, all that stuff, effectively went out of the window and I was just longing for the flight home.?

So, based on the latest AFCAS survey, how should autocratic, hierarchical organisations like the RAF ensure that its senior leaders are able to achieve the correct balance between the use of authority and process to get the task done and the use of leadership to make people feel supported and listened to and therefore willing to go the extra mile because they want to, not because they have to??Grateful for your thoughts!.