Last night we had a group call with our leadership specialist, former Exeter Chiefs and England Don Armand
He used professional sport analogies to break down leadership in corporate environments.
One area stood out.
Personality types.
Understanding how people behave, how they respond under pressure, and how they need to be led.
Great leaders understand this.
I didn’t always see that.
I often sit with my brother, ex Para Reg and we spin the dits.
Talking through our service history.
What worked, what didn’t, the leaders who led well and those who didn’t.
We joined up what feels like a lifetime ago. Different environment to corporate life, yes, but leadership should not have been different.
Then there was football.
League 1. Professional sport.
And what I witnessed was not leadership.
Forget personality types.
That would require communication.
There was none.
No 1 to 1 conversations. No effort to understand players. No real engagement.
What there was, every single week, was predictable.
Pre match. Half time. Post match.
Screaming. Shouting. Belittling.
Loss after loss in the second season.
And the response?
Punishment.
The entire squad. The entire staff.
Dragged in on rest days and pushed harder, as if more pressure would solve what pressure had already broken.
Not one staff meeting in two seasons.
Not one!
Halfway through that second season, pre-match opposition meetings stopped.
Completely.
No explanation. No direction.
And people wonder why performance dropped.
Why standards slipped.
Why the season ended in relegation.
I challenged it once.
I was told, “Don’t ever cross the manager.”
F**k that. Everyone is approachable. It’s how you go about it.
Big mistake! (That’s another story.)
Here’s the point.
This wasn’t just poor leadership.
This was unmanaged pressure.
“When pressure rises and communication disappears, performance follows.”
What I saw wasn’t a lack of effort.
It was leaders operating under sustained pressure who no longer had the capacityto think clearly, communicate properly or control their behaviour.
“You can’t lead people if you don’t understand them. And you won’t understand them if you never speak to them.”
This is where health comes in.
Because leadership capability does not sit separately from health. It sits on top of it.
When recovery is poor, when stress is constant and when cognitive load is high, communication suffers, decision making becomes reactive and leadership becomes inconsistent.
What I witnessed in football could have been improved with one thing.
Better communication.
But that requires capacity.
And capacity comes from health.
“Leadership doesn’t break overnight. It erodes when health and pressure are ignored.”
At Warrior Wellness Movement, this is exactly what we address.
Not culture. Not engagement. Not surface level leadership theory.
We address the root cause.
The degradation of leadership capability under sustained pressure driven by unmanaged health.
Because once communication breaks down, everything else follows.
Performance. Standards. Results.
So the question is simple.
As a leader…
Do you truly understand your people?
And do you have the capacity to lead them properly?
Chat soon, Ollie.
#LeadershipBreakdown#OperationalCapability#HumanPerformanceRisk#LeadershipUnderPressure#ExecutiveFunction
