Elite Leadership Lessons from Former Military Leaders | Military Leaders Panel Edition

0:00Rob Keeping:We're joined by three extraordinary leaders who've made high-stake decisions when the pressure is real. First ever leadership mission in Iraq, shot up by a missile which we evaded, but then the complexity of the mission changed. And what did that feel? Really bloody scary, let's be really honest.

0:15Mandy Hickson:Mandy Hickson, former RAF fast jet pilot and one of the first women to fly the Tornado GR4, now a best-selling author and international speaker.

0:24Mark Fetters:Bomb Disposal, what drove your decision to want to go into that?

0:27Mandy Hickson:I'd left a career in investment banking and within 18 months I was doing bomb disposal, so it was quite a career change. Mark Fetters, British Army officer and former bomb disposal squadron commander, leading teams in some of the world's most dangerous environments. When I left the military, I understood that skills you learn in the military are transferable, but don't see them as a fixed landmark. You have to continuously learn. Rob Keeping, managing director at Bells of Lazenby and the former military investigator who served nine years handling sensitive cases.

0:55Mark Fetters:What advice would you give to leaders right now in how they continue leading into 2026?

1:00Mandy Hickson:You don't become a leader by thinking about self. You just don't.

1:05Mark Fetters:Welcome to the show, everyone. I'm literally sitting here so excited as I've wanted to get a military panel together for a long time. I know you came to my event a few years ago and the audience were absolutely blown away just hearing a different perspective on leadership. And this is what we want to do. It's just help people see a different world. and you know we talk about courage a lot so to see that different world for them and to learn from all of you I'd really like and I'll start with yourself Rob what does courage mean what did it mean for you like being in the military that world?

1:35Mandy Hickson:For me personally I think that there's multiple ways of courage that comes out in a person I joined at 18 very young had opportunities to university and also professional golf but decided to join the army and courage for me was very immediate it was you know within the action itself it was putting myself in uncomfortable situations pushing myself mentally and physically it's interesting how courage can become quite comfortable when you're also around like-minded people and you're around people you trust, suddenly that courage doesn't become such a weight as it does potentially in the business world where being accountable and facing consequences is very real in the military.

2:28Mandy Hickson:It comes more from the action itself. And yeah, it was purely around out of my comfort zone, pushing myself and just stretching what I thought I could do as a human being, physically and mentally, as I mentioned, and in environments around the world that when you're back home growing up, you don't really dream of, you don't really think that real things like that are happening in the world. So it also related to maturity and growing up and breaking down that naivety at a teenager and going into my 20s and and so the courage helped me within that aspect as well I love

3:12Mark Fetters:because I've never thought about actually how courage if you're around people like mine did actually this the weight of courage can be different I'd never thought about it from that perspective before thank you Mandy what about for you yeah so courage is something I'm I feel very

3:25Rob Keeping:passionate about actually it's in fact on my necklace I have three words that are engraved and one of them is courage so that's quite interesting really but I think when I look back Courage is, it's not in the absence of fear, but it's about perhaps sometimes feeling that fear. And I hate to use the classic phrase, I'm doing it anyway. But that's absolutely what it is. It's never about the absence of fear. But I think fear hones you in the moment. And courage gives you that ability to carry on and do what you are wanting to do. Be that in a war zone, in the military, or be that in the business world.

4:03Rob Keeping:and actually I've had to dig deeper and find more courage bizarrely in my second career than I probably did sometimes in my first career which sounds crazy when you're compare flying a fast jet in a war zone to stepping on a stage in front of 4 ,000 people or doing an interview or something like that but sometimes that's what courage looks like.

4:22Mark Fetters:Have you been able to understand why that courage was different because immediately as someone sitting here I'd go flying a fast jet in a war zone is like there's not many people who can do that but then to get trained on stage do

4:34Rob Keeping:you understand what that is in you um I think I think it's it's about recognizing that you are going to be uncomfortable um I mean okay you're not going to die on a stage I know that and everyone knows that but why is the fear of public speaking one of the highest things that people have and it still is you know standing on stages people do hate it and yet I've made it my profession so maybe I actually actively seek fear um but it's as I say courage is not the absence of it it's about just doing it um working with something I yeah I work with it and I quite like it I think it means I'm passionate about what I'm doing so you won't let something get in the way of what

5:12Mark Fetters:your passion is so you can work with it yeah absolutely I've always found it fascinating meeting you with your background obviously being bomb disposal and even I think anyone just hearing in those words goes what that's a very courageous act but what did that mean to you yeah so i think

5:27Mandy Hickson:from a from a bomb disposal perspective i think i i i see courage as a balance between confidence and caution um so very very similar to what robin mundy has said that actually in the military you're surrounded by people that you know that and that gives you courage to everybody's on a common common mission however um it's right to be cautious at the same time so i like to break it down in that I want to have confidence in the training that I've been given and when I look at some of the training that I've received you know years and years of training to get to where I am and where the people I work with are.

6:01Mandy Hickson:Ability to self-reflect what are my knowledge gaps be it situational be it cultural be it professional and then ability to sort of self-manage those you know fear to me is a is a basic human reaction and that when we have fear it tells us okay let's slow down take stock and perhaps prepare for something that we need to do so a balance between confidence and

6:23Mark Fetters:caution is what I see courage as and it sounds like I heard a bit that whole in essence of self-management being able to stop being able to pause be able to reflect to go what's the choice I want to make in this situation could you say in the background and all the training that you've had to do the jobs that you did that moment to not be reactive but to really think about your

6:41Rob Keeping:response was crucial yeah absolutely and i think that's that's something that we're really taught is it's not a reaction it's a measured response and that just comes from years and years of training you know for myself that being the simulator do you do simulators good we do

6:59Mandy Hickson:different types of training but um we also do different so we have probably similar to flying we have currency tests that we have to do every year and and that's great however a lot of people approach those tests as very high pressure you know if you fail that you're off off off the planes as it were but what we need to do at the same time is create a sandbox in which our people are not scared to fail and they can try new things and you know the two go hand hand in hand and so a sandbox where it's safe to fail and there's a time when you know okay this this is the this is the time where you you don't have that freedom you can't do that because how do people is it so in

7:34Mark Fetters:the corporate business as well you've seen it a lot in terms of there is a lot of fear failure yeah there's so many people and i'm guessing you probably speak to it as well there's so many people say oh yes our company people are okay to fail and they're actually not they say it but actually in the culture you're not i'll come to you next actually but what what have you noticed because obviously you're now md in a corporate company you've made the big shift yeah what have you noticed from that fear of failure within the military versus how it's taken into corporate

8:02Mandy Hickson:um i think look i think there's always a fear of failure um i agree that you know you're training you fall back on your training that that's really important um secondly it's also creating as a leader a psychological safe environment um you know you can't uh train and create a team without that psychological safety it's where the best ideas come from it's where innovation comes from, it's also where resilience comes from. Um, um, and ultimately, you know, when you join the military and, and go through training and go, go through, through your, into your regiment and then go and specialize into what, whatever, um, you know, you're going to fail a lot along the way.

8:46Mandy Hickson:Um, it's, it's part of it. Um, and it's, it's a little bit back of, to kind of marginal gain. It's just improve every time. It's learn it from others. It's also leaning on your team. If somebody isn't quite maybe at the standard, then reach out, support them. And again, that comes from that psychological safety, which is extremely important. And even more so in the corporate world now where you are managing multiple teams and departments and cross functions and so forth and that clarity and communication that that feeling that everybody has a voice and they can speak that uh is really important in the military obviously there were orders so there's a level of of following orders and and knowing when to speak or not to speak as such but at the same time um there is a freedom within those orders because you're trained and you know how to go and execute them so there is a slight freedom within that as well yeah and i hear you loudly clear and i do a

9:45Mark Fetters:lot of work with leadership teams and it's been interesting already this year i don't know if it's anything that's going on in the world or anything the challenges or the uncertainty but the psychological safety seems to have dropped off a cliff within leadership teams and i'm walking in a lot i'm walking to rooms immediately you can feel it you can feel when it's not there and the people aren't speaking up and i'm needing to call it out more than i've ever called it out in previous years so i don't know if something's shifting or changing but i'm seeing actually not not there so much as i used to before which has been quite interesting so you know it's a really interesting

10:15Rob Keeping:point though isn't it because we talk about the importance of psychological safety but sometimes as a leader we sort of think you know yes I'm talking psycho I'm making all the right noises but ultimately you want people who are then compliant and not challenging hold on a minute you you instantly when someone comes to you with a problem you want to blame them so it's as a leader I think you've got to be courageous to actually really go back to your own standards what is the standard that I want to set and if you want to set a psychologically safe environment where as Rob was very rightly saying everybody has a voice and that voice is heard then you've got to walk that walk yeah you really do and you have to actively encourage people to challenge you and surround yourself by people who are potentially better than you who will challenge you yeah which is another interesting thing and did you experience that within the RAF of being challenged being encouraged being you know put to the front to stand on your and two feet absolutely um so i think the the air force is slightly different i think from the army um because yes there are orders of course there are but at the same time it's not about blindly following orders it's about using your judgment in a moment and and they are very happy for you to do that so long as you understand the overarching objective and so what is the the reason we're doing it the purpose but now the execution of that can actually be down to your judgment a little bit so I was um quite early on in my career actually when I think back to it and I was just happened to be put to be leading a mission uh flying over Iraq we were defending no-fly zone over southern Iraq at the time and as a foreship of aircraft my boss was my number two in the formation so he's what three ranks higher than me senior exec and um a weapons instructor so very senior team but as a junior pilot i'm leading and they do that all the time i don't know if they do that in the army whereby you're challenged because what they want is create the next tier of leaders and if you're pushing people and challenging them to lead when perhaps you feel that they're at the edge of their capability then that's that's good because that's a lot of growth can take place there and that's quite empowering and i was leading the mission and we happened to be shot at by a surface-to-air missile ironically um first ever leadership mission in iraq shot up by a missile which we evaded thank goodness um with our countermeasures but then the complexity of the mission changed and i think in that moment that's when that's what true empowerment and courage to lead came from my boss because ultimately he knows that he's got a junior pilot's probably operating right at the edge of head capability how easy would it be for him just to step in and take control and that doesn't happen so if you're challenged to lead and you're given the opportunity to lead you carry on you will see that mission through to the very end um and what did that feel really bloody scary let's be really honest firstly you've just been shot at then the mission changes because we were on a reconnaissance mission at the time and then we were tasked to carry out an attack on a target we were running out of fuel we had to leave Iraqi airspace and go and find an airborne tanker it's the middle of the night by the way it's two o 'clock in the morning it's pitch black there was a blowing sandstorm coming up from the south so the pressure was on as well and there's just a lot to think about and this is where you you surround yourself by your team so one of the things that we're always taught is that leadership is not a title it is an action and anyone can demonstrate that leadership at any stage of their career it's why we go through officer training at the start of our career we don't do it at the end but you do some if you progress but you do it at the start because what they're wanting to see is leadership skills coming out and that leadership potential being honed um so yeah that it was a scary evening but at the same time i knew i had an amazing support network i knew i had a team around me that were better than me and more experienced i knew i had a navigator sitting behind me who's also a wealth of knowledge but here's a really interesting twist in it when we were then tanking we got to this airborne tanker big sort of airborne petrol station and it wasn't a british one ours had broken it was an american one i'd never tanked for one of these before it has a completely different system and in that moment i shouldn't have actually been allowed to do it because i wasn't qualified and i just said to my boss i'm sorry sir i'm not qualified on type and he said just carry on have a go and i thought well this is interesting lovely training environment no fear of failure there um so i had two attempts and i wasn't successful and my nav at that point said carry on he had about eight years of flying experience on the front line and i had about probably about eight eight nine months by that stage and i just thought if i do carry on it will prevent the rest of my team from having a go so that's where you sort of say what is courage sometimes courage is actually saying no i'm not going to carry on because that will prevent the mission from happening through to my doubt of my own ego and there can't be any ego in leadership that's something that it's not just the person that shouts the loudest it's sometimes that quiet leadership where you do sometimes say stop or i'm in overload and that vulnerability that comes from being a leader that's a brilliant story thank you for sharing

15:25Mark Fetters:because i there's so much synergy i think and learnings you can take from that yeah and the big one that's really standing up for me is that empowering your juniors and the fact that you're trained that from that beginning because i'm sure you see it in what you're doing now a lot of the time we we do wait to train the juniors you have to wait to get your coach and your training and the investment and by then so many habits and mistakes have been led you've got to unlearn and that's so difficult to unlearn that stuff so any leaders listening right now watching please that is such a better strategy i think tamar listening to mandy's stories how would how can

16:00Mandy Hickson:you build on that from your experience yes i guess in the military slightly different to the to the business world we don't have the ability to lateral hire so if i want to to hire someone with 10 years leadership experience i have to have hired them 10 years ago which is quite quite a strange way of thinking about so we need to make sure that we're always offering our people the opportunity to grow um so certainly when i was running a bond disposal squadron i had a mantra to my subordinates saying i want you to offer each of your people the opportunity to perform at the next rank and at the same time i would like them to understand two ranks up so they've always got a growth mindset there um quite quite early on before i went to command that squadron that i had a really good boss that said to me mark only do what only you can do and that was a really good lesson for me because in a squadron i had done every officer role up to commanding the squadron so when things were were tough and and we were under pressure it'd be very easy for me to go no it's okay i will do that however what by doing that i'm doing is it's taking away growth opportunity for a junior officer or a junior junior leaver it's brilliant advice actually isn't it but it's probably been one of the hardest things i've had to do you know um we had a we had time talking about the middle east um where we had to deploy a very short notice um we had to deploy teams to be ready um to go anywhere in the middle east to to um help with the situation and it was very tempting to put myself on that first plane out there however that wasn't the thing to do at that moment in time and actually what i should what i did do was heed that advice only do what only you can do only i can be in the rear doing the really boring bit of of pulling the strings and what i did is allowed one of my junior officers to be that person that went forward and actually look at looking back that was absolutely the right thing to do because that that officer came back with bags of experience that really wouldn't have added much to my repertoire but however they've they've come away with a really good experience and they'll

17:57Mark Fetters:grow from there just a quick reminder if you haven't already to please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel it's a small action that makes a big difference you'll be the first to know when new episodes drop and your support helps us create meaningful content for leaders like you i'd also love to hear from you so if you have any thoughts questions or ideas pop them into the comments and if you're curious about how my leadership coaching or training could support you or your team just drop me a dm and we'll set up a call thanks so much now let's get back to the episode this is so inspiring and i'm going to challenge just to i'm going to put my corporate hat on now because maybe they see it is there any fear in terms of because i mean the corporate in the advertising industry i was in you're going to pitch for some business and you're going to put in your a-stars your a-stars are going into this pitch it's normally all the exec team the senior team very rarely would you see any juniors or anything coming up because there's real fear if you don't put your a stars there you're going to lose the pitch and you need to win this pitch you need that revenue coming in whereas if i'm hearing correctly what i'm hearing is you kind of keep allowing people to grow and stuff what what would advice or something you think about there in terms of just thinking a bit differently about who you put in the room because otherwise you do actually become incredibly reliant on these five or six people sometimes in a company of two to four hundred it's only these five or six people that go in that room to do the pitch what would what's

19:22Mandy Hickson:your view there stress away i think about resilience it's great if those those five people will be there however what you're you're doing is you're not training the rest of the organization so if those five people leave what's the rest of the organization going to do um from a military perspective i always think about um what's the duration of this mission going to be i can field my A team up front if it's going to be a two-week operation what if the operation is going to be 18 months what am I going to do in six months time when that A team has to come home and I've not developed the B team so I've never been a fan of the A team B team concept because we don't have

19:59Rob Keeping:that luxury necessarily all the time yeah but also just how demoralizing is that for the other 295 people on the team because ultimately they're just seeing they're just going they'll just go again so you're just going to start to get more and more disengagement and then you will end up with people leaving and you're now shooting yourselves in the foot because you will have to do lateral hires because actually you've not got any growth from the actual business itself yeah so for myself on that one I would sort of be thinking yes you could put one or two of your team in but make sure that they have got other people in the room who are now growing by watching them in action yeah um and also you know we talk about the need for diversity in teams we've always focused on gender and culture but for me it's about the cognitive diversity you know we don't really care if we're really honest what people look like but what we want are people thinking differently so if you're putting in your a team who are the people who have always closed you know a deal or managed to pitch really well well then what about the diversity of thought that coming from say a junior person that you suddenly think they they sing something different in that they could absolutely add something because they're thinking a very different way yeah and especially

21:08Mark Fetters:now i think well we've got five different generations in the workplace that we've never had yeah and all living very differently to how we all lived as well completely there's so much to learn there's so much to know how's this landing with you because you are in this world and what was it and i'm so curious what was it like for you to go into this world coming from a different world was it was there lots of similarities or was it a bit of a oh this is new um i think

21:32Mandy Hickson:look the military you have a lot of transferable skills absolutely you do however they can't be a fixed landmark they have to keep evolving and so when I left the military I understood that I had certain skill sets but I had to continue to adapt them to the environment I was going to so I was lucky enough to be funded to go and study executive leadership at Harvard and Oxford and then also learn through mentorships and working under some great leaders I think a job of a leader as well in the corporate world, which you don't necessarily think of too much in the military, one of your jobs is also building succession and putting those frameworks in place for the future of the business beyond yourself.

22:21Mandy Hickson:You're a custodian of the business whilst you're leading it, but it's not your business. You're there to do a job and make sure that its longevity is in place. um so it's really important that you're building those succession plans and you only do that through developing your team and and it's really vital that people get the opportunity to also stretch themselves and and to learn like i had the privilege to do um growth mindset is really important in business uh to also make sure that people are pushing themselves into a situation that they might find difficult at the time and that's how the best learnings come from and if you're not doing that if you're only putting your a team in every time you're not allowing that kind of rounded team to to evolve and develop and nurture so it is really important for me i i learned the hard way at the beginning um i i moved into a large restaurant group that was big turnover global and and and so forth and and i was head of operations and and felt that my transferable skills were kind of just there and and i kind of there's the direction go for a brick wall and get the job done um and realize quite quickly in the corporate world and business world you know not everyone has that mindset so i had to adapt and evolve and like i said it's it's it's not about change it's just adaption and and you know the skills you learn in the military are transferable but don't see them as a fixed landmark they have to be evolving landscape you have to continuously learn even now as as i lead businesses and i you know i still learn and i always will be um so it's really important and yeah so um and it goes back to standards you know the standards you set the standards you accept and and i'm somebody that feels and encourages my team to continuously learn because ultimately that's how you improve thank you changing course a little bit i'm really

24:15Mark Fetters:curious to know in the military you're facing the unknown a lot of the time you know you're either flying into battle or you're going to something you don't you know what's going to happen how do you manage your mindset around risk and the judgments you're making what is it like to live with that uncertainty because I'm asking that because in the business world at the moment there is a lot of uncertainty now we've pretty much had it really since covid but it doesn't seem to be just seems to be ramping up with all the changes in the world and technology

24:43Mandy Hickson:um how did you navigate that so i sort of embrace uncertainty uncertainty is almost a given in our job and i think it goes goes back to i think education is key not necessarily um what to think but how to think and and making sure that as rob's saying that you need to have that growth mindset to continue building up your golf bag of tools um to enable you to to to to see the land as it is um situational awareness um being curious understanding you know what's going on in the world how could it impact what i'm doing today what i'm doing tomorrow so when i was commanding the squadron i used to live by this 80 mantra so at no point do i want anybody to be working beyond 80 of their capacity because there may be things coming and we will need to go into a sprint to 100 so if the team are running at 100 the whole time when we need to shift into that extra gear it's not going to be there so in peacetime when it's relatively quiet 80 tempo and then sure enough when something typically in the middle east starts to kick off you've got that capacity to um to sort of fill the gap that when you need to that's so smart i've never heard anyone say that before i suppose it's probably different to the business world where you've constantly got targets to be met revenue to be achieved however when you're dealing with pretty high risk situations yeah you want to have that extra gear in the back pocket i agree and i'm also thinking if i transfer this to the corporate space obviously very different space but you kind of go

26:16Mark Fetters:we a lot of people are working probably 120 to 140 percent because they're still probably covering two people's jobs and the targets and the pressure that's on right now so there isn't much left in the tank so when they do need to walk into a pitch and try and get that new business or they have got a team crisis you know what would be a challenge in their world it is being dealt with from an empty tank an empty judgment which is why I think a lot of they jump in to fix it because it's just that it's quicker to do it myself because I do know I haven't got the energy left to bring somebody else in or train them up I just need to get it done because I'm exhausted with the talks that you do and I know you speak to a lot of leaders are you noticing any of this

26:56Rob Keeping:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people are talking about burnout as being one of the most common things I'm hearing about at the moment. But I heard a really interesting thing the other day, which I was working with the team about. We were talking about the fact that, you know, you're going back to your 80 % there, Rob. I think that's really, really powerful because we think you're operating at 100 % and then you do a pitch and you've got to go up to 120. Let's turn that around on its head. so if you're working and you've pushed yourself and your training is there and you're therefore in a calmer space lower when you go into the pitch the pitch should be almost easier your adrenaline will take you up to the hundred but if you've gone through similar things before and you've practiced it and the preparation is there then hopefully you can be almost in a you can go down a level because that 20 will come from pure adrenaline and so it's almost like you're training hot we would say train harder than you're ever going to fight for real that's the philosophy that's what the philosophy we'll use before between every exercise that we go on so that when you're in a war zone you don't need to be pushed into 120 but the other really important thing i'll talk about there is about controlling what is within our sphere of influence that controlling the controllables piece that we often hear about and if you can't let it go yeah and you can reflect on a stress bucket and in the aviation world particularly we always talk about our stress buckets and the fact that layer upon layer these days are being filled up with superfluous issues so i don't know about you but what's going on in the news at the moment that's stressful you turn on the news if you're someone like me you watch it over breakfast having a cup of tea so that you're up to date with what's going on i can already feel my stress bucket starting to fill with all of all of what's being bombarded with and if that is the case then you're now going into work and you're managing a team yeah what's left in your bucket so it's almost like going you know what can i do anything about that situation and if the answer is no focus on what is in your sphere of influence what you can have a direct impact on and make that your number one priority and look after your energy yeah look after your energy absolutely the main thing we've got isn't

28:59Mark Fetters:it um obviously you navigated the whole world of uncertainty of doing the change and stuff was something that when you went into the business that you were like you realized maybe everything all the training and as a leader then you walked in and you're like this was it was rubbing some tension up with people that he was like oh actually this style is different where

29:20Mandy Hickson:was any tension for you i think it's it's very different in in the corporate world or the business world um we talk about being authentic in in as a leader uh in work um in the military there's there's nowhere to hide there's there's no place for ego there's no place for for you know south before team it it's you just wouldn't last it just it just you'd be laughed at wouldn't you you'd be kind of laughed out the building so um but of course in in the real world in in terms of the business world that there is that it's there's no point hiding away from that some people are there you know for for personal objectives others are there for the team others they're there for you know, invested in the business.

30:03Mandy Hickson:There's a variety of reasons why people go to work every day. As a leader, you have to tap into all of those reasons and you have to lead by example and make sure that you're supporting everybody in the right way. So I was lucky to have good mentorships. I had good leaders I worked under that taught me to calm down at times and adapt. Um, but at the same time, I think the big trigger for me, uh, was that I looked at my own vulnerability as intellectual honesty. I saw it right. Okay. Let's be honest and use it as an intellectual honesty piece and say, look, this is where I'm vulnerable. This is where I need to really adapt and learn and, and, and, you know, swallow a bit of a humble, humble pill.