Lesson Overview
The first four lessons built the foundation. Leadership rests on character, what a leader is (Lesson 02), and on competence, what a leader knows (Lesson 03), both bounded by the Army's values and standards (Lesson 04). Character and competence are not ornaments. They exist to be expressed, and they are expressed in what a leader does.
The Army's doctrine names four actions through which the work gets done, following the wider Commonwealth and European tradition: Influence, Develop, Evaluate, and Achieve. They are not a sequence to tick off once. They run together, every day. A corporal briefing a section for a task is influencing and achieving, and if they are any good, developing and evaluating, all in the same five minutes.
This is the practical heart of the course, and the most concrete part of it, because it is about the ordinary things a junior leader does hour by hour with the people in front of them. What follows teaches each action in turn, then adds a functional lens, the three needs of task, team, and individual, then gathers the whole into a short list of habits you can carry onto the ground. By the end you will be able to describe the four actions, give a day-to-day example of each, use the three-needs model to read a situation, name the everyday habits of a leader at work, and explain how character and competence are made visible through all of them.
The framework in one picture:
flowchart TD
CH["CHARACTER: what a leader IS<br/>(Lesson 02)"] --> DO
CO["COMPETENCE: what a leader KNOWS<br/>(Lesson 03)"] --> DO
DO["expressed in what a leader DOES"]
DO --> I["Influence"]
DO --> D["Develop"]
DO --> E["Evaluate"]
DO --> A["Achieve"]
V["bounded by the Army's VALUES and STANDARDS (Lesson 04)"] -.-> DO
The four actions are not separate jobs done by separate people. They are four faces of the one task of leading, and each feeds the others:
THE FOUR ACTIONS OF LEADERSHIP (they run together, every day)
+-------------+ sets the direction and the example;
| INFLUENCE | communicates intent; motivates; builds
+------+------+ trust and morale
|
v
+-------------+ grows the team and the individual through
| DEVELOP | training, coaching, delegation, and honest
+------+------+ feedback (more capable AFTER than before)
|
v
+-------------+ knows the team and the situation; monitors;
| EVALUATE | reviews after action; adjusts
+------+------+
|
v
+-------------+ plans, organises, decides, directs, and sees
| ACHIEVE | the task through to a good end
+-------------+
Influence and Develop raise willing, capable people.
Evaluate keeps the picture honest. Achieve is the output of the rest.
Key Terms
- Influence: moving people, by word and by example, to give their willing effort toward the mission; the part of leadership most visible to those led.
- Develop: growing the capability of oneself, of others, and of the team, so a team is more capable after a task than before it.
- Evaluate: judging honestly, of oneself, of others, and of performance, so that what is good is sustained and what is poor is put right.
- Achieve: accomplishing the task to standard and on time, through planning, organising, deciding, directing, and the will to see it through.
- Commander's intent: the why behind a task, the purpose and the end state, stated plainly enough that people can act sensibly when the plan breaks or you are not there to ask.
- The three needs: the functional view that every leadership moment carries three demands at once, the task (the job to be done), the team (the group that does it), and the individual (each person in it); neglect one and the others suffer.
- After-action review: the honest, blame-free conversation held after a task, asking together what went well and what can be done better, so the lesson is owned by the whole team.
- Climate: how the members of a unit feel about it, drawn from its daily functioning, its discipline, and how its people are treated; the leader sets it.
Influence
Influence is the action most people picture when they think of leadership. It moves others to give their effort willingly, and it works two ways at once: through what a leader says and what a leader does. People hear your words but believe your deeds. Your attitude sets the tone, and a steady, positive outlook is as infectious as a sour one.
The first activity is setting the direction and the example. The goal has to be pointed at clearly, by someone plainly heading there themselves. A section second-in-command who tells the team the kit will be carried fairly, then shoulders an awkward load without being asked, has set a direction and underwritten it in a single act. Direction without example is empty; example without direction is good behaviour going nowhere.
The second is communicating, to pass on intent, show trust, and kill the rumour that fills any silence. The most important thing to communicate is the why. People who understand the purpose press on through friction and make sensible choices when you are not over them; people who have only the what stop dead the moment the plan no longer fits. So a good order says not just "carry these stores to the far building by last light" but adds: "because the relief team relieves us there at dusk and cannot work without them." That clause lets a soldier improvise a route when the first one floods. This is the seed of commander's intent, taught fully in Lesson 06; for now, fix the habit of always saying why. Communication is also listening, confirming the message has landed (a quick "tell me back what we are doing" is worth the minute), and hearing what lies behind what a soldier says. Its success or failure is the leader's responsibility, not the listener's.
The third is motivating. Motivation springs from a soldier's faith in their unit, their leaders, and their own competence, built by hard, fair, realistic training, good discipline, and making sure each person understands their part matters. It is rarely a single rousing speech. Far more often it is the steady drip of small things: a task pitched to stretch but not crush, a difficulty shared rather than dumped, a hard day made bearable because the leader carried their share.
The fourth is deciding. Leaders make decisions, including hard ones, and in the absence of a clear priority they set one, because things left to themselves drift from bad to worse. The plain act of looking a subordinate in the eye and telling them your decision is a hallmark of leadership.
Beyond these, a leader builds trust and morale through a positive climate. A fair, disciplined climate where people can learn, admit a mistake, and be heard draws out their best; a climate of fear shuts them down. Trust runs both ways and is built mostly in small, unglamorous moments: the promise kept, the credit passed on, the blame absorbed rather than spread. It is slow to build and quick to lose. Bullying and harassment in any form are a complete failure of leadership, not a hard edge of it. A leader also influences through acknowledgement: a simple, honestly meant word of thanks, given promptly and in the right place, is one of the most powerful and least expensive tools a leader has. Praise the work in public, correct the person in private, hold no grudges.
Finally, a leader encourages initiative and empowers subordinates: trains them to do the job, gives them the resources and the authority, then stands back to let them get on with it. This is a statement of trust and the surest way to develop them, and it rests on listening to what people mean, not only to what they say.
Develop
A leader is not paid only to complete the task in front of them. They are paid to leave the team, and themselves, more capable than they found them. The plain test is this: is the team better after the task than before it? A task completed but teaching the team nothing has only half succeeded; one completed and leaving the section more practised, confident, and trusting has paid a double dividend. The General Staff and senior soldiers of the future are, today, junior officers and junior non-commissioned officers; developing them is the Army's investment in its own survival. Development has three objects: oneself, others, and the team.
Developing oneself begins with self-awareness, an honest picture of your own strengths and weaknesses. A leader can be competent and still be undone by a lack of it, which reads to others as arrogance and closes off the very feedback that would improve them. To this add study (of doctrine, the profession, military history, and people) and reflection, the disciplined habit of turning over your successes and failures to learn from both. The Army holds that no member cannot greatly improve their leadership; self-development is a lifelong choice to pursue knowledge beyond your present competence, mostly a joint effort between you and the leader above you.
Developing others is done through four close, practical activities, best seen as a ladder of growing independence:
DEVELOPING OTHERS: a ladder of growing independence
TRAIN give the skill "Here is the drill. Watch, then do it
and the knowledge with me, then do it on your own."
COACH draw out the answer "What do you think the problem is?
rather than give it What would you try first?"
DELEGATE hand over the task, "This is yours now. You have the people
the authority, and and the authority. Bring me only what
the room to do it falls outside your remit."
FEED BACK tell them honestly "That stoppage drill was quick and clean.
how they did, to Your timing on the move was loose; here
develop, not to wound is exactly how to tighten it."
Training is the foundation: building a skill until it is reliable, by the dependable method of explanation, demonstration, and supervised practice. Coaching sits a rung higher: instead of handing a person the answer, you ask the questions that let them find it, because an answer reached under their own power is one they keep and can repeat without you. Delegation develops people fastest, handing over not just a chore but the authority to make the calls that go with it, then resisting the urge to hover. It is not abdication: you remain responsible for the outcome, you set the boundaries and check the result, but inside those boundaries the person owns the task and learns from owning it. Honest feedback closes every loop, because developing people without telling them, plainly and kindly, how they are doing is coaching with the scoreboard switched off. Alongside these run the longer relationships of mentoring and counselling, the supportive conversation that steadies and redirects. All are how leaders are grown, and the seriousness with which those in charge develop their people is the measure of their own leadership.
The third object is building cohesive teams, and it deserves its own weight, because the team, not the individual, is the basic unit of military strength. Teams do not happen by accident. They are built, through their forming, settling, and maturing, by a leader who sets the standards and the climate from the first day, manages friction honestly, and patiently grows the trust that lets people work beyond the minimum for one another. Cohesion is the "we" feeling, built on integrity and selflessness. You must be every bit the team player you wish your subordinates to be, and more.
Evaluate
Evaluation keeps the other three actions honest. It is not a form filled in once a year but a continuous habit of judging accurately against the standard, so good performance is recognised and reinforced and poor performance is found and fixed. It rests first on knowing your team and the situation: who is strong and who is struggling, who needs watching and who needs only to be left alone, and reading the situation as it actually is rather than as the plan assumed. A leader who knows neither is guessing. Most of all, you must evaluate yourself and those within your reach.
Evaluating oneself and others honestly starts with self-evaluation, the root of self-awareness and growth. A leader who examines their own actions critically and without flinching encourages the same open-mindedness in their people. When evaluating others, the appraisal must be constructive, accurate, honest, realistic, and well delivered. The hardest part is staying open to feedback running the other way, from superiors, peers, and subordinates. The rule is simple: do not shoot the messenger. The moment you lose your temper at bad news is the moment your people stop bringing it, and a leader told only good news is flying blind.
Evaluating performance is the daily craft of monitoring: supervising, inspecting, praising what is done well, and correcting what is not, all while the task is still running and there is time to put it right. This is not breathing down necks; it is a steady, light hand on the pulse of the job, so a small problem is caught while it is still small. The most useful single discipline is the after-action review, held when a task is done. Gather the team and ask three plain questions, without fear or blame: what were we trying to do, what actually happened, and what will we do the same or differently next time. Its power is that when subordinates work out together why something succeeded or failed, they become part owners of how the team performs, and the lesson sticks because they reached it themselves. It is also where the leader takes a point of criticism about their own part without bristling, because the team watches that moment and learns whether the review is real or a ritual.
Underneath all of this lies critical thinking: logical, reasoned thought, free of bias, that gets to the root of a problem rather than reacting to its surface. There is no room in a learning force for a "zero defects" mentality that punishes honest mistakes and so teaches people to hide them. Evaluation issues in two things. The first is feedback, which begins with careful observation and an accurate record (keep notes when you are responsible for several people) and is given to develop, not to wound. Given well, it is the most useful gift a leader can pass to those they lead, and the one most often withheld. The second is adjustment, the whole point of having evaluated: a leader who monitors and reviews but never changes the plan, the priorities, or their own conduct has merely watched the problem more carefully.
Achieve
Achieving means accomplishing the mission, to standard and on time, while taking proper care of your people. It is the output of the other three actions: a leader influences, develops, and evaluates in order, in the end, to get results. It draws together five plain activities: planning, organising, deciding, directing, and seeing the task through.
The first is planning. A plan is a proposal for getting something done; it reduces confusion, builds confidence, and lowers risk. A leader gets input from subordinates, which improves the plan and gives people a stake in it, then sequences the tasks, sets a timeline, and rehearses where they can. A useful rule when forwarding problems upward: ask your commander to decide only the things outside your own authority, not every problem whose solution is merely difficult. Make your commander's job easy, as you would wish those below you to make yours.
The second is organising, the unglamorous but decisive business of matching people, time, and resources to the plan, so the right person, with the right kit, is in the right place at the right moment. A sound plan organised badly fails just as surely as a poor plan, because the soldiers arrive without the stores, or two tasks need the same vehicle at once, or no one was told who is in charge while the commander is forward. Organising turns good intentions into a workable arrangement of who, what, where, and when.
The third is deciding and giving direction, purpose, and priorities. Leaders make clear what is to be achieved and why, and they prioritise, because telling people everything is equally urgent tells them you cannot make a decision. Decisions cannot always wait for complete information; a good leader makes a timely call on the best picture available and adjusts as it sharpens, because a fair decision made in time usually beats a perfect one made too late. Good direction depends on knowing how the work is actually going, so you can step in to clarify without smothering people. Give enough guidance and no more: over-supervision strangles initiative, under-supervision leaves people guessing at an intent they never grasped.
The fourth is directing the work and holding discipline and standards. Leaders set, communicate, and enforce the standard, and hold subordinates responsible for meeting it. The junior leader who insists weapons be re-inspected after the ranges is not throwing their rank about; they are doing their job, and accepting less would quietly endorse a bad habit. Standards are exercised with judgement, not zealotry, but the fact that a task is not the priority never excuses a lack of care over it.
The fifth is seeing the task through to a good end: moving past the obstacles of time, shortage, and friction by staying positive, resilient, and fixed on the mission, checking the job is actually finished rather than merely started, and recognising achievement when it comes. Genuine, public appreciation of good work motivates people for the next task and builds, over time, a team that expects of itself that things will be done well. Through all of it, the people are looked after; a task driven through at the cost of the team that did it is a victory that loses the next battle.
The three needs: task, team, and individual
The four actions tell you what a leader does. There is an older and simpler lens that tells you what a leader must keep in balance at every moment, and it can be applied to any decision, large or small, in the space of a breath. In every situation a leader meets three needs at once, and the three pull against one another, so the job is to keep them in balance.
THE THREE NEEDS (a leader balances all three, always)
+----------------+
| TASK |
| the job to be |
| done, to |
| standard and |
| on time |
+-------+--------+
/ \
/ \
/ \
+-------------+ +-------------+
| TEAM |-------| INDIVIDUAL |
| the group: | | each person:|
| cohesion, | | their needs,|
| morale, | | growth, and |
| standards, | | well-being |
| trust | | |
+-------------+ +-------------+
The three overlap. Press on the TASK and ignore the TEAM, and
cohesion frays until the task itself suffers. Indulge the
INDIVIDUAL and let the TASK slip, and the whole team is let down.
Drive the TASK and the TEAM but neglect the struggling INDIVIDUAL,
and you lose the person, and the team notices. Neglect any one
and you harm the other two.
The task is the need to get the job done, to standard and on time. The team is the need to hold the group together, keeping its cohesion, morale, discipline, and trust in good repair. The individual is the need of each person: for fair treatment, development, welfare, and for their part to matter. The art is to read which need presses hardest now and act on it without letting the other two go to ruin.
A worked example shows how fast this lens works. A section has worked through a long, wet day and the task, carrying stores forward, is nearly done; one soldier is flagging badly. The task says press on. The individual says that soldier needs a rest, dry hands, and a word. The team is watching whether their commander drives a struggling comrade into the ground or looks after them. The leader who holds all three redistributes the heavy load for the last stretch, has a quiet word and a moment's rest for the flagging soldier, and gets the stores forward on time, all at once. That is the four actions in miniature: influence, develop, evaluate, achieve. The two models are two views of the same thing, and a leader who learns to flick between them has a tool for almost any leadership moment.
The practical habits of a leader at work
Models are only worth what they change in your conduct. The four actions and the three needs come down, in the daily life of a junior leader, to a handful of plain habits, each small, repeatable, and within reach of anyone willing to do the work. They are not a grand gesture; they are the gesture repeated until it is simply how you operate.
The first habit is giving clear orders. People can only follow what they have understood, so a leader gives the task and the why in plain language, in a sensible order, then confirms it has landed before anyone moves. A muddled order is the leader's failure, not the listener's, and a minute spent making it clear saves an hour fixing the confusion. (The full structure of a military order, the sequence and headings every soldier expects, is the subject of the Signals and Field Communication course; here, fix only the habit of being clear and saying why.)
The second is leading from the front where it matters. This does not mean doing everyone's job or being physically first at all times; that is interference, not leadership. It means being present at the point of greatest difficulty or danger, sharing the hardship you ask of others, and being seen to do so, because a leader who shoulders the worst of the load when it counts earns a credit of trust no speech can buy. Judgement decides where the front is: sometimes at the head of the section, sometimes at the radio or over the map.
The third is checking that the job is done. Trust your people, and verify the result; the two are not in conflict. A leader who delegates and never checks is gambling, and one who issues an order and assumes it was carried out to standard will one day be unpleasantly surprised. Inspect the finished work, confirm the task is complete and not merely begun, and quietly put right what falls short. This is the habit that turns a plan into an achievement.
The fourth, which runs underneath all the others and never switches off, is looking after people throughout. From before the task to after it, the leader sees to the team's welfare, food, rest, water, kit, morale, the quiet word to the one struggling, before their own. This is the practical face of the leader serves the led: the soldiers' needs come first, the leader's comfort last. It costs little, is repaid in loyalty, effort, and trust, and is the surest single mark of a leader worth following.
These habits map cleanly back onto the actions and the needs:
FROM MODEL TO HABIT
Give clear orders ............ Influence (communicate the why);
serves the TASK and the TEAM
Lead from the front .......... Influence by example;
serves the TEAM and the TASK
Check the job is done ........ Evaluate (monitor, review) +
Achieve; serves the TASK
Look after people throughout . Develop + the leader-serves-the-led;
serves the INDIVIDUAL and the TEAM
In Practice: A Morning in the Life of a Section Second-in-Command at a Relief Centre
A small RKA section is working alongside the civil authorities at a relief centre set up in a community hall after a spell of severe weather, helping move and distribute supplies to people sheltering there. Watch a good section second-in-command across one morning and you will see all four actions, the three needs, and the four habits woven together.
They begin by briefing the section plainly and completely, and they do not stop at the what: "We are moving the bottled water and the blankets from the delivery point to the main hall and laying them out by the far wall, finished by mid-morning, because the families arrive at midday and we want the place ready and calm before they do." Then a quick "tell it back to me." That is influence through clear orders and the why, serving the task and the team at once.
As the work starts they notice a new recruit handling the heavy crates awkwardly and tiring fast. Rather than take the job off them or let them struggle, they spend two minutes showing a safer lift, then watch the recruit do it right twice. That is develop, by training and coaching, serving the individual; and because the recruit will now last the morning, it serves the task too.
Throughout, they keep a light hand on the work, monitoring without hovering, and catch early that the blankets are being stacked where they will block a fire exit. They adjust the layout on the spot: evaluate leading straight to adjustment. When the serial is done they gather the section for ninety seconds: "What were we doing, what actually happened, what do we fix next time?" The water went smoothly; the blanket stack went wrong because the plan never said where the exits were, and they own that aloud rather than blame the soldier who stacked them. That is the after-action review, real precisely because the leader took the point about their own briefing without bristling.
Across the morning they organise the people and crates, decide quickly when two tasks compete for the one trolley, direct the work and hold the standard so the stores are squared away and not just dumped, and see the task through, checking the hall is genuinely ready before they break: that is achieve. When a soldier is plainly flagging near the end they redistribute the load and find them a few minutes and a hot drink, looking after people throughout, before their own rest. The three needs stayed balanced: the task done on time and to standard; the team together and a little better for the morning; and no individual driven into the ground or left behind.
None of it required a special occasion. It required a leader of character and competence, doing the work.
Check Your Understanding
- Name the four leadership actions and give one concrete, day-to-day example of each that a junior non-commissioned officer might perform in a single shift at a relief centre. For one of your examples, identify which of the three needs (task, team, or individual) it most directly serves.
- Influence works through both word and deed, and the most important thing to communicate is the why. Explain why "leading by example" sits at the centre of influence, give one example of a leader whose deeds would undermine their words, and explain what a soldier can do with the why that they cannot do with the what alone.
- Use the three-needs model on a single moment: a section is nearly finished a tiring task when one soldier is clearly struggling. Describe what a leader who serves only the task does, what a leader who serves only the individual does, and what a leader who balances all three does. Why does the lesson say that neglecting any one need harms the other two?
Reflection (write a short paragraph): Of the four actions, which do you think will come least naturally to you, and why? Think of a real situation, in the Army or out of it, where that action was needed and either done well or neglected, and use the three needs (task, team, individual) to describe what was at stake. What is the first practical habit, from the four in this lesson, that you could build to strengthen the action you find hardest?
Summary
- Character (what a leader is) and competence (what a leader knows) exist to be expressed in what a leader does: the four actions of Influence, Develop, Evaluate, and Achieve, which run together every day.
- Influence moves people by word and deed, and rests on example, which people believe over words.
- Develop grows capability so the team is more capable after a task than before, across oneself, others, and the team.
- Evaluate keeps the rest honest by monitoring while there is still time to fix things, holding the blame-free after-action review, and then actually adjusting in the light of what you learn.
- Achieve is the output of the rest: planning, organising, deciding, directing, holding standards, and seeing the task through while caring for the people.
- The three needs, task, team, and individual, are a usable lens for any leadership moment: keep all three in balance, because neglecting one harms the others.
- The practical habits that carry the models onto the ground are giving clear orders, leading from the front where it matters, checking that the job is done, and looking after people throughout, which is the practical face of the leader serving the led.
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