Ian Fox – a key speaker at last month’s SJUK Leaders in Security Conference in Manchester – highlights why civilian organisations keep misplacing their leadership potential.
In the military, everyone is trained to lead. Not because it’s aspirational; but because it’s essential. When the mission matters and lives are on the line, leadership can’t be optional.
The chain of command must be redundant by design. Anyone may be called to step up when the leader, their deputy or the next in line is neutralised.
That redundancy isn’t a sign of inefficiency; it’s resilience. But what happens when we bring that principle into civilian life?
We say we want leaders. We invest in leadership programmes. We promote based on potential. Then? We return those newly inspired individuals to systems that reward conformity, where real leadership is neither visible nor safe.
We train people to lead and then expect them to wait. Wait for permission. Wait for retirement. Wait for a vacancy. Wait until it’s too late.
In most businesses, schools, hospitals and public services, the reality is this: The focus is performance, not purpose. Roles are fixed. Access to the “mission” is guarded.
Ask a frontline worker what the strategic aim of the year is and you may get a blank stare. Not because they don’t care – because no one told them.
They weren’t trusted with the map. And so, when a manager steps down or a crisis hits, it’s not that people can’t lead. It’s that they’re unsure what they’re leading towards.
This is compounded by another myth: That success is repeatable so long as the same team remains. It’s the belief that, like a football manager, if you keep the same players in the same positions, you’ll keep winning games.
But the game changes. The opposition evolves. The league table doesn’t stand still. Conditions shift and what once worked no longer fits the context.
Take football as an example and consider the contrasting leadership examples of Claudio Ranieri and Sir Alex Ferguson.
Ranieri’s Leicester City won the Premier League in 2016 with tactical flexibility, cohesion and unrepeatable momentum – but what followed was instructive.
Leicester tried to maintain its magic by keeping players they should have moved on and selling those they should have retained (for example, N’Golo Kanté).
Most damaging of all, they abandoned the very tactics that had made them successful; the disruptive counter-attacking style, in favour of what they perceived as a more ‘proper’ brand of football.
Meanwhile, competitors like Liverpool and Manchester City recognised the effectiveness of Leicester’s style and emulated it with better players and resources.
Leicester forgot their purpose and as a result lost their identity. Contrast that with Ferguson’s Manchester United. Over decades, United cycled through players, backroom staff and playing styles.
But their purpose; to win with intensity, adaptability and psychological edge never changed. Ferguson wasn’t defending a formula. He was leading a philosophy. That’s the difference between managing a moment and leading across eras.
And after Ferguson’s departure? United drifted. Without his adaptive clarity, they fell into a cycle of reaction, reinvention and reputational decline. Its purpose had been remembered through one man; and lost when he left.
Meanwhile, Manchester City, under Pep Guardiola, found its own; a philosophy of technical dominance, positional intelligence and relentless standards, embedded into every level of the organisation.
Yet individuals and organisations still cling to the past. Forgetting that great results often depend on a unique combination of timing, team dynamics and unseen scaffolding.
And when results slip, instead of questioning the system or adapting strategy, we blame the manager, replace the coach and try again; often without changing anything of substance.
The Peter Principle is well known – people are promoted to their level of incompetence. But what’s less examined is how often this is caused by a misunderstanding of success.
We confuse correlation with causation. A manager inherits a high-performing team, maintains stability and is seen as brilliant. But, when contexts shift, staff leave, funding tightens or expectations grow, leadership falters.
Why? Because we never asked why things were working in the first place. We mistook momentum for mastery. In civilian organisations, this misstep is almost systemic.
Leadership is too often built on: Myths of personality, not systems; static metrics, not adaptive behaviours and deference to status, not distributed insight.
And, when leadership collapses under stress, the instinct is to replace the person – not interrogate the structure.
When leadership pathways are vague or non-existent, we suffer more than talent loss.
We suffer: Organisational fragility (there is no one ready at 3 AM when the plan breaks); strategic amnesia (lessons aren’t passed on because leaders were never taught to teach) and cultural cynicism (promising leaders leave because they see no future and others stop trying).
The result is a vacuum where leadership should live. We ask people to show initiative and punish them for acting without permission.
We say we want vision but only reward output. We leave our future leaders staring at a locked door, key in hand.
In the Arctic tundra, lemmings survive not through dominance or status, but through collective movement, environmental awareness and instinctive coordination.
Their challenge is survival in an unforgiving landscape where the predators are real – and the stakes are existential.
Contrary to myth, lemmings don’t mindlessly follow each other off cliffs. Their survival depends on detecting pressure, navigating risk and moving together in response to environmental change.
Their behaviour is not blind – it’s adaptive. In business, the predators look different:
But the threat is just as real. Leadership, in this context, must become more than rank. It must be an adaptive function embedded across the organisation – not a single point of failure.
Lemmings don’t survive because they follow blindly. They survive because the group responds dynamically to threat, as there can be no guarantee of a single leader’s survival; leadership must be interchangeable, responsive and attuned.
In the modern economy, predation hasn’t vanished – it’s just evolved.
If we want the clarity of the military model without importing its hierarchy, we must embrace a leadership framework rooted in adaptive responsibility – not forced equality, but functional readiness. That starts by:
The military prepares for loss of command. Most civilian organisations don’t even prepare for loss of certainty. If we want to build resilient organisations, we must move from rhetoric to infrastructure.
Leadership can no longer be the accidental outcome of survival or the reward for tenure. It must be seen, supported and strategically placed.
If we don’t, we’ll keep asking the same question: Where do our leaders go? The answer, increasingly, is somewhere else.
This article was originally published in the July edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.
