How To Be A High-Impact Leader: 4 Tips From A Former Royal Marine with Roderic Yapp
In the latest episode of Extra-Ordinary Leaders, I sat down with Roderic Yapp, former Royal Marine, speaker, and director of Leadership Forces. Rod founded his leadership training and development consultancy in 2015, taking principles of high performance from the Royal Marines to develop great leaders and culture.
And Rod isn’t the only former military officer turned leadership coach. In fact, people with military backgrounds seem to be incredibly successful in the leadership space. Why is that? And what makes them so successful? What can we learn from their unique lived experiences that will benefit our ability to show up as extra-ordinary leaders?
Let’s find out.
4 ways to be a high-performance leader
Rod offered so much wisdom and value on high-performance leadership influenced by his time in the Royal Marines that I have distilled it into four main points. Let’s explore each in detail.
Put your rifle down
Entrepreneurs often work 60 to 80 hours per week. That’s up to double the amount of hours put in by most full-time employees.
Entrepreneurs who want to become better leaders and improve the output of their business often start by looking at themselves. And of course, as I’ve explored in great depth over the course of Extra-Ordinary Leaders, self-reflection is the foundation of extra-ordinary leadership.
But there’s another way to look at it. One where all the onus isn’t on us.
If leaders like us working an average of 60 hours a week wanted to increase our input – and I’m not just talking about the amount of hours we’re working, but how hard we’re working and the targets we’re setting – by even just 20 per cent, we’d be adding an unmanageable amount of time to our day. We’d have to make huge personal sacrifices to do this.
But if we could increase the input and performance (again, not hours worked but rather buy-in, productivity, and targets reached) of our team by just 20 per cent, the benefit of this would be far greater than we could ever achieve on our own, and with less sacrifice.
To do this, we can think about what individual people in our team are good at and how we can make them even better. How can we build a team around the challenges and weaknesses that we all have?
Rod: “If you want to improve the performance of your team, you can't carry that load. I take this from my time in the Marines… If you’re in a firefight and you’re shooting your rifle, you are one rifle of 30 weapon systems. Your single rifle is having minimal impact. Instead, you can put your rifle away, take the scope away, and start looking at what people are doing around you. [You can] start thinking about the effect you want to have, start managing people, and step back. Leading... means looking at what other people are doing and coordinating them as a group so they can have the greatest effect. Stop playing the musical instruments, start conducting the orchestra.”
It’s much like the saying “give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” If we can spend more time improving the performance of our team and less time running around trying to do more ourselves, it’s going to have a far bigger impact long term.
We need to ensure people are clear on what is expected of them, give them more responsibility, and invest in training and upskilling.
Get on the ground
When we talk about good communication in coaching, it’s not just about the way we’re delivering our instructions as a leader. It’s about the questions we’re asking our team in order to truly understand their perspective and how they view our vision. This is important – transactional leaders give extrinsic motivation (demands and mandates), transformational leaders give intrinsic motivation (purpose and buy-in).
It’s good practice as a leader to “go two ranks down” and ask our team for their perspective – to check in with what is actually going on “on the ground”.
In tandem with this, it is crucial that the core vision everyone on the team should be camped around is communicated with clarity. A great way to test how clear we’re being with our message is not to keep repeating it over and over, but to ask our team questions:
What are you working towards?
What are you trying to achieve this week and how does that contribute to our shared goals as an organisation?
How are you moving forwards and developing on a monthly basis?
Rod: “This is something I’ve seen in both the military and lean manufacturing… which is, you don’t lead from behind a laptop. If you want to lead people you have to go out and speak to them and understand what the world looks like from their perspective. So you might see senior officers taking trips to bases in Afghanistan on the front line to really feel and understand what it’s like to live in those austere environments. But equally in manufacturing, if you’ve got a problem with a manufacturing process, you don't solve that in a meeting room. You go down and have a look at how the machine is being built.”
Keep training
Great leadership is not something we’re born with. It’s something that is learned through experience, mistakes, and collaboration. As successful businessman Harold Geneen was credited with saying, “Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned.”
Of course, some of us may have a natural proclivity for leadership, but it is for this reason that it is vital we are constantly learning and reflecting.
We can – and should – have people to guide us on this learning, but ultimately it has to come from within us, from within our unique contexts and situations. This is why the best leadership coaches ask and don’t tell.
Rod: “When I’m coaching people, I really try and encourage them to, at the end of the week, sit and reflect about what happened that week. ‘What did I plan to do? What did I actually do? What am I going to do differently?’”
Be adaptable
Rod drives home the importance of adapting to the situations and contexts that we might find ourselves in, illustrating how crucial it is that we are able to behave in a way that generates the right impact for our team:
Rod: “When I was in Afghanistan in 2007, before we were about to go out, the Taliban hit an Afghan National Army patrol and killed some of them. And these guys were brought back into the base just as we were heading out... I remember thinking ‘right, what do I say to my guys just before we go out on the ground, given that there’s such a close connection between what could just be about to happen to us and the job we have to do? How do I put them in the headspace to do the job?’”
Rod adapted to the context, reasoning that the likelihood was that the Taliban were withdrawing following the attack, knowing there was going to be a response. In a strange and devastating way, this meant it was likely safer for Rod’s team following what had just happened.
Of course, this situation is a million miles away from corporate life where the stakes are nowhere near as high. But Rod emphasises that vital role leaders have: to find the opportunity to adapt even in challenging, unforeseen circumstances, and to use these situations as learning for a better long-term outcome.
These are just some of the many lessons in leadership Rod takes from his time in the Royal Marines and uses to help high-performance leaders unlock their extra-ordinary abilities. For more information, the full conversation is available here.
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To get in touch with Rod, find him on LinkedIn or check out Leadership Forces.
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