The latest episode of the Evolve to Succeed podcast features Paul Kinkaid, a former Army Commando and Lieutenant Colonel, who led elite teams in some of the most challenging environments imaginable. After a 20-year career as the British Army’s Head of Training Development, he left the army to share his expertise and experiences with business. He now runs Selfless Leadership, a leadership coaching company based in Poole.
Here are some highlights from the podcast.
Tell us about how the things you learnt about leadership in the army formed the principles behind Selfless Leadership…
The British Army has got six core values, and one of them is selfless commitment; that was the one that truly resonated with me. The soldiers’ needs always came before mine. Simon Sinek has written a book—Leaders Eat Last—and that’s from a military position in that you always look after the team before yourself. And so that word ‘selfless’ resonated with me and when I left the military and started my coaching business, I didn’t need to ponder too long over what to call the business.
Explain some of the thoughts and core principles around Selfless Leadership…
The army uses a servant leadership approach which is very much top-down—you’re looking down and helping those under you in the hierarchy. For me, a selfless leader doesn’t only look down to the team, they look out to their peers and up to their boss. It’s that upward leadership, upward management where maybe the boss is under pressure so you say, “Look, I’ve got some spare capacity—can I help?”
For me, there are three core principles for a selfless leaders and they are generosity, empathy and excellence. Generosity with knowledge, skills, time, experience, advice, but only giving as much of you as is appropriate, not as much as you can. The reason for this is that you might end up solving the problem for your team instead of giving them the opportunity to step up and solve it themselves, which is important for personal growth.
Empathy I think speaks for itself—leading from a position of care and using emotional intelligence to understand how your emotions impact on others and vice-versa, stepping back and looking from that slightly elevated position as leader, surveying the ground and seeing what’s going on.
And then excellence, that pursuit of excellence but not allowing that pursuit to overthrow your compassion for the team.
Talk about leadership often leads to conversations about culture within an organisation. What’s your view on this idea of culture?
I don’t like the word culture. When I ask people what the culture of their organisation is, they might be able to come up with an answer but essentially, in my view, they’re coming up with behaviour and values. So what they really want is to change the behaviours in an organisation, and culture then catches up.If you think about the culture of the United Kingdom, that’s been growing for hundreds of years. The Prime Minister doesn’t come in and say, “You know what, we’re going to change the culture and we’re going to do it overnight.”
It’s a sticking point for me. I prefer to talk about the real tangible things that we can see and do; culture for me is not necessarily tangible and nor are behaviours but we can see behaviours and demonstrate them; we can challenge poor behaviour. Ergo, over time, the culture changes slowly.