• Inspirational leadership techniques from the real world
• How to inspire leadership skills throughout your organisation
• Lessons in what really keeps a team working in the most challenging of environments

Few professions place so much responsibility on junior operatives than the military, and though the dangerous deserts of Iraq and Helmand may seem a million miles from the air-conditioned offices of London, there is much that any business can learn from the practical leadership upon which the Army relies.

At an age when most of his peers had barely qualified in their chosen career and were under careful, often one-on-one supervision, Patrick Hennessey was leading teams of ten to two-hundred on complex missions across the most volatile parts of the world. The lessons he learned were not necessarily the obvious ones and his presentation is not a series of tales of derring-do which, though interesting, have no relevance beyond proving that however bad your day is, someone somewhere is having a worse one.

Rather he had to learn, often very quickly and with high-stakes, to improvise and to push decisions and force outcomes which were both unexpected and unlikely. Overcoming differences of age, education, corporate philosophy and even language and nationality, the leadership skills which were required were not necessarily those that he had been taught in theoretical models in the classroom at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. They were highly practical, often common-sense and easily acquired and hold lessons beyond the battlefield. Knowledge of one’s subject and one’s peers, the ability to communicate effectively and balancing robustness and emotional intelligence – all required in any successful team and never more so than when under fire.

Bringing a fresh, detailed and serious but light-hearted perspective on some of the old notions of leadership Patrick explores what really keeps a team working in the most challenging of environments.

About Patrick Hennessey

Patrick Hennessey joined the Army in January 2004 at the age of 22. He was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards and served as Platoon Commander and later Company Operations Officer in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia, the Falkland Islands, and on operational tours to Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2007 where he was commended for gallantry. Patrick's five years of service saw some of the fiercest fighting endured by the British Army in decades, which he described in his book, The Junior Officer's Reading Club.