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Forthcoming Bob Stewart Masterclasses:

MORALE: 6 OCTOBER 2009

CRISIS MANAGEMENT: 7 OCTOBER 2009

NEGOTIATION SKILLS: 18 NOVEMBER 2009

Event Review

Imagine the most stressful aspects of your job. Now imagine dealing with them while bullets are whizzing overhead and bombs are falling nearby. Could you cope? If you were an officer in the British army, you'd have no option. But you'd also be trained rigorously in leadership techniques designed to keep you clear-headed under fire. It was these techniques that, in concentrated form, we would be learning about from Bob Stewart, the retired Lieutenant Colonel who led 800 British troops into Bosnia in 1992.

Stewart is renowned for his unconventional leadership style - inclusive, warm, interactive - and this came across in his approach to the London Business Forum (LBF). We had gathered in the august surroundings of the Army & Navy club on Pall Mall, where jackets and ties are mandatory and scuffed shoes are unthinkable. Yet Stewart was comparatively laid-back. He made a point of greeting us all personally, invited feedback on what he could do better and assured us he would be happy to answer individual questions after the event.

He began the workshop by outlining the differences between the military and business, as he saw them. Planning sometimes "gets more lip-service in business," he suggested. "There's less hierarchy in business, although personally I used different [management] structures depending on the circumstances." However, he added, "the key difference is that in business you're always on active service, whereas the military only goes for short periods of time." What this means in practical terms is that soldiers spend a lot more time training than business people, in order to guarantee bursts of high performance on the battlefield.

"When you were training for your job, how much of that time, percentage-wise, was actually [spent on] leadership?" Stewart asked the LBF audience. "Most of us had to say 'None.' No one said as much as 30%. Yet Stewart said that in the two years he spent at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy, "at least" 30% of his time was spent learning leadership techniques under continuous assessment. The benefit of this training, which he ended up teaching to Sandhurst graduates, was immense.

Stewart had particularly fond memories of John Adair, who lectured in military history at Sandhurst and is widely recognised as a leadership guru. "Adair said the three things that matter [in leadership] are what you've got to do - the task - who you've got in your team, and how the individuals in that team work together," Stewart recalled. However, he added, "I personally think that 'character' is also crucial to leadership: what we are, who we are, where we've come from."

To some extent this is about caring for the people you lead, but it's also about the meaningful delegation of responsibilities and a willingness to "take responsibility". "In the army, an officer is an officer because he or she is the person that runs the risks and takes the blame, and to me often it seems as if executives are quite happy to run risks but they never take the blame," Stewart argued. Before their deployment in Bosnia, he told his officers that "if they made a decision and it was wrong, I would still back them and I would take the responsibility, and that happened all the way through. So when journalists came to me and said: 'There's a real cock-up down the road. Who's responsible?' I'd say: 'I am.'" An officer doesn't just follow orders blindly, he pointed out, they interpret orders.

Yet for orders to be effective, they have to have clear objectives. It is crucial, Stewart said, to always have a clear mission, a clear goal to work towards. "In 1992, when I went to Bosnia, I was given no aim," he revealed. "When I was briefed in the Ministry of Defence (MoD), on a Sunday morning at 10am, I asked the briefing staff what they wanted me to do in Bosnia with 800 soldiers, and they had no idea... I asked which country they wanted me to go to... no idea." The next day, Stewart went to Downing Street to see the Prime Minister, then John Major, and asked: "What do you want me to do now we're being sent into the Balkans?" To which Major replied: "Can you do the best job you can?"

"At least he didn't lie," Stewart commented. "He didn't know. But it was crucially important to get this vital matter right... [The situation] was absolutely Kafkaesque, incredibly silly. It was for that reason that I made up my own mission, which was: 'To save people's lives.' It's vital for me to know what I have to do but it's even more vital for the people below me to know what they are required to do, because my job is to tell them." The MoD would eventually agree to Stewart's plans, but only after he had been in the field for three months.

So, in business or in war, how should you go about determining your mission parameters? Stewart said that army training had equipped him with three basic tools:

1. Mission analysis

The basic questions you should ask yourself are as follows: (i) What needs to be achieved? (ii) What tasks are crucial to that? (iii) What resources/constraints apply? Stewart displayed his own, handwritten responses to these questions on the screens behind him. They had been written, he said, "within four hours of being ordered to Bosnia." In the document, he talks about the reconnaissance he's been ordered to carry out in advance of sending his battle-group to the region, about the political situation on the ground and about the mission parameters provided by the UN, which he describes in bold as "very weak". A document like this may be amended on the fly, he pointed out, but it's essential for training purposes "and for us to work towards something".

"I was warned on 22 August 1992. This is signed on 23 August at 0800," he said. "And I distributed it to every officer [in my battalion]." At the top of the document was a request for all his officers to read what followed and to meet at 1000 the same day to discuss it. "I wanted us all to agree: this is how we're going to work and this is what we're going to work for," Stewart said.

2. "The estimate"

Once you've decided what you're going to do, the things that affect that, in army terminology, are "factors," Stewart explained. "If you put a factor [on your list] and you ask the question 'So what?' and it has no bearing on the mission, bin it. If it has a bearing on the mission, it's a factor. If it doesn't, it's irrelevant." The sorts of factors he cited as examples were politics, resources, timings and costs. The point of the estimate is to home in on the courses open to you, assess the advantages and disadvantages of each one and then select the best.

3. Risk assessment

The military uses a simple - and, on the face of it, crude - technique for assessing risk, which is the formula "capabilities multiplied by intentions". Again, Stewart explained, this is more of a mode of thinking than a precise calculation; it forces you to consider how far you may be stretching yourself in the pursuit of certain goals.

You should aim to assess yourself with the same rigour, Stewart advised. Ask yourself: "How are you doing in your job?" It can be helpful, he said, to imagine what the single most important quality required for your role actually is, and then to honestly appraise yourself on this quality. "I certainly believe you can change your style," he said. "I went from being a nice, decent sort to being a sort of warlord who threatened people and drove tanks through buildings."

To conclude his presentation, Stewart made a candid admission of his own failings, describing how he had assessed his own abilities in the run-up to deployment in Bosnia. His leadership character, he said, had been formed on the streets of Londonderry, where he had worked as an intelligence officer at the height of the Troubles, in command of around 160 men and "running" over 250 informers.

"I lost so many men in Ireland that I was deeply, deeply hurt," he explained. "Six men killed, 35 wounded out of 120. Those are huge casualty rates... And I realised straight away [upon critically analysing myself before Bosnia] that I was too soft. We were expected to take 25% casualties. I was going to be hurt. And that hurt would communicate itself into softness, and could be counterproductive for what I was required to do."

Every officer in the British army is assessed annually by their senior officers and given a kind of report card that grades them on characteristics such as "zeal and energy", reliability and "common sense and judgement". Like a school report, it also provides supplementary comments under each category. So, for example, in 1991, Stewart's card - which he displayed on the LBF screens - included the following lines: "Lt Col. Stewart's first year in command has been far from straightforward or easy. His approach to command has been positive, very practical and possibly a bit over-enthusiastic... He has a caring style of leadership. He's also a touch verbose." The feedback had improved by 1992, but even then Stewart was being described as having "a slight tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve." The underlying message, he said, is that "this officer thinks I'm soft."

Yet Stewart was much harsher upon himself. Against the official criteria he judged himself to be "not fit enough", "severely frightened" and "insecure". He was quick, he acknowledged, but he needed to be more practically minded. And in terms of his leadership style, he said: "I'd already decided from my reconnaissance in Bosnia that this mission would need up-front leadership. That meant: in the front line. That meant: first to be shot."

Stewart didn't show this self-assessment to anyone because "that's really me naked." Nevertheless, it was very useful in terms of forcing him to face his weaknesses and to be more mindful of how he was perceived in the eyes of his men. He urged us to perform the same exercise, but warned: "For God's sake don't show anyone. Especially not your wife."