Episode 61 - Deep Roots: Leadership in Enduring Organisations with Professor Alex Hill

Welcome to the Centre for Army Leadership podcast. I'm your host, Lieutenant Colonel David Faulkner. And today we're exploring a question that sits at the heart of military leadership. What does it really take for an institution to endure? The British army is not just an organization. It's a centuries old profession shaped by history, sacrifice, adaption and service to the nation. Yet endurance is never guaranteed. Longevity must be earned, generation after generation. Our guest today is Professor Alex Hill, author of Centennials, a book that examines organizations that have survived and thrived for 100 years or more. His research looks beyond short term performance and instead asks what allows institutions to remain relevant, trusted and effective across generations. In Centennials, Professor Hill explores leadership as stewardship rather than ownership, culture as a strategic asset rather than a slogan, and values as lived commitments rather than statements on a wall. These themes resonate deeply with the Army's own values and standards. Courage, discipline, respect for others, integrity, loyalty and selfless commitments. They also speak to the responsibilities of command and leadership. To leave a unit stronger than you found it, to balance tradition with transformation and to maintain the trust of the British public. Today we'll discuss what 100 year organisations can teach army leaders at every level, from junior NCOs, shaping section culture to senior leaders responsible for institutional reform. Professor Hill, welcome to the podcast. Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. To start with a bit of a scene setter, can I just ask you what first led you to study organizations that survive for a century or more and I suppose what surprised you most about them? So my background, which I think kind of is useful. So I spent the first 10 years of my life running companies. I worked for a big engineering firm, so actually in Cheltenham, so not far from your neck of the woods. So they were an aerospace company and then they got acquired and then they got acquired again and I sort of, they're really old. But what you were seeing was, I guess what were the challenges working in an old organization that's got established norms, very traditional, very safety conscious, and how do you innovate? So I was in that world sort of, you're just absorbing stuff but not really realizing what you're interested in or thinking about or looking at. And then I left sort of industry and went into academia, went to Oxford and sort of went into this sort of college, very sleepy college environment. So the business world, although it was challenging, there was a lot of real focus on short termism and we would have hourly targets in the factories that you had to hit or monthly targets. And there's all this pressure to do whatever it took to deliver on budget, on target this week, this month, and then went into Oxford, which was very, not like that, basically. And it was, you're sort of going, oh, this is very different, this is a different world, very sleepy, much more concerned about the long term, much more concerned about the future. You know, I often say the only real short term target there seemed to be to try and make it to lunch, but that was about it. Yeah, you know, so without realizing it, I went from a very short term focused world to a very long term focused world. And also was really quite surprised at how many people at the college hated business. So although it was a management college, they just didn't like people from business. Most of them, I think had come from medicine. And actually, I think what the challenge was, they didn't like the short termism of business. They didn't like the fact that people who often run businesses aren't thinking long term, are only really concerned about this year, aren't trying to build something that lasts. You start to realize that businesses don't last and their lifespans are falling dramatically. And actually the people that run, run them think that's a good thing, not, not a bad thing, you know, so they talk about sort of creative destruction. So I think without realizing it, that was the origin went from short term into long term. But the work really started when we started working the Olympic teams. So that was coming into sort of London Games. And we spent time with a guy called Pete Keane. Pete had got the early medals for cycling. And then UK sport, the funding body had said, pete, could you repeat what you've done in cycling across all our sports? So Pete developed this model, 21 factors that he believed you could use to predict how many medals a team would win. And then based on how you rank across those factors, you're given money. Because the challenge for an Olympic team is can your athletes train full time? Have you got enough funds and train full time? So a colleague of mine was working with the Olympic coaches. They were kind of like the coaches behind the coaches. And John said, you know, there's something really interesting going on in UK sport. We're coming up to, you know, 2012. Let's see if we can, can get in and understand what's going on. So we spent a day with Pete. He took us through the journey of transforming cycling, then building our Olympic system. And I said to Pete, what keeps you awake at night? And he said, is it sustainable? So he went to this big whiteboard and at one end he wrote cult and at the other end he wrote sustainable system. And he just said, too many of our sports are cults. They're too dependent on one or two individuals. If they go, the whole thing collapses. So how can we make it sustainable? And I said, well, who could you learn from, Pete? And he said, the arts. They've been doing it for hundreds of years. So we contacted the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal College of Music, the Royal College of Art and said, look, can we come in and watch what you do? We don't really know what we're looking for or what we're looking at, but can we hang out in. You see how you think and behave. And then we started to work with others, people like Nasser and the All Blacks and Eton. And we did some, you know, interviews with people from the Marines too. I saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was, I think that it was actually really Pete that set us off on that course. And then you have to work out how to engage people with your research. You start to realize that how do you stay successful for 100 years is much more interesting than how do you stay successful for 10 years? So that then became our benchmark. It's interesting you talked, you mentioned the short termism, I suppose, you know, linking this to the Army. What is the danger of short termism in a long established organization like the army, from your perspective? So I think what we found, because, you know, you do the research and then the book came out and that's obviously triggered lots of work in terms of, you know, different organizations that want your help or support and what you realize that if you're an old organization like the army, you're very traditional and you've got really strong established traditions and they're really important because they kind of guide you, they guide you forwards. The challenge always in an older organization is how can you become more radical and how can you become more disruptive and more innovative? If you're working with a young organization, you know, a tech startup, for example, you're incredibly disruptive and you're incredibly radical, which is how you've kind of been successful so far. Your challenge is how do you put some traditions in place? So I think with an organization like the army, the challenge is always going to be how can we be more radical? And the secret is to learn how you do that within the confines of a public service or public servant system. Completely, Completely. You know, and also in a situation where you're heavily scrutinized and you're being observed all the time and you're performing in public. I mean, one of the things we found for long term success, performing in public is really important because it raises the standards standards in the organization. It makes you perform at a higher level, it shows the world what you do so they actually trust you and want to support you more. But it's hard because if you're performing in public, then if you mess up, it goes wrong. So I think the trick is how do you find safe spaces to experiment in that are less visible and then how do you feed them through? The analogy I would give is a bit like F1. You've got one car that you're racing this season that's on display, but then you've got another car that you're developing for next season that you're experimenting with and you can't experiment with the current car that's racing because that's just too risky. So you need to find an area to experiment and then you feed the learning back in. That's good. And I want to just bring us to stewardship and command responsibility. You mention stewardship in your book. I just wondered in terms of the stewardship piece, in a profession built on command and leadership authority, how do you see leaders avoid slipping into ownership rather than custodianship? So that's interesting, isn't it? And I think there's what's going on in broader society that starts to play in that the world is becoming more individualistic and people that kind of look at that talk about the significance of mobile phones, but also the significance of front facing cameras on mobile phones and actually how it all starts to become about you. So I think that sort of plays out. But the stewardship we found was really important, which I guess, you know, for the army you get that most organizations don't. And. But what we found was important is you, you need enough stewards, but not too many stewards. I think that's important. So I like to think of them as a bit like the oaks in the forest. So you need them to provide the sort of structure and support for everything else. And you need enough oaks in the forest to support the ecosystem and to support the new growth that's coming through. But you don't want too many oaks because if you do, there's no light and there's no space for new growth. So we tend to find about a quarter of your people need to be stewards and need to be oaks and they provide that real stability. And they're the people that kind of live and breathe your values and they pass them On. So if you look at. I know you like rugby. If you look at the really great All Blacks teams, a quarter of the forwards and a quarter of the backs in those squads were always at their third World cup, and they've been there before. They know how it works. You know, this is all very familiar. And they are like these kind of rocks that the rest of the team rely on. Interestingly, though, it's the younger players that normally win the games. It's the younger players that do that sort of move you're not meant to do in that moment, you're not meant to do it. That changes things. Now, the Oaks and the stewards, they provide that kind of structure and support that gives them the confidence to do that or they feel safe to do that, that. But the innovation doesn't come from the stewards. So I think there's certain individuals who are comfortable being stewards, and they are individuals who are more in it for the institution, not them. I do wonder if it's a bit of a personality thing. I'm not sure, but you'll hear them say things like, the All Blacks, I want to leave the shirt in a better place. I want to add something. But ultimately the institution is more important than I am. Whereas the younger players, the disruptors we talk about in the book, who are more like your teenagers, they often are more individualistic, and they are there that they question and they challenge and they push and they shove. There's a positive friction against the stewards, like being a parent, bringing up a child. You need that. What I think is important is it reaches a point in your career where the organization needs you to be a steward. And I don't know whether everyone can step into that role sometimes. I've seen or worked with organizations where you can tell the leaders actually are just big kids, they're big teenagers. And actually they're probably not always right in terms of stewardship. The question I was going to ask is, is there a transition to stewardship and is it based on time and experience? But I think you sort of answered that in the fact that it doesn't matter how long. Some people aren't cut out for that role. I think some people don't get energy from it. And I think for me, that's the real guide as an individual. What gives me energy and what doesn't, I think is probably the true test of where you should give your time. You've got to find your own purpose in life. I think that's really important. The institution won't necessarily give that to you, I think you find your purpose as an individual and then say, what's the best institution to help me live that purpose or create the impact I want to create? I work in a university. Professors are disruptors, they're not stewards. Nobody wants to be the head of department. That's actually a role that is quite different. And you find the best academics are the best researchers and the best teachers and they don't want to manage people. They see their role as disrupting and creating impact and leaving a mark on the world rather than looking after people and guiding them and supporting them. It is a different sort of personality. However, when you look at say someone like Eton, you know, Eton are kind of really interesting in many ways. Eton are really modeled on the army. You realize when you spend time in them, it's probably apart from maybe NASA, particularly NASA's modeled on the army. Eton is very formal. The jobs you do, how long you spend there, when you change. So every kind of role at eton is a five year post and you can do it for two terms but not three. So you can't do a role for more than 10 years. But their stewards, if you like, which they believe are the most critical individuals in their community, is the head of house. Each house has around 50 people in all of this for sound quite familiar to the army. There's five years in that house, so there's 10 people in each year and they have that same structuring like you do in the army in the school. So the head of house is in charge of the house. 50 kids live there and they've decided that that's a 13 year job. So if you want to become head of house, you move into a house with your family and your partner and you live there for 13 years, which for me I've got two teenagers, some 50 teenagers is quite scary. But. But they've realized that actually a child will be in the school for five years. So as head of house, I'm covering sort of like two cohorts, if you like two and a half and then they'll have a two year handover between one head of house and the next. So every person in the school has got either the current or the incoming head of house for the entire five years they're there. So it's that nurturing and caring role and they are this sort of stabilizing people. But it is very much about the community and others and not about them. And we've got that with the rank structure in the army. I suppose when you Talked about eton and the five year cycle. We've probably got anywhere between 18 months to 36 months, depending on the appointments, particular leaders and some of those leaders or stewards in whatever role, whether it be junior NCOs, senior NCOs or officers. I just wondered, can leaders with a relatively short tenure, such as the sort of 18, 36 months, still act as a long term steward of the institution? I think it's much harder. So at Eton, for example, the head of house tends to be someone in their 40s and they like you to have at least 5 if not 10 years experience of being at the school and at least 10, if not 20 years experience before you take that role on. So they do tend to come later. I think the 18 months to 3 years is perfect for disruption. I mean, if you look at the book I'm currently looking at is how do you create impact in your own life and leave your own legacy? Most people, when you look at all different walks of life, create their biggest impacts in their 40s and 50s. That's when they really, really do something that shapes the world in some way. When you look at, you know, Olympic athletes, it's different, but what you tend to find is it's often around 20 years into your career. The thing with an Olympic athlete, the career tends to start at around four or five these days, but you're sort of 20 years. That's when you often create your big impacts. And I think what you're doing in many ways prior to that is gaining as much knowledge and experience as you possibly can so you can create a massive impact later on. So early on, moving a lot, broadening your experience is really, really fundamental and really, really important. Then later on you have a bit more stability in one role or in one part of the army, because again, you know, it might be that you're moving between roles, but they're all very much connected and you're all kind of, you're part of a team or a group and that's when you're sort of, you're more like a parent. I think that the stewards are more like parents. And then I think you also, in a high performing environment, you need grandparents too. And they tend to be people who have the knowledge but not the responsibility. So they're often people who've been a stewards or they've been a very disruptive expert and they are now no longer responsible for that stability or disruption, you know, the guidance or the drive, but they are still in the environment to sort of, you know, Help and support. So again, taking the All Blacks as an example, at a World cup, they often bring in the old great players from the past. They're there at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and they're just in the community. And you find the younger players sort of drift towards them to hear the old stories or to talk about what they're worried about. And also the grandparents will often guide the parents and say, look, you know, don't worry about that. You were worse when you were that age. Or, you know, this is really important. That isn't. I think these sort of. They call them the elders. I was actually talking to a US Marine earlier this week. I think they call them the graybeards. I'm not sure, but it's this idea that there's this wisdom in the community. You find that when I look at my own kids, the grandparents make them feel really safe. And you know that if your team feels safe, then they can do the extreme things that you need them to do. They're an inspiration as well. And I think we've got that at various ranks through this system, whether that be junior NCOs who private soldiers can look up to get advice, whether then senior NCOs and warrant officers. It's interesting because I do think that family, that sort of family feel is certainly something that you feel, whether it be through a regimental context or a unit context or an organizational context. There's certainly something within the army, but they're much shorter timeframes. I was gonna move on to culture now. And in your book you said the most successful organizations try to get better, not bigger, and are intentionally inefficient and share their stories with the world. Can you explain more about what that means and how that might be applicable to the British Army? The long term success of any organization is how do you attract money and talent and how do you do that over multiple generations? So if you're doing it for 100 years, that's four generations. So you're building an organization where your grandchildren's grandchildren would want to work or that your grandchildren's grandchildren will want to support or believe is important and give money to or time to or whatever it is. So you're having to think in generations. And what you also realize is that as a society, we only support the organizations that we think positively impact society long term. You know, you can get away with really bad practice and really damaging society short term, but long term, society is looking for another option, whatever that is. So they're saying, actually we don't believe in you anymore, we don't trust you anymore, we don't think you have a positive impact in the world anymore. And you just start to see money and talent just starts to drift to other places. So the three things you described are really important over the long term. So getting better, not bigger, is realizing that actually maybe I've got really good at something, but if I just suddenly scale massively, typically it's often because I'm trying to make money. But it could also be that I'm trying to broaden my impact. If I scale too quickly, then suddenly actually I'm not really learning and my standards slip because you know, it was a great quote, Hewlett Packard, back in the beginning, they said never grow faster than you can recruit great people. So if you expand too quickly, you suddenly start recruiting people who aren't that great, or don't really want to be there, or don't fit your culture, or don't have the same purpose or whatever it is. And if that happens, you know you've got the wrong people, suddenly things just start to go wrong, or you know, you're trying to do too many things in too many places. What is interesting is that you find great organizations will have a core and then often they'll have a spin off. And the idea is the core is at the cutting edge of what it does. So the core often stays very small, but it is really at the pinnacle and the cutting edge of what it does. And then they might have a spin off that takes learning from the core to share it to create more impacts or to generate funds. So for example, NASA have a spin offs division, so they have 50 astronauts that are involved in space exploration. But then they have a spin off division that takes the learning from space exploration to share it with the world. So that could be artificial limbs, gps, or it could be actually by photographing the world from a distance, we're now seeing energy use or migration patterns or whatever it is. But it's the spinoffs division that's oftenly creating the broader impact. But the spin offs division can't exist without space exploration. So you have this core that's really at the cutting edge of what you do. And that has to stay super small to be at that cutting edge. And then you either just have that and nothing else, or if you do want to broaden your impact, then you have a spin off division. But what you've got to do is realize that one can't drive the other. I mean, the other example is the Royal Shakespeare Company. Matilda was incredibly Successful. But Matilda doesn't exist without Hamnet. You know, people go to see Matilda because it's the rsc. And actually the lady running the RSC said, you know, when Matilda took off, most of the company wanted to kill it. They thought, this is ridiculous, this isn't who we are, this isn't Hamlet. But she said, but actually we know it can broaden our impact and it can generate some really good funds to fund the core. So that's important in terms of the other elements to be intentionally inefficient is realizing is this innovation piece. So if you only trade off your existing ideas, existing way of working, then eventually you're going to die. You've got to keep innovating, you've got to keep moving forwards. And if you don't do that, you will die. So 3M, you know, who make post it notes and other things, they have this idea called the Vitality Index. So if you look at a business unit within theirs, their question is how much of this year's revenue came from products developed in the last two years. And they will depend on how fast their different markets move. You set different targets. So if you think about mobile phones, we change our phones every two years. Typically, if you're not getting 100% of your revenue coming from phones developed in the last two years, you might be growing, but you're dying. Whereas if, say it's laptops, it's four years, so it needs to be 50%, or cars, it's six years, so it needs to be a third. So different environments need to innovate at different rates. And some environments you need to be much more innovative. So the question here is, how innovative do you need to be? Think about the Army. Where do you need to be developing new technologies, where do you need to developing new approaches? Where do you need to be operating in a very different way than you've done before? Where are the new sort of modes or areas of combat, you know, and are you developing new approaches and new methods continually for those? And what you realize is that efficiency allows you to use what you know, if you like, with as few resources as possible. But actually new ideas come from being inefficient. They're like by doing the thing you're not meant to do, or an accident happening or something, conversation occurring that wasn't necessarily planned or thought. I was thinking like in Covid, when people had to interact just through teams. It's very efficient. But what you do is you just execute. There's no sort of conversation beforehand or conversation Afterwards, there's no bumping into someone in the corridor, there's no having lunch with someone. There's no of those sort of random conversations. And it's actually the random conversations where you find the next thing and the thing after that. It's really interesting. You're talking about the innovation piece. I mean the army has to innovate to remain credible and relevant on the battlefield. And one of the things we are now talking about is techcraft and innovation on the battlefield. So techcraft is as important as fieldcraft to main that operational advantage. And then I was just struck by you talked about the spin off from an organization. I just wonder whether not just because we're doing a leadership podcast with the center for Army Leadership, but I wonder whether leadership is the army spinoff based on a 350 years of experience. Because if you think of any crisis in the last 20 years, whether that be Covid the fire strike, there has been an element of looking into the army to support. And I just wonder do you see the leadership as that spin off for the army? Yeah, completely. The question always for a spin off is what are we amazing at and what are we at the cutting edge at and what do we have real deep knowledge and expertise in? And obviously leadership is one of those things. I also wonder whether there's potentially certain technologies you've developed that are at the cutting edge too. But yeah, you're right, the value of a spin off and we're doing some work with the eno, the English National Opera and one of the things that they were like talking about said wow, it's just unsustainable, our model. It just costs so much money, I just can't see how it could work. And actually you realize every high performing environment to be at the pinnacle of what you do isn't financially sustainable anywhere. Again, we've done a bit of work with the Lawn Tennis Association. Coaching those elite players costs millions and you don't really get anything back from that. It's completely unsustainable as a model. Training opera singers and doing that to a high level, or even doing a lot of what you do, it's really hard for it to sustain itself financially. The spin offs are a great way to take that learning from the core and bring a broaden your impact. Because often high performing, long lasting organizations do positively impact the world, as we say, because that's how they get the next generation of money and talent and the generation after that. But also it can be a way to bring in money to fund the core. But what's really important, because the spin off can be really exciting because often it's quite high growth. What you don't want to do is to get it where the spin off is taking all your talent. So the core has to be where you're really at the cutting edge of what we do. I mean, if you look at NASA, NASA's impact on the world really is through its spinoff. Now, long term, if we do have to leave this planet, space exploration is going to be incredible and will tell us so many things. But generally it's the learning from that that is most useful at the moment. And the public support for NASA is more driven by the spinoff than the core at this moment. So there's this constant trade off. I mean, it's one of the arguments I have for our Olympic system is at some point the government will think that better schools or better hospitals or better housing is more important than gold medals. So at some point your whole system, your whole financial model will crash. Surely, though, you're at the pinnacle and you could argue this is the army too, at the pinnacle of mental and physical performance. And what are you learning by pushing the boundaries of what's possible and actually how you help people perform in, you know, in high stress, in high pressure. In those moments, surely that's useful for the rest of the world too. I mean, I always think the analogy I always use, if you looking at high performance is a bit like studying steam. You know, the world is water, the world is people coming together, working in teams, trying to do stuff. High performance is high pressure, so it becomes more like steam. Now, what's interesting about steam is that it's still water, but under pressure, the core elements, the core relationships, the core things just become more visible. So actually studying steam is the best way to understand water. It's realizing that if you work in steam, there's also learning for water so the rest of the world can learn. And from what you're finding out, it's just working out how you sort of package it up and share it. And I think the centre of army leadership, we had the Strategic Defence Review and our role is wider than the internal audience as part of wider society. And from a leadership perspective, we've got a lot to learn from outside and I think that keeps us relevant and credible and grounded and we can feed that back into our internal audience. I was taken by the talent management. There's the phrase the war for talent has been used quite a lot recently, given the competitive nature in the private and public sector. I Just wondered how you saw senior army leaders approach talent management differently if they're thinking in 25 rather than two year horizons. So it's interesting, one of the things that we found. So we called these organizations centennials that have been around for 100 years and outperform their peers for 100 years. And it's like you sort of discover these things, you just hang out and then little things get said to you that they think are insignificant, but then you suddenly go, that's interesting, unusual. And you see patterns. So one of the things you realize is they all work with kids from the age of four. So like the Royal College of Arts has art competitions that kids enter from the age of four. And if your work gets selected, you go to the college. You see it on the wall. Both of my kids had their work set. It wasn't very good, I have to say. But you know, we went in and immediately my daughter's like, okay, what's this? This is interesting. Yeah, this is, you know, I hadn't, you know what. So what does this place do if you, you know, I think anyone who's got a child, their kids will have done a NASA challenge at school. So you realize that actually kids heads get turned quite early on. And it sort of digs into this bit in the book, but simplistically, your brain is growing from birth to around the age of four. And then from the age of sort of around four to 16, your brain is learning. And actually just by measuring blood flow in the brain, it's sort of around four times higher between the age of four and 16 than it is in the rest of your life. You're in hyper development. And what's happening is children are, without realizing it, are deciding what they want to do with their lives. We would have a similar, probably not at the age of four, but we'd have the Army Cadet force and the CCF in various schools. And then we've got a university officer training corps. We do have those links in at the schooling age. And I think the army has clearly found that important and is a good source of recruitment as well. I think it's fundamental actually, because otherwise what can happen is you can suddenly turn around and someone else has nicked all your talent. And the problem is by the age of 16, a lot of people have already decided, I just want to move now to values and standards. Obviously really important from an army perspective and a number of other organizations. But they underpin everything we do. Essentially they're the bedrock of leadership and the moral components and for the British army, courage, discipline, respect for others, integrity, loyalty and selfless commitment are our values. They're explicit and codified. But in long lived organizations, what distinguishes values that endure from values that erode from the organizations you looked up? So I would phrase them slightly different. I call it beliefs and behaviors. It's exactly the same. Your values are what you believe and your standards are how you behave. And you find it's really interesting. In every high performing environment you walk into, they just talk about behavior all the time and it's just a constant conversation. I think it's a little bit like bringing up a family. You know, you sort of go in and it's got like your values on the fridge, you know, be kind, be thoughtful, etc. And if I think about my kids, most of my conversations with my kids are about their behavior, how they behave to each other, how they behave to their mum, how they behave beyond. And what you believe as a parent is that if my kids behave in the right way, then they'll go out and do stuff. So what I think's important is that as a community like the army, you are clear on what your values and standards are, your beliefs and behaviors are. And it's a constant conversation and I think you can never assume that it's done. And what I found is great organizations, those don't really change over time and they find the ones that are right for them and they live them and breathe them. But what they do is constantly talk about what they mean and what is good behavior and what is not good behavior. And I think that's really interesting because we conducted, the center of Army Leadership conducted a values review back in 2025 by a senior researcher, Dr. Risso. And there'd been a lot of debate about the values and standards following a number of high profile events of poor behavior across the Army. And I think the summary of that report was the values were fit for purpose. Potentially the descriptors needed to be updated for some of the generations. I just wondered how you have seen how effective the effective organizations have been to not necessarily be able to recite the values, but actually live them. And how that education of the meaning of the values for the new generations coming through has been effectively conducted by the most successful organizations. So they are constantly talking about what does good look like. And they also build a community where you pick each other up if you're not doing it right. So a great example for me was we spoke to an all blacks coach and he described how he just arrived at the team and he was late to a meeting and he walked in and one of the players stood up and said, we have a no dickheads policy here. You were late. We are all here on time. That's disrespectful to us. So that's what I think is really important, is that the whole community lives the values and the whole community supports and picks each other up if they're not living them. And then that builds an incredibly strong community. It's also quite interesting, taking that aside, when another one of the coaches talked about how, you know, they used to give this sort of pre match talk as a coach and one of the players just stood up and said, look, no offense, but it's a bit disrespectful to us. You know, we don't need that pre match talk. We'd rather you weren't here and we will talk to ourselves because we're gonna be out leading ourselves on the pitch. But again, you are using the values and you're using the conversation and you're creating safety. I mean, I think that's really important. If you look at us as humans, our core biology hasn't changed for thousands of years. And I think our core biology is that we are programmed to pass our genes on. So the minute you have a child or the minute you have a grandchild, you just want to keep them safe. It's just, that's really your programming. So our core programming is to create safety for the people we care about and to be in an environment where we feel safe. So I think you've got to create an environment where everyone feels safe, where they can talk and they can speak up. You do that by constantly talking about these things. You do that by showing vulnerability as a leader and saying, you know, there are moments when I haven't lived the values, when I slipped or when I didn't do or when I observed this, but I didn't speak up, I didn't call it out the way you build trust. Did you always show vulnerability first? You know, all the studies show, and it's not that unusual an idea, but having these conversations where you then build a community where we know what we believe and how we should behave and then we talk about it and then we all look after it and we all pick each other up. Because you tend to find the issues in most organizations aren't that their values or standards are wrong, it's just that they weren't managed or enforced in the right way or they weren't possibly understood by the people they were misinterpreted so that's a constant, I think, process and conversation for each new generation. You can never assume that it's done. And if people are your most important asset, which they are in the British army, you'll make every effort to make sure that they understand the values, but also can live the values and bring out the meaning for them in a slightly different way for different generations. Because for a, a 45 year old W1 or 45 year old major might mean something different to a private soldier or a junior officer. And I think that's the key, is the values as they are, are completely fit for purpose, but it's how we collectively ensure that they are instilled and understood across the organisation. And it's, you know, again, coming back to the idea of stewardship. They are people who live for your values, so they're providing those role models. But I think you're right, you know, it's having those conversations. You know, I watch my son talking to my dad and my son telling my dad that, you know, your generation screwed up the planet and now we're stuffed. And then that's like a very simple way to look at it. But then the conversation starts, but then they talk about it. Well, what does that mean and what does it and how do you see it? And, you know, and seeing these things in different ways. And it comes a bit like back what we were saying earlier about finding your purpose. So realizing that these are the values of the community that I live in, but how am I going to live and breathe those as a person? What does that mean to me? But realizing you can't just do that by yourself, that's a conversation with everyone else too. Yeah, everyone needs to be part of that conversation. I want to take us to trust. And in the book trust is mentioned a lot for obvious reasons. But what destroys institutional trust the fastest? There's a couple of things here. I think that we trust people where we can see what they're doing and why, and so we understand why they're doing what they're doing. And actually you realize that if you're secretive, then it's really hard to be trusted. I mean, so there's a couple of elements we talk about in the book. One is the role which I think are relevant to the army, the role that the institution plays in society. So one of your earlier questions, which I didn't quite get around to answering, was why do you share your stories with the world? And part of the reason for sharing your stories with the world is you're Being open with the world and you're explaining what we do and why, and that builds trust because then they understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. And then they trust you. And if they trust you, they'll support you. And I think as we were saying earlier, it starts with being vulnerable. So if I'm sharing and being open with you about what we do and why, I'm making myself vulnerable and open to criticism and potential problems. But actually by being vulnerable, I'm actually building trust. And on a personal level, it all comes down to oxytocin. They've discovered, they've done studies where, you know, you take one group, give them oxytocin, take another group and don't, and then ask them to lend money to a stranger. And the ones that had oxytocin do, the ones that didn't, don't. But equally, they've looked on the flip side. If you are lent money by a stranger or you aren't, if you are, you get a hit of oxytocin. So you trust back and you give money back. If you aren't, you get a hit of testosterone and you become aggressive. So it's sort of, it's, you know, if you trust someone, they will trust you. I mean, it's a notes all kind of, we all know that that's what you're meant to say or thing, but actually chemically in your brain, that's what's happening. So trust always starts with being vulnerable. And I think as a leader in an organization, again, you know, Google did some great studies around team performance and they found that the highest performing teams are the ones where the leader is more vulnerable. Not for the whole conversation, but at the beginning of the conversation, they would normally talk for five or ten minutes about more personal things and their worries or their concerns. And that builds trust in the team. But I think also, you know, kind of across your organization, if you're leading from any point in the army and you want people to trust you, you actually have to be vulnerable with them and talk openly and honestly about what you're thinking and why. And realize it's not just about having all the answers all the time. And it's about explaining, you know, where you've gone wrong in the past or what you're worried about. And actually that's how you get them to trust you. I mean, no leader is superhuman. We've all got vulnerabilities and the idea that you try to mask them eventually, whether that be in the role that you're in now or two years time or 24 years time, eventually they will come to the fore completely. And we all know the problem is when trust goes, it's a bit like if you've been in a relationship and it's gone wrong, the next relationship's always a disaster because you're not willing to trust. And the minute you're not willing to trust, then they read that and they see that and you can get away with that maybe for a bit, but long term, those relationships just start to break down. So, and I think as a leader, you are in. You are in a position of authority. It's a bit like the parent child scenario. It is very hard to change your relationship with your mum or dad as a child. It just is. Actually, as a parent, you are setting the relationship and you're setting the tone and it's the same as leadership. As a leader, you are setting the relationship with the people around you. So it's realising you have to do that. Yeah. I mean, the Director of Leadership, Mayor General Cowley, talks about a positive transfer of energy from one person to another in the form of leadership. And the British army definition is the character, knowledge, an action that inspires others to succeed. I just wonder whether you think that leadership and the definition for organizations that you've looked at will evolve over time or that will remain a Constant Irrespective of 20, 30, 40 years down the line with new generations and new needs for those generations coming through. But will leadership remain a constant with the definitions already provided by those institutions or organizations like the Army? So this is definitely something that you get asked a lot, particularly when you're looking at things that last for a long time. Often, I think as people, we focus on the things that are changing, whereas I think a more interesting question can be, what's not changing? So I thought it was interesting. One of Amazon's core strategies is let's get really good at the things that don't change. The products that people are always buying and will always buy, the things that we're always doing. So I think the context is shifting and changing. But again, if you come back to what we said earlier, our core biology isn't we're people and biologically we're the same as we have been for a long time. The context we're operating in is different and it's always shifting and changing and it's realizing that although the younger generation may seem like they're behaving in a different way, they're actually, their core needs are very similar. Because they're just people. We're all just people. So I think leadership is key. And having great leaders, that will always be key. Recognizing that the context is possibly changing, but actually the core needs. Do I have purpose? Am I being heard? Do I belong? Do I have great strong relationships around me? Am I in an environment where I feel safe? Am I trusted to do what I think is right? All of those elements are just no different, and they're always going to be there. But how we express that, how we make sure that people understand that the way people are going to interpret information or receive information or, or what they think their needs are versus what they really are, you know, I mean, they're being fed so much information and they don't realize that a lot of it is wrong, but that's skewing how they think or what they think is right. So there's an element of sometimes of re educating them because they've been told it's X when it's actually not, it's Y. Or they look around the world and see leaders who do A or B. And we know that that's not really right or good leadership. Long term it might be okay. Short term, you might be able to get away with fear and being authoritarian, but, you know, dictators don't last. It doesn't. So, you know, long term, every successful nation has to be a democracy. We know that it's harder, it's messier, it takes longer, but actually, long term, it's more successful always. So again, those sort of core elements about leadership and what's needed I don't think are changing, but it's realizing the context has shifted and the language is changing. You know, what you say might not be heard in the way you think, or actually they may be expecting it to be said in one way and you've said it another way. It's the same thing, but it's just making sure it's communicated in a way they can understand. Essentially, the character of leadership is enduring, but the context changes. We have a framework, the leadership competency framework. What leaders are their characters, what leaders know their knowledge, and what leaders do their action in the organizations. From your research, did leadership form part of a framework in a sort of simplistic way, in the way that I've described, or did they not use a framework to sort of guide their teams, their people through? So we talked earlier a bit about the group size and the work. Robin Dunbar, he's an evolutionary psychologist and he's done a lot of work looking at group size. And he's gone back to hunting tribes and farming communities. What I think is some of his more interesting work is he's also looked at group size in primates. So looking at, you know, chimpanzees and Marmites and all these things, and what he's discovered is that the size of the front of your brain determines what kind of group you can live in, what size group you can live in. And because you can do studies on primates that you can't do on humans, he looked at, for example, cortisone levels in feces of Marmites that lived in groups that weren't optimal size. So either they were too young, too small, or too big. And what he shows is that stress levels go up massively. And what is there's this kind of optimal size in their case. If your group is too small, you worry that someone's going to come in and steal your food or your mates, and so you feel vulnerable. Or if your group is too big, you worry where you fit in the group and you groom more, which is how they build relationships. And you could sort of observe these things happening. And so if the group's too big, it's unsustainable, it eventually will split. If a group's too small, it's unsustainable, eventually it'll combine. So within humans, we tend to live in families of five, in extended families of 15, in communities of 50, in sites of 150. And it sort of. It goes up. So I always say, you know, the street we live on in London, there's around 300 of us on the street. Whenever we have a street party, the bottom half of the street sit together and the top half sit together. And we don't re. Talk to each other because it's just too many people for me to know. We live in the community within that 150. So I know probably 10 families to wave to, but I don't like to talk to them because it takes too long. And then two families have keys to our home, and so we rely on them if there's a problem. And recently one of those families moved, and my wife, without even thinking about it, invited over for dinner someone that we used to wave to and then gave them keys. So again, it comes back to this idea of safety. I know that I feel safe if I'm in this community that I kind of know and understand. So what you're finding is it kind of. It's building up in this way, these sort of communities and these environments and what you're trying to think about is how do I lead those different things. But did you find that when those communities are formed that they followed a charter or a framework? Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah. What I think's interesting is that when the community is relatively small, everything's less formal. So actually, when you look at farming communities, particularly in. I'm going to mispronounce this, I think the Memonites, they live in Canada. Okay. And they're basically farming communities. And once the community goes beyond 200, it splits. And they said the reason it splits is because you can't manage it informally, so you can't have a quiet conversation with someone to make it happen. Or the relationships within the group aren't strong enough that actually you're reinforcing the right behaviors, or you haven't got the parents and the grandparents that are kind of living the values and the principles. So when the group's quite small, it was completely undocumented and it was actually lived and breathed through individuals and through the collective knowledge and wisdom within the community. So it was never documented. Once you go beyond that, then the need to document it starts to appear. Or if you have this idea of the core in the spin off, the core, often it's undocumented. The spin off is more documented. So if you're having to grow at speed, then actually it can't just be naturally being built. So you're having to build it quickly in a particular context or particular environment. You know, if you're maybe if you're doing a tour in a particular region and you're going in, you have to establish some norms very quickly. So therefore having it really documented and really understood is super important. But if you're in a smaller community that's more stable, then actually it doesn't need to. But I do think what is interesting is even if it's not documented, it is talked about. What normally is documented, which I found very interesting, is their purpose. So what is documented is why are we here? So, for example, when we first started working with the Red Cross, the Red Cross was founded by somebody who was walking alongside a battlefield. Forgive me if I'm telling you what you know, in France and saw all of these injured soldiers on the battlefield and no one was helping them. And he thought, this is ridiculous. Look at all of these people, they're dying and no one's helping them. So he got everyone from the local village and they just started going out and treating them and it didn't matter what side you were on. And he felt that this is Something that just needs to happen more broadly in war. But what he did is said, I think for this to work, we need some founding principles. So there were like 12 founding principles. And one of their core principles is you can never pick a side because they said, our role is to move freely between both sides and to support. So you can't judge who's right or who's wrong, and you have to be completely neutral. So neutrality is one of their core guiding principles. Interestingly, the principles from the Red Cross ended up becoming the principles of the un. That's where they came from. I was going to say. I thought that was very similar. Very, very similar. But it all started with the Red Cross. What's interesting is the first time we worked with them, they gave us a book that was their 12 guiding principles. And they said, look, you just have to understand these are the principles that guide everything we do. And that's kind of a version of that. Everywhere we went, there was something that was very much documented about purpose. And also we tended to find that in times of crisis, often the organizations would get that out. So another example is the Royal Institution. Its purpose, it was sort of founded by Darwin and Faraday and all those people. Its purpose is to use science to help society. They went bankrupt sort of around the time we were working with them. And the first thing they did was get out their founding document and dust it off and say, well, why are we here? And then they went through and said, oh, my God, we're not doing all the things we were meant to be doing, and we're doing all of these other things that are just completely irrelevant. And they used that sort of document to actually go, okay, I don't think we should be doing this. I think we should be doing this, or da, da, da. And that sort of pruned the organization, but also redirected it. The purpose is normally very documented. The All Blacks, for example, it's to raise New Zealand's profile and live their beliefs and behaviors on the world stage. Their first world tour was actually to promote trade as they were coming out of the British Empire. And they know that that's their purpose is to live and breathe those values. And actually, if they win by not living and breathing their values, then the country gets really angry. And I think given the world events, whether it be Ukraine and the current events in the Middle east, the chief of the General staff when he came in, Sir General Rollie Walker, was very clear to communicate the purpose of the British army to protect the nation by fighting and winning. Our battles from land. And I think it's really important to zone everyone in and that who you know over time, that purpose is clear and upfront. It's been emphasized. It's been fascinating. I've got one particular question. I don't know whether there's one single answer to this, but was there a question that you wish more leaders ask themselves when they think about purpose, culture, and influence? The thing that we talked about earlier is really important. I think you have to be very clear on your own purpose. We all get one life. I mean, I know in the army you work more than 40 hours a week, but the expression is sort of it's 80,000 hours. It's not actually that many. This is your moment to really create an impact and leave a legacy. And I think the best people I've worked with ask themselves, what is my purpose? And they keep asking it, am I living my purpose? I think simplistically, for me, it's what are you good at? What do you love? And where can you create impact? And I think it's important to keep asking yourself that as a person, because as you go through your life, that might change, and actually what you're good at might change, and what you love might change. And where you can create impact might change. Obviously, you're in an institution that has a purpose, too, but recognizing that there might be an alignment for a period, there might be an alignment for a really long time. But it's up to you to guide yourself and to ask yourself that question. People who have really significant impact on the world do find their mentors. They go out and they consciously find them, and they consciously connect with them. They are normally ahead of them. They're in the next stage, so they can guide them and they can help them. Not all of them work out, but most of us have one, two, possibly three. But normally one or two really big mentors in our life, and they are often there for a very long time. But also I think as individuals, you find great individuals will build teams around them. Not just the team that they've been put in within the army, but the team that kind of guides their life. So I think it's realizing that actually this needs to be quite a conscious process. As an individual, you know, what do I want to do? What impact do I want to create? How do I find the people who will guide me and help me and support me and that I can work with and share it with? And really thinking about how you do that, it's about visualizing how you've left the organisation, the unit in a better place completely. And also what are you going to do post army? Because your impact won't just finish. And you know, people leave the army at different ages, but you've got so much to add. I have worked with quite a lot of people who are ex military, in a broader phrase, and often they're quite lost when they pop out. And then what I've noticed is that they suddenly they come alive again when they're with, you know, other people who are ex military or in the military or even that they're not happy until they get back into the military in some shape or form. So it could be that this is your home forever, or it might be how do I create my next home and my home after that. But I think all of that starts with what am I trying to do? What's my impact? One final question before going into some fast fire leadership one liners. If the British army is still thriving 100 years from now, what will the leaders have done? Right. Your long term success is your ability to attract the next generation of money and talent. And long term, we only support organizations that we believe and we can see have a positive impact on the world. And a couple of sort of fast fire leadership questions. What's the best leadership advice you've ever received? Somebody said to me, it's actually the former head of Eton, a guy called Tony Little. He said, you're not doing anything important if no one's shouting at you. And I think it was real learning that if you're trying to create impact and you're trying to create change and you're trying to make a difference, not everyone will like that and that's okay. Putting your head above the parapet, so to speak. One thing you change about leadership overnight. I think difference between great leaders and less good leaders I've worked with is great leaders are incredibly ambitious and great leaders are incredibly curious. And great leaders are constantly looking outside of their world for new thinking and fresh ideas. And I'm always shocked when I work with people who aren't ambitious, curious and going outside. So I think it's the curiosity, I think if you're curious, that just changes everything. No, that's great. And the final one, a leadership habit you think everyone should adopt. I think a really interesting question or a motivation I've seen in all of the great leaders I've worked with is what am I going to leave behind? And I see they are more proud of what the next leader does than what they did. Okay. And I think I think if we can think that way. Yeah. That actually, if the next person is even more successful than me, then I did an amazing job. I think that'd be great, setting up your successor to succeed. Hey, Alex Hill, thank you so much for your time this afternoon. We've only got halfway through some of the questions I want to get to, but it's been fascinating. Could I continue this talk for at least another hour? Thank you so much. My pleasure. It's been great to be here. Thank you.