Leadership as storytelling - how narratives bond teams

This is one of a series of articles on lessons from Commando training. Here is the full list.

Leaders as storytellers

If you aim to encourage others to follow you, it's worth studying the techniques of successful historical leaders. One common feature of great leaders is their ability to engage with their teams by involving them in a story - or narrative.

From Henry V to Winston Churchill, great wartime leaders are remembered for their rousing stories. They invited their followers to join them in making history, and pointed out how future generations would retell their exploits.

While few leaders face the French knights at Agincourt, or Hitler's armies across the Channel, every leader can apply the storytelling principles that Henry and Churchill brilliantly demonstrate. As a young Royal Marine I learned this lesson and I hope you'll find it useful too.

The fewer men, the greater share of glory

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember'd;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Henry V, Act 4 Scene 3

As one of the greatest leaders in history or literature, Shakespeare's Henry V is a fine source of leadership inspiration. In this speech to rally his troops for battle, he tells them that they will tell their sons of their exploits at Agincourt for years to come.

Henry's aim is to bind his men to him. He has already offered to send home anyone who doesn't have the stomach for the fight ahead, and even to pay their salaries before they go. He is not relying on discipline and threats but on aspiration to encourage his men to join him in battle. He even highlights that if anyone does leave then the glory of the remaining soldiers will only increase - he creates a sense of exclusivity among this band of brothers.

Focus on the prize

This lesson lies at the heart of leadership. Henry is plotting out the benefits of featuring in his story, and it works. His positive reinforcement of the roles of his lieutenants Warwick, Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester (all of whom get a name-check in his speech) binds each of them to their posts through the struggle ahead.

Critically, Henry focuses on the prize - the positive result, rather than the struggles that lie between his audience and their status as storybook heroes. He doesn't even mention the possibility of defeat, even though it's very real.

Getting out of dire straights

When he spoke to the nation on 18 June 1940, Winston Churchill faced the prospect not of imminent victory over the French, but of the imminent invasion as Hitler prepared Operation Sealion. Newly in post as Prime Minister, Churchill did not shy away from the harsh reality of the situation, but he offered hope was well as purpose, and above all, he set the struggle in an imagined historical context:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

I think many people would argue that it was.

OK - but we're not at war now

Churchill and Henry V were wartime leaders operating in extreme conditions, but storytelling still has an important role to play in leadership, even when the setting is not quite so dramatic.

In 1997 I was put in charge of a group of 60 Royal Marine recruits, and challenged to convert them from civilians to Commandos in 9 months. To succeed, I would need to ensure that as many of them as possible stayed in my troop, without resigning, being injured, or failing to pick up new skills at the required rate.

I knew that they were in for a tough time, and also that many would doubt their desire and ability to complete their training. Most of all, I knew that these doubts would be most damaging when the recruits were out of the reach of me and the rest of the training team. So I thought about how to ensure that every time they had a break and the opportunity to return to the familiar comforts of home and family they still wanted to return to the challenges and discomfort of the Commando Training Centre.

I realised that when they headed home, their friends would be asking them what they had been doing with the Royal Marines. And I knew that if their answer was good enough they would enjoy telling the story. So my challenge was to ensure that whenever my recruits went home, I could guarantee that they had the best story in the pub. Every week I was careful to ensure that there was at least one episode that  they could turn into a great story, and I noticed that they enjoyed rehearsing - the more dramatic, outlandish (and often uncomfortable) the episode the better.

As the troop prepared to depart for 2 weeks of Easter leave, I played my best hand - knowing that this was the most likely time for the comforts of home to tempt my men to stay away. As they waited for the train, I asked them if anyone knew what an "SSN" is. At first no-one volunteered an answer, but one recruit hesitantly guessed "Is it a nuclear submarine?".

I congratulated him on his answer and explained that on their return from leave the troop would embark on an exercise in and around Scotland which would include a reconnaissance phase involving covert insertion and extraction by SSN. This wasn't standard for recruit training, but I'd managed to get my troop on a special exercise with extra resources. Everyone returned from Easter leave keen to collect another great story.

The measurable result of this was that for the first phase of training, 736 Troop had the highest retention rate among recruit troops for 5 years. We lost no-one at all for the first 10 weeks, speeding the recruits towards realising their Commando ambitions and saving the taxpayer a small fortune too.

The best story in the pub

So if you are seeking ways to motivate a team, ensure that every member has the best story in the pub. As leader your role is to provide your team with the basis of the story and encourage them to take ownership of it and retell it in their own words. If your stories align with your values and objectives, your team will be loyal, dedicated and effective.

This is one of a series of articles on lessons from Commando training. Here is the full list.

Initiation ceremonies - how to welcome new recruits

This is one of a series of articles on lessons from Commando training.  Here is the full list.

Joining a new organisation (company, team, club) can be exciting and alarming at the same time. Some organisations make great efforts to welcome new members with introductions, mentoring, briefings and feedback forms. The Royal Marines take - or took - a rather different approach...

If you are responsible for helping people adjust, or if you are joining an unfamiliar organisation, you've probably given some thought to what creates a sense of belonging. Once new members feel at home in a team they are likely to adopt group values, bond with teammates and work more productively together.

Theorists often suggest that team formation follows a forming, storming, norming, performing sequence, and leaders usually try to usher teams through these stages as rapidly as possible - to get team members comfortable together and delivering results.

Few theorists mention the dread words "Initiation Ceremony", but I think it is worth considering the part that initiation can play in accelerating team formation. A quick immersion in a new organisation can dispel fears and build a sense of belonging faster and more deeply than more conventional confidence-building measures. Here is my experience.

Anticipation

I joined the Royal Marines at 1200 BST on 6 September 1995.  By 1300 the 36 new recruits of whom I was one had discovered the rumour that in parallel to the formal induction we were going through, we could expect an informal welcome to the Corps.  As we adjusted to the strange formality of our new home at the Commando Training Centre, we wondered what horrors this mysterious event would involve.  Since our first briefings outlined the busy timetable for the first few days, it looked as though the initiation ceremony would probably be at night.  We therefore braced ourselves for some kind of shock sometime that night.

In the event, our first night was uneventful (apart from practicing our newly taught ironing skills and folding almost every item of our freshly issued equipment into A4 size).  We rose at 0600 to clean our accommodation and prepare for day 2.

Action

We soon learned that the intake of trainees who had joined before us were away on exercise. We had discovered that they were planning to "welcome" us so we were confident that nothing would happen before their return.  Sure enough, on the night their exercise finished, we were woken at 0300 by the sound of dustbin lids being clashed like cymbals, sirens and shouting. Well prepared, we raced out of the building already in our shorts, t-shirts and running shoes, only to be caught in the beams of several powerful lights and jets of water from fire hoses. Trapped, we formed into a group as unseen people behind the lights and hoses shouted instructions.

Three of us were immediately singled out for special attention. I had featured in a television documentary following the selection process for Royal Marines officers, while each of the other two had some previous military experience, one in the SAS and the other with the Parachute Regiment. While we were "encouraged" into stress positions, the remaining 33 recruits, still illuminated by a dozen torches, ran up and down a nearby hill.

Breakage

After a few minutes, and to our great relief we were allowed to rejoin the fold. Together, we were commanded to run back and forth several times between various flashing lights. In the darkness few people spotted some ruts on our path. Two people fell over. One broke his leg immediately, while the other was unhurt by the fall, but not by the impact of the man behind him who ran over his body and broke a bone in his back. While 4 people were instructed to carry the casualties to the medical centre, the rest of us raced on towards the Bottom Field, home of the assault course.

The catalogue of challenges that we endured over the next 90 minutes is too long to list, but highlights included:

1. "fruitbats" - hanging from rusty angle-iron beams and doing endless pull-ups
2. baby-carrying each other up and down a steep hill in shuttle relays
3. running out into the estuary mud and practicing leopard crawling
4. a false finish in which we returned to our accommodation only to start again

Finally, we returned to our quarters and the torches were switched off. We saw our oppressors for the first time as they came forward offering us plastic cups full of rum and welcoming us into the Royal Marines. They assured us that our injured friends were receiving treatment.

The morning after - and we belong

With less than an hour of sleep after the ceremony, we awoke to start a new day. Though we had been in the Corps for less than a week there was a palpable change of mood. During a short, sharp and strange event, we had sampled - and survived - almost all of the challenges we would take on over the coming months of training. We felt confident that we were ready for anything, and also that we had sufficient humour and team spirit to see us through.

Another important if unpalatable factor in our sense that we had completed a rite of passage was the loss of two of our colleagues. Their injuries prevented them from completing their training with us (though both had recovered sufficiently to join the following intake), and this enhanced our sense that we were now part of a special club that ruthlessly competed and focused on performance.

Too high a price

Traditionally, the chain of command had turned a blind eye to the initiation ceremony, but with the loss of two trainees (at considerable cost to the taxpayer), this approach changed.  Our initiation ceremony was the last of its kind, and we welcomed the following intake with an elaborate but victimless practical joke.

The importance of motive, respect and humour

I believe that while the human cost of our initiation ceremony was high, it was a very effective introduction to our new profession. A brief shock gave us more of a sense of belonging than the issuing of our new uniforms, or words of welcome from high-ranking officers.

I would not recommend any attempt to try to recreate the ceremony I have described, but I believe that it is useful to abstract certain ingredients that can help teams to integrate, and new members to feel that they belong and are ready to play a full part in the team:

1. the opportunity to confront the full spectrum of team challenges early
2. recognition by established team members
3. establishing the sense of the privilege of membership

Most important of all, our initiation ceremony was successful as a team development experience because the people who initiated us were motivated not by a desire to inflict pain or humiliation, but by pride in their organisation and the wish to test their newest colleagues. They treated us with respect and humour.

The Royal Marines use the expression "if you can't take a joke you shouldn't have joined". It was a harsh, brutal joke, but we enjoyed it, and we knew we belonged to the organisation we had so recently joined.

This is one of a series of articles on lessons from Commando training.  Here is the full list.