INTRODUCTION
Jim Wallace is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon. After serving regimental duty in the 8Th/9Th Battalion, The Royal Regiment and the Special Air Service Regiment, he returned to the Royal Military College as Adjunct in 1977. In 1980 he was attached to the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation as a Military Observer in Syria and Lebonon. On Return to Australia he again served in the Special Air Service Regiment as the Operations Research Officer and as Commander of the then Counter Terrosrist Squadron, 1 Special Air Service Squadron. It was for his exceptional performance of duty at this time that he was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia.

Following his graduaction from Staff College at Camberley in the UK, in 1985, he was appointed Staff Officer to the Chief of Operations Army. Brigadier Wallace commanded the Special Air Service Regiment from January 1988 to December 1990. He then spent two years in the UK as an instructor at the Britisch Army Staff College, before returning to Australia on promotion to Colonel. He is married and his wife, Poppy, is a General Practitioner. They have two Daughters, one 16 years of age, the other12 years of age. Jim has been chairman of the Military Christian Fellowship.

What I have learned about leadership.
Well I'm very honoured indeed to be asked to speak to you tonight. I have to say that I feel completely unequal to the task, feeling I could really offer nothing to anyone here about either leadership or Christian living. Both are certainly under threat. I don't need to tell anyone here about just how much Christianity and Christian ethic and principle are under attack in our society today, but so very much is leadership. Leadership and leaders are of course victims of the increasingly cynical nature of our society. There is an automatic assumption, particularly by media, that any holder of public office is in it for his own good. Few leaders today are given even the benefit of the doubt, as to their motivation.

Leadership has also been further compromised by our strongly economic rationalist approach to both government and commercial business. There is simply less room for people and for concern of people. We have forgotten that while you can manage an organisation, its people have to be lead. That leadership is a people business. As leaders of Christian organisations you have at first glance an even more onerous task. The expectation placed on you, and indeed all Christians in leadership, of example is extremely high. And yet there is almost a denial that you have any right or authority to speak from a Christian perspective, to influence society as other leaders would be expected to do, to pursue Christian principle. Thankfully this potentially accurate, but somewhat superficial view, denies the power of Christ to act in every leadership situation in which we find ourselves. But it still puts the onus back on you and I to be good leaders - to equip ourselves to be used of Christ.

In looking at what I've learned about leadership I will therefore look first at this confused state in which we find leadership, before talking about what I think are the most important lessons. Leadership confused. As a soldier we have little doubt that leadership is what we are about. We train leaders as Cpl., Sgt., WOs, Lts and so on right up, because we realise this is our core business. And yet even with this focus, we have more lately allowed ourselves to be infected, and I use the term advisedly, infected by unproven contemporary philosophies.

The reality is that we are totally subjected to market forces in our society. The market doesn't test something for whether it's good or useful, but only for whether it can be sold. It's always seeking something new, because old things don't sell so well, and so we have willingly accepted theories that have actually confused and even eroded leadership. It's true that some contemporary emphasis, and it is usually emphasis rather then anything new, has strengthened leadership.

Participative leadership as a style stands to strengthen leadership. But when the desire for participation is higher or stronger then the central imperatives of leadership itself, it damages it. Vision statements have been a great innovation in recent years. But how many have made an iota of difference to the way an organisation is actually managed or lead on a day to day basis. I would certainly say that hardly any have realised the marginal benefit to the organisation of the additional cost they were to produce. I would seriously doubt that many organisations dynamically manage their vision statements to reflect the constantly changing environment in which we find ourselves today. It's not that vision isn't essential in a leader - and I'll talk about that, but it's that we are seeing a victory for process over purpose, of marketeering over quality in the proliferation of leadership theory today.

What we need badly is not to redefine leadership, but to rediscover it.

Vision.
Well what are the lessons I've learnt? The first, and I am going to assume that you are all engaged at the strategic level of leadership, the first, is that vision is indeed essential. But it's not new, can we possibly deny the vision of truly great leaders in history and its central role to their success. Alexander - a vision to conquer the known world, achieved by the age of 25 yrs; Churchill - a vision for victory even while in the depths of defeat after Dunkirk and Singapore, Marshal - a vision for a peaceful, prosperous and united Europe, when at the end of WWII many people must have seen revenge as more appropriate and immediate a concern.

No, vision in a leader is essential, but much more important than its crafting, is its communication. The purpose of a vision is to give the organisation its focus, its direction. Its crafting takes perhaps some hours. But its communication, keeping it out there takes continuous and total commitment. I like the example of Alexander the Great. In battle, Alexander would form and then commit his troops and then observe the ebb and flow of battle to decide where the main effort should be applied. Where the already committed troops should shift their effort and reserves be introduced. He wore plumes in his helmet that when he had decided on the spot he went there himself, a clear symbol to everyone of where they were to rally.

This commitment to moving the army to where he wanted it, placing himself tangibly out in front of them was total. A rallying point to his troops, he equally became a target to the enemy, the cumulative effect of wounds received eventually killing him at 27 years of age. Now today, even in armies, communication and the greater lethality of weapons means we can only draw on Alexander's example as an analogy, at all but the lowest levels of leadership. But a strong analogy it is.
It tells us that a vision has to be communicated and it takes commitment. It means, not just producing another glossy brochure, but getting out there and enthusing people with the vision, showing them their part in it. And it also illustrates to us that there is a cost - there is a personal cost.

Alexander shows us something else about the leader's role in delivering the vision. You see in Alexander's day a commander had no hope of addressing his whole army before battle. Despite the popular film images, the PA system to achieve that just didn't exist. So it was critical that he communicated his vision for the battle to the right people - the critical people at the critical time. He made himself visible, gaudy armour and plumes, and communicated the vision, to the people that mattered most in achieving it at that time.

This is a very important lesson for leaders today, as they are under ever increasing pressures of time. As a brigade commander of the 1st brigade in Darwin last year, I couldn't hope to communicate my vision effectively to all of its 2,700 members. Instead I had to concentrate on, in my case, my direct subordinates, the commanding officers of my regiments. I put a great investment in time and effort into those individuals to ensure they understood my vision and their part in it. This was both as a group and one on one. Identifying and empowering key people in achieving your organisation's vision is essential to its effective communication. In identifying this key group it's important to not only think hierarchically. You are trying to identify the people or groups of people with key influence. Not necessarily those next in the hierarchy. In my
case I also put a good deal of time into my regimental sergeant majors - the RSMs, the people the soldiers really believe.

In a strange way, doing this, meeting with the RSMs in a two way conversation, also increased their profile, they were seen to be in the mind of the "boss" in others perception and so their already substantial influence was reinforced. Of course this is tiring - as you travel a lot to achieve this communication, and no matter how you try to focus your effort, you invariably have to repeat the same message over and over again. But it's essential, communicating the vision is much more important than how you craft it, and the object of your communication is people.

People and Unleashing Their Potential.
Now lets talk about these people. The object of leadership, the whole rational for leadership - people. The successful leader in my view accepts that in reality he is a facilitator - a facilitator of the inherent power in the group. The reality it seems to me is that there is very little difference between the leaders and the lead in raw talent. In fact in many cases and particularly today, with so much of an organisation's power reliant on information technology, the diet of the younger generation, the balance of talent, even knowledge, is the other way. That old adage: "get a teenager while they still know everything" is becoming to have a ring of truth about it.

What the leader mainly brings is maturity and experience. So it's no longer just advantageous to unleash this power in subordinates, it's essential. A traditional hierarchical approach to the exercise of leadership, an authoritarian approach that assumes knowledge and wisdom are the preserve of the leader or leadership group these days, will consign an organisation to the scrap heap. I had the great fortune to command the SAS Regt, the Australian special forces and then a mechanised brigade - the 1st Bde. In all those organisations the potential combined talent was, as the young say these days, awesome. But how do you unleash it?

The first thing is to accept that you aren't the residue of all talent - to value the talent in your subordinates. Having humility has a real role to play here. The second is to accept that in strategic leadership there are two essential roles. One to provide the vision of which I've spoken, what we call the "left and right of arc", and the second to resource and facilitate
the objectives that vision requires.

Now unfortunately, the propensity of strategic leadership in any organisation to fail to limit itself to these functions - the communicating of vision and the facilitating and resourcing of its objectives, is I believe the main reason for dysfunctional organisations. Organisations with disgruntled team members because instead of concentrating on this the strategic role, their superiors meddle in theirs and so prevent them from meeting their potential.

Of course to empower subordinates does entail risk. It's not just organisational risk and business risk, but the psychological risk to the leader of feeling his power being challenged. I use to compare commanding SAS to having loose rein over a chariot pulled by 500 odd horses, my job to keep them basically between the halters - but what a ride. The sheer dynamism of any organisation with individuals empowered, simply given left and right of arc and authority and trust is incredible. But it requires leadership to consciously and deliberately reject paranoia that its role is challenged and then to stick to its strategic responsibilities. As Christians we have a great advantage here, because we should be seeking God's glorification through our exercise of leadership, not ours, so this shouldn't be an issue
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Leadership - A Spiritual Business.
The next dimension of leadership which I believe needs reviving is acknowledgement of its essentially spiritual nature. I believe that in this era of denial of anything remotely spiritual, that leadership is a clear loser. We seem to have forgotten that leadership is much more than the manipulation of management tools such as bonuses. Leadership is an appeal to the spirit. It is asking people to go beyond the rational, reaching through the cognitive to the emotional.

In extreme cases of conflict or danger, no rational calculation would cause men to be persuaded to do what we ask of them. For those of you who saw "Saving Private Ryan", what rational calculation would see men enter and then leave those landing craft. How many of them would have been steaming into Omaha Beach thinking I wonder what the army can do for me today? What's the bonus for this one? I suggest that in the actual operation, it was an appeal by leadership to the spirit that kept them there and even harder, kept them going after it. I'm not suggesting this appeal to the spirit requires a religious consciousness or results in a religious experience. But even our idiom acknowledges the fundamental role of the spiritual side of man in performing above himself. we certainly say in the army that it's not the size of the dog in the
fight that matters, as much as the size of the fight in the dog.

The spirit.
When a football team everyone has assumed will lose, knocks over a higher ranked team, you will inevitably hear it described as a "spirited performance". It resulted from them drawing on something within. To understand this to me is the essence of leadership. To comprehend that management might use artifacts to manipulate effort, but that leadership reaches into the spirit to generate it. It's not that this just creates a means by which leaders can cause individuals to perform above themselves, but that this focus on the spiritual dimension of those been lead, creates a people focus in the leader.

The spirit is the source of our humanity. The leader with a spiritual focus should automatically take account of the human factor in leadership, the need, for example, for acknowledgement and praise in those been lead. The essential requirement for the leader to treat subordinates and view them, not as pawns, but as people. No leader is in my view successful with out this capacity.

Humility.
I can't leave this subject without one final point. It is the issue in leadership the lack of which has brought too many leaders undone and which Christian leaders need to particularly exhibit --it is humility. We have enough contemporary examples of this failing for me to save on time in treating it. But I will say that for Christians in-particular, lack of humility is unacceptable, because it denotes someone working not in God's power, but his own. How many times have we all given some seemingly irresolvable leadership problem up to God, seen him miraculously resolve it, and then strutted around taking the credit.

But as soon as we lose humility we think its actually us achieving the results, go off in our own strength and before too long it all comes apart. Humility is essential in Christian leadership.

Conclusion.
Well I want to thank you for inviting and listening to me. I was the wrong person to ask "what have you learned about leadership?" Because unfortunately I continue to learn as much by default as commission every day, I have lots of lessons. Had you asked someone who had this leadership business squared away, you would have suffered a shorter talk I'm sure.

If I am to sum up the lessons on leadership, I would say that vision is essential, but its communication is infinitely more important than its crafting and that takes commitment. That leadership is essentially about unleashing the power in people and directing without constraining it and that to fully realise the fundamental human factor, you have first to accept that we are all spiritual beings and it is the human spirit that true leadership seeks to reach.