‘Leadership is about noticing more than anything else’
Matt Offord spent 30 years in the Royal Navy. He now works as a leadership academic at the University of Glasgow. His ideas and research will empower both individual and collective action.
A five-minute walk from the University of Glasgow campus is Kelvingrove Park, eighty-five acres of green space carved in two by the meandering tree-lined River Kelvin. Kelvingrove is part of the city’s scientific and philosophical history, in Glasgow’s West End, a short walk from the River Clyde. It features a statue of physics professor Lord Kelvin, the namesake of the famous temperature unit. Lord Lister, pioneer of antiseptics, is there; and the Stewart Memorial Fountain commemorates the man who provided the city with fresh water from Loch Katrine. There are other, more controversial, figures too. Thomas Carlye, the historian and philosopher, stands between the childcare centre and the bandstand; close to the river, deep in thought, looking down on dog walkers, joggers and curious students.
On any weekday during term time, Matt Offord, associate director of learning and teaching at the nearby Adam Smith Business School, can be seen standing next to Carlyle, asking undergraduates to consider leadership outside the classroom. “Carlye wrote the great man theory of leadership in the 1850s; it’s controversial because it describes leaders as heroic, masculine and divine,” says Matt. “We stand there talking about him and his work. We ask questions, notice how the students respond, and reframe the story. ‘Why is the great man theory important?’ ‘Why wouldn’t it be entertained today?’ ‘What’s changed between then and now?’ You’d have a big problem trying to sell the great man theory today because it rules out 50 per cent of the population.”
Learning leadership in the Navy
Matt Offord started his journey into leadership back in 1989. Growing up in rural Cambridgeshire, he wanted to fly planes. While he considered the Royal Air Force, he thought the Royal Navy could be the place to become a pilot. As a teenager, he applied and was accepted, but he had to wait before he could start training. In the months that followed, he got a taste of civilian life, working at a local accountancy firm in Cambridge; he suggests it could have been a good career path, too. But when the Navy got in touch asking him to start earlier than expected, he was off to Dartmouth like a shot. “When I joined the Navy, I never really looked back,” he says.
Matt never flew a plane. But he did take to military life. During his training, he got up early, dressed and went for a five-mile run. Then he was back, showered and changed into another kit for breakfast. This structure, discipline and kit rotation would continue all day, until around 8pm, when officers inspected his accommodation to make sure it was clean and tidy; to make sure he was clean and tidy. Then he would prepare for the next day. And so, it went on, alongside hosting cocktail parties.
“These were not things I was particularly good at in real life, but that professionalism really helped me to be organised and to plan ahead,” he says. “There is a real family feeling in the armed forces; you think about other people because you do everything in teams. You are reliant on each other. It was early days, but we were being trained as leaders; we were being trained to care about other people.”
‘Trained to care about other people…’ I noticed that comment because it felt important in our discussion about leadership. Matt explained that he and his peers were soon responsible for others. As a divisional officer, one of the most important entry-level jobs in the Navy, he would have a group of sailors to look after. He made sure their career progression was in hand. He was a point of contact for compassionate, and even financial, issues. Matt says he would sit down with sailors and help them reconcile their bank statements, chequebook in hand, as it was back then.
At 21, in his first non-training role, Matt’s leadership experience stepped up. He began to shape his approach. Servant leadership – working in service of those around him – was a concept that resonated; important when he wasn’t the most experienced person. Matt’s team were all around ten years older and he had much to learn about the ship’s systems. But he could only do that with their help. It was a real lesson in how to be humble, to get on with people; and to accept the fact that even though people called him ‘sir’ he needed them more than they needed him. He came to appreciate people for the specialist knowledge they had.
I ask Matt if there was a time when his leadership learning came together. He shares an example later in his career when he trained executive leaders. He would travel around the world making sure ships and systems were working properly. Matt would spend weeks on board running training courses in leadership and management, alongside a team of technical specialists. He had mechanical engineers, divers, mine warfare specialists; there was no way he would know everything they did. But he didn’t have to; he had to enable the team, with its different personalities, to do the best job they could in the time they had.
“I was in charge of the programme, but once it started, they just ran with it,” he says. “When you have the right people qualified to the right level – and you have looked after them sufficiently – then that happens. Those programmes went well, not because I added much professionally, but because I helped and supported the people involved.”
Post-heroic leadership – the beginning of academia
Matt’s Navy career entered a new chapter when he returned from the Iraq War in 2003. He had suffered from partial sight loss because of a rapidly developing eye condition called bilateral keratoconus. It meant he couldn’t dive or keep watch from the bridge of a ship. So, he spent the following years on shore, feeling a bit lost, unsure what to do next. He didn’t want to leave the Navy, but he felt limited. As a deputy harbourmaster, he kept an eye on the defence information notices – DINs, as they called – which listed potential opportunities for service personnel. One was to study for a PhD, funded by the Navy. He applied, but the first time, he was turned down. He tried again a year later. This time he was successful.
It was now 2010. Matt was interested to know if his leadership experience could be brought to life through academic research. His PhD ‘Beyond Nelson: a post-heroic view of leadership in the Royal Navy’ set the tone; that leadership was less dependent on heroic individuals and more dependent on the situation, where different people come to the fore at different times. Yes, there was a chain of command, there was a captain. But if you swapped one crew for another, the dynamic would be different, even with the same leader in place.
Matt studied these networks. Onboard a submarine or ship, there is a group of people working in confined conditions, often for months at a time. It’s important, of course, that these people can work together; there isn’t space for a big drama every five minutes. But they don’t have to like each other to be able to work together. In any case, if a leader issues an instruction, then those people will decide how to respond, especially if they find a particular leader overbearing. Will they comply? Will they resist? Resistance, without getting into trouble, is a normal function of that group, says Matt. No matter how clever an individual leader might be, they won’t be as clever as a group of ten people. That’s why good leaders will engage with that team, rather than achieve things by force.
These networks are powerful, then. During his research, Matt asked every single person on board who they went to for professional advice; he wanted to get a sense of their ‘prestige’. He did the same for personal connections. Why? Because when information needed to find its way to the bridge of the ship, the network would kick into action. When a fire needed putting out – a simulated fire, using smoke generators – he found that information would only get passed on via people considered to be prestigious. They were respected regardless of their rank; their expertise, or in some cases their social standing, meant they were trusted. Matt remembers a time when a senior crew member, who had only been on a ship for a couple of weeks, tried to pass on information. But he found it difficult. He had the authority. But he hadn’t established himself in the network.
“It sounds like you are undermining the command-and-control system,” says Matt. “But that’s not what it’s about. You have a formal system, and you have an informal system, and these two systems work well together. You need both. My experience showed me that the Navy was good at switching between the two, and that also applies to 21st Century business: sometimes you need to switch to a more informal way of doing things.”
Into the classroom (and out again)
Since the beginning of 2019, Matt has worked at Adam Smith Business School at The University of Glasgow. He spends a lot of time with fourth-year undergraduates, preparing them for the real world. In conversations about leadership, he’s aiming to build a bridge between theory and practice. His students all love a textbook, and the security and predictability of a lecture. But Matt likes to get them moving and thinking. He wants them to get creative, to learn for themselves, and to do that without the aid of an internet search.
That’s because leaders are going to make decisions, and there are going to be consequences for those decisions. So, the best way to understand those decisions is to start noticing what is going on around you, he says, crediting Dr Suzie Kellett for the concept. This is not about teaching people to do things a certain way but giving them the tools to make up their own minds, to challenge bias, to reframe things, and to apply critical thinking – before taking action. But they can only do that when they stop and notice what’s going on around them.
When students arrive at lectures, laptops come out of bags, and a sea of faces sit, poised for Matt to start talking. But then he asks them to put on their coats, go outside and complete a task. That could be a trip to Kelvingrove Park to see Thomas Carlye; a walk to Byers Road to understand more about local businesses, or a journey closer to home, on campus. Either way, he usually faces resistance. His students have come for a lecture, not to go for a walk. But he pauses and allows his idea to sink in. What follows is usually a sense of resignation, but they do eventually put on their coats. Sometimes he’ll go with them; at other times, he wonders if they will come back. But they usually do, full of energy and ideas, having discovered there is another way to see the world on their own doorstep.
Most of my learning about leadership has come from interviewing business leaders, hearing stories from others about what works and what doesn’t. It’s also come from my experience of working in command-and-control and more informal environments. But speaking to Matt, and weaving together his Navy and academic experience, has been particularly enlightening.
After we spoke, I took a walk in a local park, home to a sprawling country estate, with areas of controlled public access. It was getting dark, but I could hear an owl calling in a nearby tree as I walked along the footpath next to the river. It struck me that I had walked through this park many times, but I had never given any thought to how it came into being. With hundreds of decisions taken, over hundreds of years, to create the space that exists today. It’s home to a large country house, owned by the same family since the 1600s. It was used as a girls’ school in the 1900s and is now, once again, a private house. The land around it contains one of the cleanest stretches of river in the area and is home to abundance of wild birds. There is also a birds-of-prey centre, open to the public, which has operated in the grounds since 2013. The park is open to the public for most of the year. The point I am making is that the impact of those decisions is evident today; decisions to protect the grounds and the wildlife, decisions to allow space for education and schooling; and, also, the decisions to keep parts of the estate private. All this simply started with noticing. Then I thought about what I had noticed, and what it could mean.
When I walked out of the park gates that evening, I had started a process that has continued in my mind ever since. I have begun to look at my surroundings in a new way; I have also considered the decisions that I make on a regular basis. Matt’s ideas have challenged me – I too, have felt that resistance – but they have also opened another door. A door to the world we create with the decisions we make every day. His broader message is that anyone can do this, not just those with ‘leader’ in their job title; his studies credit the power of the collective much more than the individual at the top. That feels particularly important.
“The key is to get outdoors, observe, notice and think about things differently,” says Matt. “It really helps to move around because that keeps your brain awake. Leadership is about noticing more than anything else.”