Chris Paton on Military Principles for Better Decisions and Leadership Success

Chris Paton is a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Marines and saw active service for over 18 years. One of his senior roles was Head of Strategy in Afghanistan to the David Cameron Government, where he was responsible for the extraction of all UK combat troops and their equipment from Afghanistan from 2010-2012.

Chris shares his experiences as a former marine and how he transitioned from the military to running a successful consultancy, advising Fortune 500 and FTSE 250 global giants on their performance and leadership, plus his views on passing on key principles to others to strengthen trust in relationships.

Can you share with us some of the challenges you faced as Head of Strategy in Afghanistan?
After just three weeks into the role, it was suddenly announced that we were to have all UK combat troops and combat equipment out of Afghanistan within 24 months.

So it fell to me to coordinate and create a strategy to extract just over 10,000 combat troops and over 20,000 shipping containers worth of equipment.

We calculated, with the shipping lines available to us at the time, that it would take a minimum of 18 months, which led to really quite unpleasant decisions in the early stages because we couldn’t leave the equipment until the end. If it’s going to take you 18 months, and you’ve only got two years, you’ve got to start taking equipment out from the outset.

This meant an ever increasing level of personal risk because you’re having to take out the equipment that is there and designed to protect them. So try as you may to keep that balance as good as you can. Inevitably there’s going to come a point at which people are at an unacceptable level of risk.

One of the biggest challenges for me personally was leading this remotely and not being at the centre of the location.

Did you experience difficulties in the plans not always being followed on the ground and how did you manage this?
We definitely saw changes and adaptations in the plan through decisions that people had made at different stages in the journey coming back. So there were some decisions being made right at the very forefront of the fight in the bases themselves, small bases quite isolated in Afghanistan and then you’d be having different decisions made at the central hub in Helmand.

As well as different decisions being made at the what we would call the operational level and a headquarters that was based just outside London.

Typically, many people have a perception that the military is command and control, and that it is top down, and that people obey orders. When actually the military is very good at being disruptive. It’s very good at being innovative.

There’s a high degree of trust between different levels and trust for me is the basis of all success. When you’re coming on to very uncertain and fast moving problems and complexity like we face in the world today, you know, we’ve gone from complicated to complex, where sometimes we’re struggling to work out what the question is never mind what the answers might be.

So we had to give a level of autonomy to the people living through this experience throughout the decision making process.  Good leadership comes down to trust, that we invest in people at all levels to make the best choices they possibly can.

How do you build trust in the types of environments when you have not worked together before?
If you’re suddenly paired up with someone you could be walking out the door with in 10 minutes and be responsible for each other and each other’s lives, you have no choice other than to trust each other.

Trust is given almost entirely immediately and then it’s for the other person to lose that trust through the actions or things that they do or do not do.

This applies to any industry, not just the military.

Do you think any organisation can exist without a culture of trust?
I often refer to the Competing Values Framework, developed by two academics called Cameron and Quinn, that says that there are broadly four different competing cultures within an organisation.

This first is very much around process systems flow charts, slightly hierarchical and controlling. The second is very much centred around nurturing, people and relationships.

The third is innovation, creativity, new products, new services and the final one is based on achievement and hitting targets, hitting numbers and being very much focused on beating the competition.

And the truth is that every organisation has a facet, no matter how small, in each one of those quadrants.

Good leadership starts with make people feel safe, and this is built upon trust. Everything else stems from here.

Can good leadership be trained?
It’s the endless debate, isn’t it? I firmly believe that you can help people improve in any part of their life. Whether that be through the things that they do and hold important.

I believe that actually, yes, there are people who you may regard as having innate leadership qualities, but that doesn’t mean for me that people can’t be helped to develop an improve leadership approach to think about their own leadership, to ask questions about their own leadership, and what sort of leader they want to be.