Resilience Through Leadership

 Good afternoon, very warm welcome to yet another fascinating edition of our Research Futures Webinar.

My name is Leila Choukroune and I'm professor of International Law and Director of the University of Portsmouth theme in Democratic Citizenship.

Today we are absolutely delighted to welcome our colleague Andrew Stewart OBE.

Andrew has a vast experience, a very impressive experience.

He will be reflecting on his own leadership experience today based on nothing less than 33 years as an officer of the Royal Navy.

And he will draw on his eight years as an academic teaching Leadership within the Faculty of Business and Law at the University of Portsmouth in particular.

He's also going to reflect upon his own research and his own doctoral research.

Really so very much looking forward to this discussion.

Andrew, it's a pleasure to have you.

And without further ado, I'd like to give you the floor.

Right.

Thank you very much.

I'll start with the sharing, then with the presentation, and you're able to see this?

Absolutely.

OK, good.

Well, welcome, everybody, and it's really exciting because actually we've got five continents represented here.

We start with Australia, where my nephew and my sister lives.

Then we move to Vietnam, where I've already seen some former students names, then across the way to India and then to Africa and Tanzania, actually, obviously Europe.

And there's a few from Italy here.

So we're definitely represented in Europe.

And then it's really lovely to have representatives from the Chilean Navy more about that at the moment.

In a moment.

But yes, it's a fantastic start.

And I did say at the beginning, it's lovely to have a feeling amongst friends.

So, as I say, thank you for this opportunity.

I thought I could start with a funny story.

There was a learned professor going around various universities and conferences, and he was so eminent, in fact, he had a driver.

And after a number of these presentations, the professor said to the driver, I tell you this, why don't you give the presentation and I'll sit at the back.

So that was fine.

And presentation went fine.

And then there was a question at the end with the driver gave the presentation.

And he said, well, that's such a good question and it's so easy.

I'm going to get my driver to answer it sitting at the back.

And the sort of link to this story is that my wife is listening to this presentation.

She's heard a number of rehearsals.

So if there's any difficult questions.

I could also ask my wife to take over, in fact, and indeed answer any questions.

Hopefully that won't be necessary, but it's lovely to have her back up and support.

Well, my wife tells me resilience is in my blood.

I'll take that.

Thank you very much.

Nice compliment.

I did the London to Paris cycling ride four years on my own when I was in the Navy.

Then my nephews, you might recognise me.

I'm the younger one in the middle, but my nephews join me so there's a bit of a family event and hopefully I sort of inspire them to do something similar and get something out of it.

So the presentation and resilience and leadership are going to do a bit of the theory being asked not to concentrate that on too much then leadership experience from the Royal Navy.

Then we come into academia and I'm going to concentrate on a critical leadership module, which I lead.

Much more about that later.

But it's really lovely to see former and current students from the module joining us today.

And thank you for taking the time to do so.

Then conclusions and recommendations, things we can do to take forward.

And then a critical friend Question Time, delighted to take questions.

And so we'll finish about three o'clock and I think it'll be about 35 minutes my actual presentation.

So.

I think we can all take example from this man, it tells me that age doesn't matter.

Whatever time you start to do take on resilience, you can keep going to raise thirty two point eight million from around the world by walking around his garden when he was in his 100th year.

I think is fantastic and a good example for us to follow.

I've got affinity to this because actually he was in Burma in the war, Second World War, and so was my father who died in twenty nineteen.

So he had the same medal.

So that's a nice affinity there.

So let's start, if I may, with the Oxford Dictionary, as you could say, we've got to start somewhere and we'll try and build on it.

It's the ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, et cetera.

But put another way, and rather simply, it's the ability to bounce back.

And moving on to academic definition, Fernandez, I did quite a bit of a search for this presentation, and I quite liked Fernandez because it comes from a practitioner basis.

And after all, I am a practitioner, I suppose.

And so these challenges go beyond simply having more work to do.

So, yes, we've all got more work to do, but it's actually the ability to bounce back, continually needing to change in response to eveolving circumstances.

And I don't think it's fair to say things will stay the same.

I think there'll be constant change as we we we go forward.

Just picking up on Lengrick resilience is recognised as a capacity which can enable an individual organisation to face a crises and capitalise on theevent, some people bounce back, some people actually thrive on it.

And hopefully by going through this presentation, we'll all learn from it and be able to be more resilient and therefore bounce back.

And workplace resilience is a necessity for employees and organisations because it ultimately helps success.

And I'm sure we're all interested in that.

So resilience through leadership not only withstand crises that go beyond and Eliot is also a practitioner, so I chose that and I do come from the business school, but we talk about everybody, businesses, their leaders and their employees, regularly faced, disruptive change.

And as I say, I can't see that change, that changing in the future.

Now, I think whoever we are, we probably had personal experiences where we've had to bounce back with the separation from parents at a younger age.

It could be the death of a loved one.

It could be put into difficult, unfamiliar circumstances.

It could be not getting a job.

It could be not getting the mark you want.

So we all have personal circumstances where it's important to be able to bounce back.

And that's personal on a personal level, but the bigger, bigger scale, the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, IT problems; we all have to go through these and these just to name but a few.

So now we know a little about resilience, how do we gain build on it?

I really like this in my research, I found this nurse and I know we got a couple of NHS staff listening today, which is which is lovely.

And this nurse was working in an elderly people's home and having seeing and having to come through a number of deaths on a daily basis.

So what did she do in these adverse times?

And when the chips were down, effectively forcing myself to be optimistic, find a moment of joy in each day, to connect,with others and remember ways in which other challenges in life were overcome?

We're not the first to experience this.

And and we are going to take forward some of those views being optimistic.

A moment of joy later in the presentation.

Now, you'll be pleased to hear you're only going to see one model and this was a number I saw, but I thought this was the best one I think we go at from the outside first the physical, mental, emotional and social activities, social areas, and then around it there are sleek reappraisal, The sort of reflection, the sabring, the emotional really important when we're trying to bounce back is understand the emotional side gratitude I get to talk to talk about a bit later with some examples.

The social connections are so important, aren't they, with no man is an island and we need others to help and support us with this contact.

There is, for those interested, a list of references at the end of the presentation for those who do wish to go forward with it.

So there's a number of my former and current leadership students, and here's a question for you, I won't embarrass you by asking you to put it on the chat.

Which leadership approach or theory would you most associate resilience?

So that's the question.

I suspect that a lot of my students might have come up.

With transformational leadership, and you're not wrong, actually.

And indeed, my leadership students, I think, know that it would be a mistake to take one leadership theory approach in brackets and say there's nothing else around it.

So you're not wrong.

And in fact, you're definitely on the right track.

And I can see some of you might think, well, I haven't heard of transformational leadership.

What is it?

Well, basically and  again, my students would recognise the author.

Northouse a theory that describes leadership as a process that changes people and organisations so generally to the better.

And that's, as I say, important.

But for those who got this, you can have a gold star and I'll wrap it in a chocolate and give it to you virtually because my research tells me the most appropriate form of leadership or style or approach is servant leadership.

And we're going to talk a little about that.

Developing servant leadership behaviours and its leaders is an important component of such a strategy.

So this isn't me saying this.

This is Eliot in a peer reviewed article and it's bang up to date.

And and servant leaders place the needs of their followers first, focussing on developing followers to achieve their highest potential.

So that's the idea.

And my, I witnessed this in the army, and you might think, well, I wouldn't expect the Army to be practising servant leadership, but how about this?

I was asked to help the Army on pre deployment training before this team went off to Afghanistan.

And we were in the field and I noticed that the officers made sure that their soldiers were fed and watered and were happy before they thought about sitting down themselves for a meal.

And I thought, well, that's that that's a good example.

And I know we might have a couple of Army officers listening.

They're welcome to disagree with me, if you like, but that was certainly my experience.

Now, Liden, and we are coming to the end of the theory, we are pleased to hear that this is important, Liden came up with the specific dimensions of servant leadership.

We talked about the emotion and this is where the evidence begins to stack up, talked about the emotional healing, talked about empowerment and empowerment doesn't mean to say go and do a job and then ask somebody five minutes, 10 minutes, even the same day, how is it going?

You let them get on with it.

And as my students know, you know, they are empowered to get out.

They take ownership of a task.

If you're if you're delivering it.

And, yes, you're available to come back and ask questions.

But basically, you should be let them to get on with it until, of course, it's going unsafe and then you have to intervene.

But I like the idea of helping subordinates grow and succeed, and that's developing that.

And as my example, putting subordinates first and very topically at the moment behaving ethically.

So criteria's for resilience: servant leadership, a positive attitude both to yourself and the organisational behaviour and increasing and developing resilience work capacity at work, and actually we're doing that now by you kindly listening to this presentation.

Now.

You'll be pleased to hear that's the
theory over, that's part one.

I wonder if you can recognise where I am.

Here's a first hat by the way, there might be a few hats to keep you interested, but I was brought up and educated in Scotland and I spose took my first step of resilience by becoming a banker for Lloyds Bank in London, which was a bit of step out of the ordinary, you know, out of your comfort zone, put on a three piece suit.

I was on their development and leadership programme, actually, which is where this photograph was taken.

And to be honest, I did that for about three years and found it well, I'd like to do something more exciting.

So I'm just going to stop sharing while I adjust the settings.

If you like this, we're going to see two videos and I guess stop sharing for a moment and then I am going to adjust so we hopefully can see the videos.

Motion video I am doing so, I'm now going back to sharing.

And this is not a recruiting video unless you happen to be the 17 year old that I saw outside my house yesterday walking, walking past.

It's not a recruiting video, but it told me it's another example of doing something out of the ordinary, if you like.

It's out of your comfort zone.

I so I'm going to show you what happened at the AIB, the Admiralty Interview Board and the little story afterwards.

But please have a look at this.

This is Oh.

Sorry.

To have a look at this video.

Every officer goes through the Admiralty interview board, whether you plan to join the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, Medical or Chaplaincy Services, the Reserves or the Royal Fleet Auxiliary,  [inaudiable] or the AIB.

You'll spend three days, HMS Sultan, with a group of candidates just like you.

Together, you'll be put through a series of mental and physical challenges which measure qualities like effective intelligence, communication and leadership in order to assess your potential to be an officer in the Naval Service.

This is your opportunity to impress the board and show them why you should be an officer.

It's going to be a determination test because is quite easy to give in.

And when you want to really keep going until you can't actually physically go on.

My tip would be to just pace yourself from the start, so you're not racing to meet the beeps at the beginning you might as well pace yourselves so you've got more energy towards the end when it starts to speed up.

What we're looking for is a candidate
to show that they're really motivated to be here and that they'll push themselves as far as they can to do the best that they can.

This is where I thought my strengths would lie in the AIB, so yeah I was
quite pleased with the result really.

I was quitepleased with my time.

Eight four, always a good achievement so well happy with that.

Yeah pleased to get it over with! Fed
up with bleep tests.

Now, the funny story is that I'm amazed I passed my AIB, it was the last opportunity I had because of my age, and it's a series of interviews, series of test.

That was one bit of it.

Anyway, at the interview, the captain asked me, he said, what's that on the wall?

And I looked at it and I said, well, it's a helicopter.

And, oh, yes, we can see it's a helicopter.

Can you tell me a little about it?

And I'm afraid I hadn't done my homework and I just said it was a helicopter.

I didn't wasn't able to tell what type of particular helicopter it was.

And so, thankfully, they saw something in me because 33 years later, I was still there.

And so I took off my three piece suit and put on a uniform and joined the Navy as part of your training you go to the Britannia Royal Naval College, which is in Dartmouth, in Devon.

And as another quick video clip, I saw this from two sides.

First of all, I went through it as a midshipman, young officer, and then not long after, actually, I was invited back to be on the staff to train the young officers.

And it was a great experience because you were developing these young officers for the future and some of them were going to go higher than you.

But that was fine.

And you did your best.

I can see I was effectively like their divisional officer.

And for my students, I suppose the nearest thing, I suppose, is your personal tutor.

It is different, but if you're a divisional officer, it takes on that.

So let's have a quick look at this video.

But sorry, let's take a look at this, this video.

I'm trying to get the we are.

The officer cadets are in week five of their gruelling twenty eight week training course.

Most of them did not have any previous military training and the demanding militarisation phase has taken its toll.

If the weather on Dartmoor is anything to judge by then for most of the cadets, the next four days are going to be a living hell.

On Dartmoor the cadets will run three personal leadership tasks, each even with his long Royal Navy background.

OC Eglinton has his work cut out on a rain sodden, windswept tour.

Warning order  warning order warning order.

Situation there's a minefield between two rocks for miles east to west.

The mission is to get all team members and equipment across the minefield limitations for three zero minutes for this task.

OK, carry on.

Ok two people on the large rock over there I probably in my never carried on at least 20, 25 POT, although only two of them being of the warning order format.

So the format was a big issue itself.

*Gives general commands* Really not that fazed.

Once I was able to complete.

That's one of the largest milestones this term, and that is definitely the light at the end of the tunnel.

*Gives out general cmmands* Like many cadets, OC Eglinton failed to complete his PLT in the allotted 30 minutes.

However, most of his marks for the exercise will come from the command, leadership and management style, he demonstrated.

I'm just going to stop sharing because we're going to revert to share content and we're going to optimise for text and images.

Hopefully we can go back to the video.

Right, so we'll come back to those practical leadership tasks, personal leadership tasks in a moment.

Well, when we talk about the critical leadership module, but that's really where I got the idea from them.

So a long time at sea, especially in your early career away from home, and I was being trained and I trained to become officer of the watch.

Now, what's that?

It's a deck officer.

You're in charge of the bridge at sea.

And your responsibility is for the safety of the ship and the personnel, the ship's company.

And having done that.

I wonder who can tell me what this is here's if you're allowed having had heard my helicopter experience to say, well, it's just a ship.

Here's a clue.

Next hat, don't know if you could see that.

But for those who got it right, well done.

It's the royal Yacht and it's Her Majesty's yacht.

And my job some of the time was manning the bridge, as I say, with the royal family on board, a bit of a responsibility.

And but it was out of my comfort zone.

It's not a warship.

There was no weapons on board.

And some of the minutie and attention to detail, you'd be amazed at.

Happy to take some and there's some funny stories I can think of connected with my time on the royal yacht, but it was special.

You might just recognise me a couple of years ago welcoming the queen on board.

And it was before she embarked to go to Caen for the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings.

My title was Household Liaison Officer, so as well as Manning the bridge, my other task was household liaison officer and it had the nickname of Baggo.

And if anybody had any problems with their baggage, they'd come to me.

But actually my primary responsibility was responsible for the Queen's luggage.

And thaten it was quite a leadership task because sometimes with a full entourage, there was 5 tonnes of it.

And to get five tonnes of luggage on board that yacht when it's at anchor, as that picture shows, was quite a task.

To be fair, the ship had done it before.

But on the other hand, it did need personal organisation and certainly attention to detail and getting all the luggage in in the right place.

But out of the ordinary and interesting thing to do.

Now hetr can see that facemasks are not new to people in the Royal Navy.

This was a bit more protected, but I moved from being the bridge into the operations room and controlling a team and keeping a motivated belowdecks, looking after the sensors and weapons.

I'm showing you this because from day one in the Navy, we were brought up to appreciate the single greatest factor was the sailor, male, or female.

It was the sailor.

And my students know this, that a leader is not a leader without the followers.

And it's important we look after our followers.

And for those aspiring to be leadership into leadership, when you do teach that, you do look after your followers and develop them as we we've talked about.

Yes, it was visiting a Commonwealth War grave when we were nine months, actually seven and a half months away from sea.

We were in the Adriatic at the time.

But to keep morale going and we'll come back to keeping morale going very shortly.

I organised some charity events with the HMS Ark Royal was visiting Newcastle and our adopted town was Leeds, so I organised a run between the two and we did it in a relay.

Again, a bit of organisation, but actually, you know, big, big charity event.

And we had our supporters raising it, raising money.

Not as much as Sir Tom, I'm afraid, but it's all little helps.

Now.

Here is out of my comfort zone.

Why am I showing you a picture of the Congo?

And for those who may not know, it's the 11th largest country in the world.

And I know it's large because I flew over it.

More about that in a moment.

But our task, the UK had been tasked with setting up the UN headquarters in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under the umbrella of the UN, under the umbrella of the UN peacekeeping force.

So.

A bit out of the ordinary, out of my comfort zone, A) the country was in devastation, it was war torn, the infrastructure didn't exist.

I was there at the time of Y2K, which was the 2000 and the thought was, well, how how's the Y2K going to affect the Congo?

And the answer was, well, they don't use the Y2 to at the moment, so it didn't affect it.

What I'm trying to bring out is it was out of the ordinary and it was a difficult and challenging task.

Butit was enjoyable, the grainy, but I'm grateful for my brigadier at the time who sent me the photograph is a bit grainy because the photograph of a photograph, but you might just pick up me on my left and just to prove it, I've got the hat, the beret, the Casque Bleu to prove it.

But if somebody said, what's the most enjoyable time at the Navy, I would probably say the Congo, because it was so different, it was so challenging and it was so different.

And, you know, as you could see from the map.

And there's not much sea for the Navy in the Congo, and there was a there it was muted that I would have to open the river Congo, but it didn't come to that.

But what I did do and was asked to do was lead a U.N.

mission to Goma, which is in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And the aim was we would set up a headquarters where we could bring in humanitarian aid.

Now.

Very vividly, I remember they stood in front of that aircraft was a bishop.

And he was wearing his purple front and white collar.

And he was so determined that he wouldn't let the aircraft take off.

I mean, the engines were burning, he wouldn't take it.

And there's nobody to ask.

Communications didn't work.

So I made a calm decision.

Why was he saying this?

Because I mean, full marks to him.

He wanted some humanitarian aid taken to Goma and this aircraft would contract for transport it.

It was CAFOD.

I remember seeing on the pallets CAFOD, which is the Catholic aid.

And I did recognise that.

Anyway, spoke to the pilot and we did take some aid.

And when we got it there, it was unloaded and all very grateful.

But sometimes you just have to make your decisions.

Could have could have had a mistake with it.

And anyway, we did it and it seemed to be successful, which was great.

If you ask me what's the most dangerous thing I've ever done in my life?

It is probably this.

There was a riot going on outside the headquarters.

I was doing the recruiting of UN personnel, and the UN, in its infinite wisdom, was offering wages in excess and with abject poverty everybody wanted the job.

I've been brought up and my students know this, that if there's a problem, a leader should not hide behind it, you should face the music.

So this was going through my mind.

I said to this security guard, please open the gate.

All I had to to protect me was my blue beret because it was an unarmed mission.

It was peacekeeping.

We weren't armed.

So I said to him are you sure?

So anyway, the good news is I did go out there.

Fortunately, my French was barely passable enough for them to understand and they did understand it and they calmed down.

But it was a risk and they were very agitated, as you might be able to see from that photo.

And but as I say, I'm here to tell the tale and all was well.

Another job I did, having come back from the Congo, it was to be executive officer and a bit more about that in the moment of HMS Collingwood.

Executive officer, the commander and I was responsible for the infrastructure, the daily running of the establishment, the discipline and the morale, and HMAS Collingwood is the largest naval training organisation in Western Europe.

There is the parade ground, which you can see here.

And it was a command, if you like, leadership task.

And the next slide is an example where I try to empower people, by the way, I suppose a simple word might be chief operating officer, executive officer, anyway.

I was developing those under me.

This was the first time in the Royal Navy that the leading hands and corporals of junior management level could have a mess of their own.

What's a mess I hear you say?

Well, it's like a club.

It's their own area.

Others don't get into it apart from the leading hands and corporals.

And I empowered them to get on with this.

And they did their own fitting and putting in the various equipments they wanted to do.

And they learnt from that.

And it was a nice experience.

Now, while I was executive officer there.

I came across the Chilean navy, now you can quite rightly ask, what's the Chilean Navy got to do with this?

Well, Chile was buying three of our ships and we were training their personnel.

And it was my task to embrace them into the establishment, intoCollingwood.

Now, we could have said, oh, it's all too difficult but we didn't that hopefully we went out of our way to embrace them and make them feel welcome.

By the way, there are seven and a half miles away, seven and a half thousand miles away from home.

And I suspect Victor on the left might be listening to this presentation.

But actually, it was the start of a lovely friendship with the Chilean Navy.

Victor volunteered to be my Spanish teacher, and I hopefully helped him with his English.

But just doing something out of the ordinary, you never know what happens from it.

And as a result, actually, my wife and I have been to Chile very well, hosted each time, seven times.

And it's a pure delight to have our friends there.

Now, I felt sorry for them.

Why did I feel sorry for them?

Well, they were originally here for a year and then that time was extended.

And then imagine the leadership task of explaining to your crew who are away from home, they've been away for a year, and then you say, actually, sorry, through no fault of yours, the ship staying here for another three months because they got engine problems.

And then those three months are up.

Well, we're staying here for another three months and it's over Christmas, so you're going to be away for a second Christmas and you think, wow, this is quite a leadership task for the captain and officers.

And so I felt sorry for them.

So I organised a field gun competition.

Yeah.

You know, you say, well, what's a field gun competition?

All I can say is that it's a competition that builds up resilience, teamwork, endurance.

And so from the Chileanship Almirante Cochrane, as it was known as then, was called then and and still is, and Portsmouth's we had a team and it was a very good success.

I was given this photograph and it was after this event I said to the captain, can I do anything for you?

And he said, Well, I quite like you, please, to find me a certain naval photographer.

So I did that.

And the background and why was that the Almirante Cockhrane was alongside in the dock yard and the captain had been invited to a Trafalgar Night dinner on board HMS Victory.

Most important night for the Royal Navy is where we celebrate the battle of Trafalgar and the guest of honour was the Princess Royal, Her Royal Highness, Princess Anne.

And there been a photograph taken with the captain and the Princess Royal.

I found the captain sorry, I found the photographer and he said, what's all this about, sir?

And I said, Well, somebody wants to thank you.

I was just doing my job.

And I said, I know you're doing a job, but somebody has taken the trouble to say thank you.

So I took the photographer up to the captain's cabin, he was presented with the Chilean Navy cufflinks.

I'm proudly wearing mine.

I don't know if you can see them now that he was proudly presented there with the photograph of Princess Anne and the captain.

And then afterwards he was invited with both sets of brilliant cruise into the hangar where they keep the helicopter.

And we had empanadas and a reception.

And I thought, wow, somebody has taken that much trouble to say thank you.

And I tried to in my future naval and future career, and I'll hopefully continue to do use as an example to say, well, somebody may be just doing their job, but actually to say thank you, and it meant a lot to this naval photographer.

That completes my time in the Navy, I was very pleased to be awarded a Leila kindly said with an OBE at the end of it, which is a Commonwealth recognised award.

And I was invited with my family to Buckingham Palace to be awarded the OBE.

So that was a very special.

So I thought it was too early to retire.

I thought I had more to give to life and so my final hat, I arrived into academia and somebody said to me, do you miss the Navy?

And I said, well, and it was a student, actually.

And I said I would miss the Navy if I didn't enjoy this current job as much.

And I must say, I do enjoy the job very much so.

Not immediately.

But I decided to do a PhD type.

It's a professional, but it's an EdD, as you will see on that slide stands for a doctorate in education.

And I'm in my fourth year doing part time.

What's this got to do with resilience?

Well, you could say I didn't have to do it and I don't.

For anybody who's done a Ph.D.

or is doing one, it's no small matter! Think carefully before you do one.

But it's great to have the support while I'm doing it.

And it's very nice that my supervisor is kindly listening and supporting me.Can I go back to the Chilean navy, because what I wanted to say was the great story about this was that captain moved up the ranks to admiral beyond the admiral, and he's now head of the Chilean navy.

And he is here and supporting me, along with some of the officers from Almirante Cochrane.

And so to have that support, I think is fantastic.

And I hope the Admiral Leiva will give me permission to use his name, will say that this example lives on and it shows that by embracing another culture, we can learn from it and indeed benefit from it.

So back to the academia and this is where my students say, oh, is this familiar.

I tell my students it's the best module on the planet of its activity based.

I brought things when I started it five years ago.

There was only about 15 students on it.

Now there's about 100 per year.

And you'll see the practical leadership tasks, which I'd learnt from the Navy I brought into this module was called a unit module.

Sadly, we couldn't do it and covid and but afterwards hope to.

And a lot of the students here benefited from it.

We have a visiting speaker and there's two assessments.

Happy to take questions on the assessments, if you would like.

But if you completed the practical leadership task, you this just tells you that 20, 20 credit module and this is primarily the basis for my research, my professional doctorate research.

And that was after some practical leadership tasks where they get a certificate.

Somebody said, oh, it's like graduation.

I said, no, it's not as grand as that.

But they did get a certificate and that was it with the student's name on it.

And I'm going to tell you a short story about this certificate in the fact that the student from Tanzania and I think she's listening at the moment, five years after completing this module, she used a certificate and an interview and she told me that 650 applicants for the job and she got it.

Now, she used this certificate in the interview.

One can only assume and she thought she was ad she told me that she was impressed that that the interview panel were impressed by it.

So here we go.

It's it's it's helping people step out of their comfort zone by doing different tasks and hopefully building up their resilience at the same time.

Evidence now, I didn't go out to search the I didn't go out to search for resilience, but I learnt this is some of the evidence from the students.

Some of the students listening might say, oh, that was me.

It remains anonymous.

So we're not going into names.

But basically it was helping the competent side of it and it was something nice to do something different.

And I did enjoy it.

And I think if your students can enjoy learning, then they learn from it, so.

I'm now going to start wrapping up and with the conclusions and recommendations, it's based on three, it's a triangulation of evidence.

Three sources, review of literature.

It's evidence from my doctoral research to date of the students and also based on my personal experience from my military and academic career.

So.

We start off with and we've talked about this building on your self-confidence, stepping out of your comfort zone, taking on new you new opportunities.

Let's take this presentation as an example.

I was kindly asked to do it, and from it I've submitted a paper for a conference.

I have the huge benefit of talking to you all.

And also I'm now going to introduce the next year.

Twenty one twenty two, a resilience in leadership presentation as part of my political leadership module.

Andrew.

Sorry to interrup you andrew, I'm conscious of time we're receiving plenty of questions, so I'd like to ask the questions.

Thank you.

Thank you very much Leila I'll be very quick, then be positive.

We talked about that.

This is more of revision and a trusted mentor.

Have courage in adversity.

Try to have daily exercise and also having a faith can help as research from Ogtem and Young proved, something to fall back on and work on becoming a servant leadership.

And finally have a sense of humour and cheerfulness.

So I always keep smiling, and in particular, thanks to Professor Leila, Anne my wife and to He and the research and innovation services team.

And finally you all! Great to have you interest and delighted to take questions and over to you, then there is the list of references for those who would like it, and I think I should stop sharing now.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much, Andrew.

You've received plenty of messages of congratulations.

Everybody was really interested.

And you see these people clapping now, literally clapping very soon we'll clap together.

So I do share a number of values.

But of course, I'm going to play the devil's advocate just to challenge you a little bit.

It's great to hear about resilience.

We all are resilient.

We all want to be resilient.

However, don't you think that it's also good as a leader to show your vulnerability and embrace as such your humanity and inspire that way as well?

What do you think about that?

That's the first question fro, me.

And then we have plenty of others.

Yes, definitely.

And actually one has to learn to bounce back.

My my naval career was not a huge success throughout.

I have to do a course again and to sort of bounce back after that.

And absolutely.

You've got to show your your and admit to it.

And by having setbacks and knockbacks you learn from it, then you then hopefully proceed again.

And so the short answer is you've got to be yes, definitely you have your setbacks.

And indeed that's part of your growing and becoming a stronger leader.

I mean, I could say I didn't get promoted higher.

That was a bit of a blow.

But, hey, I'm here now and I'm doing my work.

So, yes.

So I didn't I didn't get as far as our supportive of Admiral who got to the head of the Navy, but he's still a good friend as well.

So that's nice.

Exactly.

Very good.

So we have a question from Ayad, Ayad I think is your
director, how do you embed resilience leadership in your teaching?

How do you support your students to be resilient?

You already responded to that partially.

But you may...

No its a good question, I mean, until
you asked me to do this presentation, it hadn't really been part of my critical leadership module.

But it certainly will be now.

I think I would talk about confidence, confidence.

You've got to have the confidence to bounce back.

So that's important.

But, yes, my future students will learn about resilience as a result of you kindly asking me to do this presentation.

Fantastic, thank you.

A question from my colleague, Karen McBride.

Can you tell us a little about phenomography and more importantly, why you are using it in your PhD project?

Great question.

And it's something it's probably going to come up in my viva! Oh, yes.

It's looking for those who are not aware.

And to be honest, I wasn't aware of it either.

It's looking at student experience, variation of student experience of the same phenomena.

So I'm looking at the way students and I've interviewed them and I got feedback.

And you've seen some of the results and some of them are here today.

And so it's looking at the different ways, the variation in ways in which students experience the same phenomena.

And by capturing that, we can hopefully teach them better and get them to learn better.

And my aim is that I'll be developing stronger leaders for the future.

Excellent, thank you very much.

Another question from Ayad it seems that it's a mini viva for you today, really.

It's all good practise! Exactly.

So Ayad is very much on that.

So can you tell people about your research methodology and how do you go out of your comfort zone in embracing this research methodology?

Great question.

The by doing a PhD takes you out of your comfort zone.

Anyway, I didn't have to do this.

Nobody was forcing me to do it.

So I think, yes, others had done it.

And I'm looking at others who have done it later on in their lives, which was an inspiration for me.

And so I hope I'm answering your question.

So, yes, it's it certainly was out of my comfort zone by doing it by doing a phenomenographic approach, which I think was the question that was certainly out of my comfort zone as well as I feel.

And I've got some superb students who I've supervised at master's level.

I feel as though I am a better supervisor for them.

Mmm, excellent.

I see, you know, doing so we're good to go for the viva I think.

Well, can I invite you to my mock viva and then that'll be marvellous?

Of course I'd be delighted.

All right.

A question from Cairo.

I'm currently writing a piece about women in the workplace for my degree.

I understand that this could be a hot potato subject.

Have you ever served worked with many female leaders?

And what qualities do they bring to the team with regards to resilience?

And thanks very much for the great talk.

Well first of all, thank you very much for the great question, and I was at sea in HMS Bristol when we had the first females at sea, so we were adapting to that and I was the operations officer.

And they do add a richness.

I sometimes look to the Admiralty Interview board and thinking there needs to be more females on it.

How they got round that was having non-executive directors who were female but I do a whole lecture presentation on basically females in leadership.

And I tell them,they'll know this already.

It adds a richness.

Just as the Chileans added a richness to Collingwood, they added the richness and I think part of the question was what attributes do they bring?

I think they do bring the emotional feeling, which is what we talked about already.

Does that help?

Well, actually, let's just say and again, I love to play the devil's advocate, don't you think it's a bit of a cliche to say that women bring more emotion than know they're more compassionate and all that?

I can be really harsh myself.

Yeah, I know you can.

You can be.

But I think they do and it's important.

I mean, you know, they represent I was keen in Bristol that we had some senior ratings who were female.

Why?

Because we had young sailors on board and they didn't have the infrastructure going up.

I think it's important that they feel represented.

Of course.

Of course.

Thanks very much for that.

So we have a question now from He.

You know He quite well.

She's my research assistant, and I think she's supported you as well.

So thank you very much, Andrew.

We have quite a bit the amount of students today joining the webinar.

And I would like to ask a question for all the university students.

How could you relate building your personal resilience into the module assessment?

Great question.

Thank you very much.

And by the way, you're all very welcome to come on my critical leadership module.

I think I might just if I may go back to this to to help answer the question.

Basically par for the second part of in the in the module is assessment is the personal development portfolio.

And I get them to see lots of tools which assesses their leadership potential.

And then I come up with some..

They ask them to come up with some identified development needs.

So let's say it might be build confidence.

How are they going to do that?

So they put it in there.

How are they going to measure it?

You know, I got a Fitbit that measures my you know, how many paces I do.

So it's important to be measured.

And then I would say, you know, at a realistic time scale and I've just been marking some of these and I've been saying try to be smart, try to be specific.

So in my summary, there are development activities.

You could put any one of those in there to develop your own resilience.

I'll stop sharing.

did that answer the question?

Yeah, very well, I think.

Thank you very much, Andrew.

You have received many messages of congratulations.

I Have not read all of them because I was conscious of time.

I'd like to ask you a last question.

You've stressed the fact that we have a very diverse audience.

You've been all over the world.

It's very important to me, to us, to have diversity.

So the last question is going to be about diversity and culture.

How do you make sure that leadership embraces diversity and all sort of cultures and works against racism?

Great question.

I think you've got to be fair and do exactly the same to every student, whatever their background, their colour, their race anything, you've got to be absolutely fair.

And I think that's important.

And also you can learn from them.

I've learnt so much from my students by getting them to tell their stories of their experiences and all the other students on the group can also learn from it as well.

So it's I think I'm saying, you know, to be fair to all and learn from them, just like I learnt from the Chileans, you learn from their examples.

Hopefully I tell my students, when you look at a leader, what you do is take the good things about them.

And yes, nobody's perfect.

So you take the good things about them and then try and embrace those in your own leadership as you go forward.

And a related question from from James our colleague, is positive discrimination a way of lessening the pale male and the stale criticism balance, though?

Well, it could be it could be .

I see it myself.

I know with Deloitte that say that on their CV's, they remove the name.

So everybody is treated the same and you're not sort of prejudiced by one word or another.

I think you just embrace the different cultures and learn from it.

And as I say, none of this.

'Well what would, what would they know about it?' You know, they actually bring a lot to the party and I learn from every student I speak to Fantastic.

And this is really the last question, because I don't want to frustrate anyone, we're receiving more questions than the last one from someone in Germany.

Thank you very much for the inspiring presentation.

Is there any advice that you'd like to give to young professional trying to find their leadership style, especially considering this current climate in which you have less direct contact your colleagues indeed online.

Yes, good question.

Well, I do tell my students you don't go into a one day saying, what leadership style am I going to adapt this particular day?

I do think you have to look at the circumstances.

I do think you have to appreciate what's going on.

The priority, if there's danger and it's more autocratic, if it's democratic and you want to ask opinions but people and my students are aware of this, that whatever they choose, whichever theory, there are limitations with it.

And a Democratic is great, but it can just take too much time.

So there are times when you have to adapt.

So to answer this great question.

I think you have to adapt to the situation.

Look at your prioities, know your team this is important.

What makes them tick and adapt an approach that will make them will motivate them, will give them the the enthusiasm to carry on.

And so, yes, know your team and how they react would also affect my ability, my sort of leadership, some people, and students do, appreciate a sort of quite a strict approach and others that would turn them completely off.

I did have one student who says, I want you to be strict with me.

So so I said, well, that's great.

But, you know, just take my advice.

So we go on anyway any more?

Or is that it?

I think that's it.

But you have a complement to conclude.

I love your answer says Tao about discrimination.

I was in your class and I understand that you've always been a fair person.

Well done.

So a compliment, very good.

Thank you very much.

That was fantastic.

Thank you very much, Andrew, for this really interesting and certainly inspiring presentation.

I'm sure you're a very good teacher and students love you and I'm certain you Viva is going to go well, now that we've rehearsed here.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and we look forward to reading your publications obviously.

I'd like to thank the audience as well for being such a great and enthusiastic audience.

Thanks my team as well.

In particular, Gloria, Barnaby, He and Cláudia for their support.

Well, again, thank you very much, everyone and I'll see you next week then.

All right.

Thank you.

And thank you for this opportunity.

Lovely spot has been marvellous.

And thank you to you all.

Bye!