Stop Calling Everyone a Leader: An Army Veteran’s Reality Check To Businesses

Former Army Sergeant Jonathan Batten says civilian leaders could learn more than a few field tactics from the Defence Force, starting with purpose, process, and pride.

Ask a corporate professional what leadership means and you’ll often find yourself as an audience of one to a mini-TED Talk. Ask a veteran, however, and you’ll get a high-stakes philosophy built on hundreds of years of action.

Former Army Sergeant Jonathan Batten, says he’s had his fill of the “L” word. “Nowadays I avoid filing anything under leadership because no one really knows what it means,” he says.

Batten’s approach to management is a specific and practical fifteen year career in the Australian Army, that included two tours of active duty in Afghanistan, one in East Timor, and contract support to the Australian Diplomatic Mission in Iraq. He now develops high-performance programs for specialist enterprises, and believes that there’s a lot that businesses can take from the Defence playbook as we move into a new era of work.

Stop Confusing Leaders with Managers

Batten says many modern workplaces fundamentally confuse the need for leadership with effective management. “We’ve got this obsession with everyone being a leader, when actually what most people need are managers who can run a good process and make a team function,” Batten says.

“A shop steward needs to lead a team in a factory because that’s still a functional team with a defined goal and risk but for most roles it’s a bit reductive when all you really need is someone effective at managing the resources and enabling skilled practitioners to be autonomous within the organisation.”

For Batten, that means stamping out micromanagement and trimming bloated middle layers. “I once had a brilliant director who said no person is an inbox. If I need a filter to send emails up and down the chain, I’ll just put a filter on my inbox.”

“As a leader it’s my job to make sure that the people in my team want to turn up to work every day, that they know what’s expected of them and how to do it safely.”

Profit Isn’t A Mission 

In the Army, every mission has a defined purpose with high stakes outcomes. In business, purpose often gets lost somewhere between the EBITA and the BHAGs.

“I think the biggest mistake leaders make is conflating the profit for purpose,” Batten says. Finding personal purpose is one of the main things that will keep an employee, from entry level to C-suite, engaged in their work.

“Sometimes you need to divorce yourself from what the company decides your team’s purpose is,” he says. “A lot of companies still believe profit is the bottom line and they’re cynical about making sure their employees have individual purpose. It’s disheartening for people who care about their work, which ironically, are the best employees you’ll ever have.”

For Batten, the backbone of purpose is clear standards. “Everyone loves to quote Lieutenant General David Morrison, ‘the standard you walk past is the standard you accept,’ but it’s generally true. You can’t just write a list and then sit back, watch it not happen, and then criticise.”

He credits that mindset to his father. “As a kid my old man ran a sand blasting factory out in West Melbourne in pretty rough areas. To be blunt, most of the people he had working for him were the ones who couldn’t get other jobs, they had just come out of prison or what have you. They were rough fellas.”

“The team room was a mess and dad didn’t like it. So, he cleaned it up, painted it. Every day he’d be the one in there sweeping it out and cleaning it up. And that was the first domino, it made these guys realise that they had somewhere they could come and have a bit of pride in their work.”

“Eventually it got to the point that he could send these guys out to a work site and they would leave it immaculately clean every day at 4pm. All the paints would be put away properly, everything be locked up and stored properly. That sense of pride built real purpose.”

The Capstone Skills for the Future of Work

“One of the things that people often overlook with the military is that overwhelmingly they are people who want to be there,” says Batten. “Very focused, goal‑oriented people with a bias for action and the people who don’t want to be there will generally self‑select out and go do something else.”

That self‑selection breeds the ultimate leadership advantage, a workforce guided by purpose and accountability. “Leadership is the capstone of what you learn in the military, but there’s also the ability to stay calm under real or perceived pressure and the ability to make structured decisions.”As AI and automation reshape how teams operate, Batten says that leaders need to keep substance above hype. “We’ve all seen the bell curve about adaptability,” he says. “The army is skewed towards early adopters and innovators so we’re trained very early to adapt to new skills quickly. The elephant in the room is that a lot of AI tools are being added into everything while very few people are being tasked with working out which ones actually work.”

“Just being an evangelist for whatever the new thing is, that’s the easy side of it. If you don’t have any substance behind it, there’s no point.” It’s the same disciplined rule of pivot fast that he learned in the service. “In tactical military thinking you don’t reinforce failure,” Batten explains.

“When you have something that failed, your reinforcements – manpower, money – need to go to your successes. Only by building an adaptation cycle that is constantly reviewing will you ever start to benefit.”