Foundations of Military Leadership

LDR 201 · Leadership and Command · Level 200 (Phase Two)

A Royal Army College course in leading soldiers.

Course length: 10 hours, studied online and asynchronously at the student's own pace, together with any in-person practical instruction and assessment the course requires.

Foreword

Leadership is the lifeblood of an army. Weapons, training, and equipment matter, but they are inert without the human quality that turns a group of individuals into a disciplined body that will hold together and go forward when everything tells them to stop. That quality is leadership, and it belongs to the moral component of fighting power, the part that decides battles more often than numbers do.

For a small force this is not a comforting saying but a practical truth. The Royal Kaharagian Army will rarely have the advantage of mass. Its real edge is the quality of its people and of those who lead them. A small, well-led force outfights a larger, badly-led one, and a small, badly-led one is simply small. This course is therefore among the most important the College teaches, because it develops the thing on which everything else rests.

Leadership is also not reserved for officers, or even for the senior. The soldier who is second-in-command of a section leads; so does the soldier who, on a bad day, steadies the person beside them. This course is the foundation for all of that, and the entry to the longer study of leadership and command.

Who this course is for

Every member who will lead, which in time is every member: aspiring and new junior non-commissioned officers, officer candidates, and any soldier who wants to understand the foundations of leadership. It assumes the Basic Training Manual, in particular the modules on the soldier, discipline, and ethics, and it is the prerequisite for the College's leadership and officer-development courses.

What you will be able to do

By the end you will be able to:

• explain what leadership is, and how it differs from command and from management;
• describe the foundation of leadership in character and competence, what a leader is and knows;
• state the Army's values and standards, and why leadership rests on them;
• explain what leaders do, through the actions of influencing, developing, evaluating, and achieving;
• choose a leadership style for the situation, and explain mission command;
• recognise ethical and unethical leadership, and set a healthy climate; and
• understand followership, and take the first steps of leading a small team.

How the course works

The course is self-paced and studied online, lesson by lesson, with a reflection at the end of each. But leadership, more than almost anything, is learned by doing. This course gives you the understanding; the skill is grown in real appointments, under the eye of those who already lead, and through honest reflection on your own successes and failures. Treat the reflections as the heart of the course, and the rest of your service as its practical.

The framework

The Army does not tie its leadership to any single academic theory. It teaches one simple, practical framework, set out in the RKA Organisational Planning Document and shared with the British and Irish military traditions:

• A leader rests on character (what a leader is) and competence (what a leader knows).
• That character and competence are expressed through what a leader does: the actions of Influencing, Developing, Evaluating, and Achieving.
• All of it is bounded by the Army's values and standards, and by the law.

This framework runs through every lesson, so that by the end it is not a list to recite but a way of seeing the work.

Structure

A note on study and practice

Reading about leadership no more makes a leader than reading about swimming makes a swimmer. This course is the study, and it matters, because a leader who has thought hard about leadership before they hold it leads better when they do. But hold the study lightly enough to test it against reality, and humbly enough to keep learning from those you lead. There is no member who cannot greatly improve their leadership, and none who has finished learning it.

A note on sources

This is the College's own course. It is built on the Army's own leadership doctrine (the RKA Organisational Planning Document) and on the open Commonwealth and European leadership writing, the British Army's Developing Leaders and Army Leadership Doctrine, the Irish Defence Forces Leadership Doctrine, and the Canadian Forces leadership series and Duty with Honour, written fresh in Kaharagian terms rather than reproduced.

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