Portsmouth Business School
RAF ‘re-blues’ its middle managers news story April 15 2013
Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:07:00 BST
Any book on how to become a great leader will contain advice on the need to know your history and to be able to scan the situation before jumping in with a decision.
It might not mention that playing computer games and having fireside chats with more senior people are also sometimes helpful.
Hidden away behind countless door locks and keypad entry codes at the Royal Air Force’s Air Warfare School, RAF Cranwell, in Lincolnshire, 16 senior RAF officers have returned to the classroom to reflect and think about their place in history.
All of the students volunteered for the first Senior Officers’ Study Programme run by the RAF in partnership with the Universities of Portsmouth and Cranfield.
The students have one thing in common, in addition to sharing the rank of wing commander, they are a tiny proportion of the military’s middle-ranking men and women who haven’t been given formal training in the ways of war for a decade or more, at a time when the ways and means of war have and are changing considerably.
Specialists in leadership and strategic studies from Portsmouth Business School, in management from Cranfield’s Centre for Defence Management and Leadership, and from the RAF have delivered the six-month Master’s level course as part of the RAF’s commitment to professional development for its staff. The course is a pilot and, it is hoped, will eventually run six times a year, educating and developing many of the RAF’s 700 wing commanders.
The course is designed to refine and broaden their leadership knowledge, analytical ability and self-awareness with the ultimate aim of better equipping them for the demands of high-level appointments within the Ministry of Defence and beyond.
They are taught the tools of leadership and management through history seminars, syndicate room discussions, what the RAF call after-dinner ‘fireside chats’ and practical exercises in planning and leadership from instructors who have been in the theatre of war and academics who specialise in military history, leadership or management.
The first cohort is gaining as much personally as professionally.
One said he “had to do this, to be able to feel equal to Staff College colleagues”, another that he was “learning for the first time things you think you should have known, the history and context of the RAF and many major battles, but which I hadn’t really known about at all in any depth or detail”.
A third said the course was “hugely helpful to know our place in history, our place in society and in the political landscape”, and a fourth, that “we’ve all been leading for some time and now we’re here learning about toxic leaders and the model of the fox, the sheep, the donkey and the owl, and you’re sitting there for the first time thinking about your own leadership style and wondering, am I that sort of leader? It’s very reflective”.
The course has won the backing of Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, the Chief of the Air Staff who advises the Prime Minister and Cabinet on defence and air power, and who is the most senior RAF officer in the UK. He drove from the south-east through snow blanketing England to meet the course members at their two-week residential, have dinner with them and host a fireside chat.
The students also heard more about leadership in the private sector from John Holland, leadership and change management coach at Hewlett Packard, which has worked with Portsmouth Business School on leadership training for its managers worldwide for the past three years.
The students are aged from 40-52 and have served their entire adult lives in the RAF. They have become highly specialised experts in their fields and are senior pilots, navigators, lawyers, engineers and communications specialists. But despite their prized technical skills, they have spent most of their careers working heads down in ‘silos’ with little time to look up and see the bigger military picture.
Squadron Leader Bruce Hargrave is the programme manager. He said: “The nature of aircraft and the systems that support them mean that RAF officers tend to be technologically and tactically adept, but the aim of this course is to expand their education beyond mere expertise in technology and tactics.”
The men are being taught how warfare has evolved on a continuous arc through history taking in kings, queens and politicians, tribal warfare, the emergence of the air force from the army, to modern-day battles inflamed via social media.
Nick Randle, a former RAF navigator and One Star officer turned leadership development academic is one of their instructors.
He said: “If you plugged these guys into a ‘stress-at-work’ meter, they’d all be on amber or red – in order to get the job done in the modern military. Until now they’d never had time out to think widely and study some of the implications of the changing global system.
“You could pick up a book in any airport with a title like ‘The seven secrets of dynamic leadership’ or ‘Everything you need to know about leading’ and every single one would have a chapter on the need and power that comes from reflective thought – you need time out to scan a situation, think about the implications, think about lessons from history.”
Another instructor is Major Danny Brown, a Senior Officers’ Study Programme instructor and exchange officer from the United States Air Force. He said the aim of the course was to “re-blue them” because due to the highly technical and specialised nature of many RAF jobs, many officers delve deep in to their primary job, without spending enough time thinking about the RAF as a profession.
Major Brown said: “Individuals on this course are officers first and technical specialists second.
“Re-bluing is a chance to take time out from their primary duties and start thinking about the ethos, history and fundamental principles of RAF service. The RAF wants officers of this rank to develop their understanding of how the world works and the RAF’s place in it.”
One of the key strengths of the course is that despite the strong similarities between military and professional leadership – instructors and students acknowledge a good leader is a good leader and a toxic leader is a toxic leader no matter where or for whom they work – it teaches that the best leaders learn how to lead by knowing the history of their own working environment.
Nick said: “To be an excellent military leader, you first have to understand the context in which you operate, the histories of battles won and lost, the emergence of each discipline and the understanding of new opportunities and threats. None of these things is in isolation – together they give true leaders a rock solid foundation from where to make wise decisions.”
Lessons include the need to think differently about the military’s place in the world, particularly in the face of new emergent threats from tribal or clan-like groups who are experts at using social media to their advantage and who do not battle on traditional linear lines or use traditional tactics.
The military must also contend with the constraints of a political need for an “end-state” in war, while in reality in the modern theatre of war there tend to be only “milestones” – military success should be viewed as an enabler to creating the conditions for political success.
Nick said: “Enemies are innovative, creative, they use modern technology, they are more allowing than restraining of those they fight alongside, they have minimal procedures and are fleet of foot. A huge degree of trust within an enemy group comes from honour, family ties, shared and deeply held values. So, if we are going to out-lead them do we need a new type of leader, or a new strategy, or a new vision?”
A modern leader had to be culturally attuned, scholarly, creative, militarily experienced and skilled in peace-making, he said.
Dr Andrew Conway, a New Zealander and expert in military leadership is another of the instructors, in discussing the philosophy of battles, wars and the military’s role in them, he challenged the students to think harder about war and said: “Is war among humans inevitable? We go to war to achieve a better state of peace, but even overwhelming victories don’t always lead to lasting peace. Ask yourself, does war achieve anything? We can win every tactical engagement and it can make no difference, look at Afghanistan and Vietnam.
“And what is peace? Is it an absence of violence, or an absence of the threat of violence? Protagonists and battlefields keep changing and rarely now are battles between states.
“You need to consider what does victory look like and what does peace look like. You can’t ever break the will of people, of tribes, of nations, you may occupy them, you may take everything they’ve got, but you’ll never break them. So is that peace? Is that victory? It’s very easy to achieve military victory, but it’s meaningless if it occurs in a vacuum.”
Another of the instructors is Dr Peter Lee, a former RAF chaplain turned academic who specialises in the ethics of war. He explored the histories of Western and non-Western ethics of war, analysing key philosophical and theological ideas that underpin ‘Just War’ thinking in a number of cultural and religious traditions, then applied those lessons to complex current leadership challenges facing military officers and politicians in the decision-making process at every level.
The residential course also allowed for games – though the combat simulation game they were asked to play had a serious lesson underpinning it.
Squadron Leader Bruce Hargrave said: “After some initial bemusement, the men organised themselves into teams to carry out the planning and execution of a 19th century battle. They surprised themselves to discover that, despite the technological advances of the last 130 years, the basic tenets of warfare still endure. In the deceptively simplistic environment of a game, they were learning that, while situational awareness is essential, education and reflection can turn that awareness into priceless situational understanding.”
The course begins with four months of independent e-learning, followed by a two-week residential, then students have six-weeks in which to research and write a 4,000-word essay on one of the many subjects that the course has introduced them to. The first cohort graduates this Spring.