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Why take leadership advice from one expert when you can interrogate four? This was the premise behind "What Do Leaders Really Do?", a special London Business Forum event named after the latest book by Jeff Grout, the acclaimed business speaker and author. In attendance were Grout himself, as compère, and three ex-bosses of major UK organisations. All were willing to field questions from the audience, after an open interview - Parkinson-style - on the intimate stage of the British Library Conference Centre.

Major General Patrick Cordingley led the 12,000 men of the Seventh Armoured Brigade - better known as the Desert Rats - during the first Gulf War. In his civilian clothes, he looked more like a bureaucrat than a front-line commander - small, shrewd and unassuming. But there was a steely glint in his eye too. And when we heard his received pronunciation boom across the auditorium, we had no doubt he could flatten bigger men just as easily in retirement as he could in his prime, when he won the Distinguished Service Order for leadership and courage.

Greg Dyke was director-general of the BBC from 2000 to 2004. His tenure was a turbulent one, in which the Corporation was forced to expand its offering while becoming leaner and, for the first time, to grapple with the Internet and digital programming. His manner was friendly, easygoing and casual. And when he told stories about his staff, they were loaded with genuine warmth and affection. It was easy to see why so many people took to the streets to protest his forced resignation, in the wake of the David Kelly affair.

Stella Rimington, by contrast, came across as a noble school-marm with a mind like a Swiss Watch - the sort of person you'd be glad to share a life-raft with. She was the first woman to run MI5 and the first British intelligence chief to be named publicly. After a long career in counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and countersubversion, she transformed the service from one of stuffy inflexibility to one of openness and dynamism - an essential shift to meet the challenges of the War on Terror.

Grout knew all the guests very well having interviewed them for his book. They were among 17 UK leaders from a range of activities including business, the military and sport. And they all exemplified some key leadership responsibilities. A good leader, Grout argued, must:

• provide direction and foresight;
• focus the organisation and prioritise activities;
• clarify what's expected of each individual; and
• articulate a vision to create sense of common purpose.

Underpinning all these things, he said, is the skill of communication. So, to open the discussion, he decided to probe one of Cordingley's views from the book, that communication is "the glue that binds an organisation together."

"I think it's very important that when you communicate with people, they are able to get back at you," Cordingley said. This was why, before the invasion of Kuwait in 1991, he briefed his men in groups of 100. "In a group of 100 you could eyeball them all, which is very important; but more importantly still, they could come back at you. They didn't feel there were too many people [present]... They were amongst their mates, and they could ask you questions."

You should also aim to "make yourself available" to those you lead, he argued. Once, in the Kuwaiti desert, he was sitting in a toilet stall when a soldier passed by, stopped and asked nonchalantly: "How's it going, sir?" This kind of informality, even at an awkward moment, is a positive sign, suggested, because staff will work much harder for you if they know they can talk to you directly.

Equally important is your style of leadership, the panel agreed. For example, Dyke said that, when he first arrived at the BBC, "everybody I met thought what they achieved, they achieved despite the management... And if you go to the average hospital and talk to the average nurse - you'll get the exactly the same response. They think that the management are the problem." If you're taking over the leadership of a struggling organisation, he said, then it's absolutely vital to overturn such views.

During his first 100 days as director-general, Dyke tried to visit as many BBC locations as possible, and to ask two questions of everyone he met: "What can I do to improve your life at work?" and "What can we do as an organisation to improve our service to the viewer or the listener?" He listened hard, and then he tried to implement as many good suggestions as possible, at speed.

Asked how transferrable this approach might be, he said: "Some will come up with ridiculous ideas, like double the budget, which you can't conceivably do; but others will say very small [achievable] things." For example, he found that staff at the BBC's local radio stations all made the same, entirely reasonable, complaint: "Why do we have to pay £15 out of our budget to rent a CD from the BBC library, when we can buy it for £10 at HMV?"

"We all know internal costing systems are a good idea as long as they're not ludicrous," Dyke said. But, at the BBC, "Most of them had become ludicrous. So overnight, I just changed it. I just said, 'Okay, we want you to use the library; the point of having a library is that it's free. We'll pay for it somewhere else.'" Another key leadership skill is, he argued, knowing when and when not to bureaucratise.

Asked whether leaders still needed skills of oratory, Dyke acknowledged: "There's no way you can ever meet personally with over 30,000 people." However, he added, the idea that leaders have to create and tell inspiring "stories" to win buy-in from staff obscures a more important issue: "You've got to think all the time: 'What are the stories [the staff] are gonna tell about you?'"

For example, he continued, if you walk into an office and you "don't talk to the receptionist and you walk past the security as if he doesn't matter, that's the story they'll tell about you. So you've got to find the time to [pay them attention]."

Ultimately, you have to prove to your staff you're on their side, or they'll be reluctant to accept any changes that you deem difficult but necessary. For Rimington, this realisation was the key to her success at MI5. When Grout asked: "Why do so many change initiatives fail?" she replied:

"The important thing about change is that it's got to be the right change at the right moment... I think a number of change initiatives are made in a sense for the sake of change." MI5 often changed not as a result of strategic thinking but as a result of crisis, she explained. "The Cold War was coming to an end, all of the old days of countering espionage, it was no longer enough; we had to tackle a new threat, which was the threat of terrorism. The old ways of doing it were not going to be adequate. But the people who were in charge at the time didn't know how to change."

Three specific crises sprang to mind, she said: "One of my colleagues went on the television and started talking about what we were doing... another decided he wanted to be a spy for the Russians [but] was mercifully caught before he did very much harm." Crisis No. 3, she said, came in 1982 when Peter Wright, a former assistant director of the service, published Spycatcher, a memoir "in which he listed every secret operation, every name, every code word that he could possibly remember and then rushed off to Australia to be outside the jurisdiction when Mrs Thatcher decided to prosecute him."

Rimington said MI5 was "able to change quite quickly and catch up," after these crises. But the organisation - and presumably British interests as a whole - were harmed nonetheless, because, she said, this change came "too late".

If you leave something too long, it ends up taking multiple attempts to get it right, she argued, citing her experience as a non-executive director on the board of Marks & Spencer (before the current, successful reign of Stuart Rose).

"There was a company that thought that it was the leading company in the UK," she recalled. "The board room... in 1997 was full of awards for excellent management. And yet other companies were coming up faster, slicker, with better ways of doing things. And within the board room, nobody had actually noticed. Change came by crisis, first with a falling share price, then because nobody was buying the goods, then because there was a board room coup. And the whole thing went into freefall."

Making change stick, Dyke commented, is yet another communication issue. The danger of change programmes, he said, is that "if you don't see them through, you're screwed, because the staff very quickly get cynical." Middle managers have a tendency to meddle with change programmes because they want to assert their authority, or because they're new to their job, or because they simply don't understand or agree with your vision. But when the house of cards collapses, it's your fault, and there's no excuse.

Good leadership means driving through difficult changes. It demands a hands-on approach. And just because something is being discussed by senior management does not mean it is being embraced by the ranks.