DEFENCE
Veterans and Reservists deliver leadership in turbulent times According to Serco, businesses with policies designed to identify, attract and retain staff with a defence background stand to benefit within an increasingly uncertain business environment. You don’t need to scroll too far down your newsfeed before headlines influenced by our current employment market come to your attention. A record low unemployment rate, a drove of skilled workers taking up opportunities offshore, and low migration post-pandemic all contribute to a situation where talented people can be hard to find. However, for as long as there have been movements in employment trends, there have been people with ties to Defence – veterans and reserves – looking for opportunities in the civilian sector. Many of these people indicate that the greatest hurdles they face in their job hunt is in communicating their value to a potential employer. Either they struggle to ‘sell’ what they have, or employers find it hard to relate a candidates’ Defence experience to their business needs. The reality is that military experience brings a range of skills and qualities to add significant value to any commercial activity, with veterans often equipped with experiences that are keenly attuned to the demands to the business community. The range of skills and experience that military trained employees can bring to the workplace is wide and varied. Collectively, this workforce reflect community values, a strong work ethic, well developed planning and analysis tools, a healthy attention 26
to detail, the ability to work collaboratively and/or independently, and an expansive aptitude for learning new skills. These qualities are unsurprising when considering the nature of military organisations: large and complex but with a clear hierarchy, an abundance of processes and procedures, a continuous training and development pipeline to prepare people for new roles and higher duties, and a need to operate effectively under pressure with incomplete information. The sheer dominance of this quasi-corporate structure and the need to navigate it makes military trained personnel incredibly versatile, provided of course that potential employers can look beyond the specific military tasks a veteran once wielded and make use of the complete range of skills that a candidate brings. While these transferrable skills are indeed valuable, they largely serve to underpin the effectiveness of a veteran or reservist’s greatest contribution to an organisation, namely “leadership’, or more specifically, “leadership in turbulent and demanding circumstances”. The modern business environment is becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, or ‘VUCA’, with executives and academics alike seeking to understand and convey the impacts of the fourth industrial revolution on their corporate
strategies. Interestingly, the term VUCA was first used by the US Army War College in the late 1990s to describe the post-Cold War era military operating environment. Unsurprisingly, the emergent paradigms resulted in military organisations re-emphasising the development of ingrained leadership capabilities to navigate and respond to unpredictable and evolving environments over the past two decades. Put a little more bluntly, what is ‘new’ in business is ‘old hat’ in defence circles. The emerging consensus in the commercial world is that dynamic capabilities that support organisational agility are the key to survivability and success. Commonly categorised as ‘sensing, shaping, seizing and transforming’ capabilities, the ultimate aim is to position an organisation in a manner that enables it to respond to unpredicted changes in their environment. Further, driving this response – and ultimately organisational performance – is the domain of leadership. Those individuals who are able to detect and identify trends, establish a clear vision and direction toward the future, guide the collaborative formulation of options, organise and resource the organisation to deliver, and continuously innovate and adjust accordingly, have a high probability of success. Line of Defence
