“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In the summer of 2008, I found myself in the British countryside attending a conference on stability operations at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, the military center for education, training, and research. During elevenses one morning, I found myself chatting with a Royal Marine who was talking about leadership behaviors and how they translated to our ability to achieve success in an era of nation building.
As we chatted back and forth, I recognized something that I’d seen in our own Marine Corps. Like their counterparts across the Atlantic, Royal Marines don’t overly complicate concepts. They keep them simple, direct, and on point.
If it works, leave it alone.
The leadership behaviors aligned well with our own leadership attributes, but they were actionable in a different sense. Where ours define “what a leader is,” these focused more on what a leader does. The behaviors were also rooted in core values, which ties the two together in a simple framework that exemplifies positive, action-oriented leadership.
The Multiplier Effect
Good leadership doesn’t just make people feel better. It makes organizations perform better. And the proof is hard to argue against.
Start with the person in the chair: the head honcho, the boss, the HMFIC. Gallup research attributes at least 70 percent of the variance in team performance and engagement to the leader alone. That matters, because those aren’t soft metrics. In Gallup’s 2024 analysis of more than 3.3 million employees across 183,000 organizations in 90 countries, teams in the top quartile of engagement outperformed those in the bottom quartile by 23 percent in profitability and 18 percent in productivity. They also logged 78 percent less absenteeism, 63 percent fewer safety incidents, and markedly lower turnover.
That’s not a coincidence.
Good leadership is a multiplier. It rarely shows up as a single dramatic moment. It shows up in the subordinate who takes the initiative because the boss has their back, the team that solves the problem before it reaches the executive conference room, and the high performer who stays because their work is appreciated and recognized.
Those things matter. They reflect the leadership and the culture those leaders build. And culture is a competitive advantage no rival can copy.
So, the question isn’t whether leadership matters. It’s which leadership behaviors matter most. The British Army spent more than a decade finding out.
The Evidence Behind the Code
The British Army Leadership Code didn’t emerge from a doctrine writer’s cubicle or on the whiteboard in a general’s office. It evolved from years of field research by a team of sport and performance psychologists led by Lew Hardy at Bangor University in Wales. Their work began in 1999 with a practical problem: too many Royal Marines were failing in training.
Working with the Institute of Naval Medicine, Hardy’s team studied the methods used by the instructors responsible for training those recruits and measured six distinct leadership behaviors: role modeling, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individual consideration, high performance expectations, fostering team goals, and contingent rewards. Several of those behaviors separated the recruits who earned the green beret from those who quit – they had a deep and meaningful impact on confidence, resilience, and satisfaction. When instructors were trained to use them deliberately, outcomes improved.
The British Army took notice. Researchers extended their work to the School of Infantry in 2006, then across the Army’s initial training enterprise. The impact was almost instantaneous, and recruit attrition dropped by as much as 15%. In 2015, the Chief of the General Staff published the Army Leadership Code, codifying the research into seven behaviors expected of every leader, from lance corporal to general.
If you look closely at Hardy’s research, his behaviors map almost one-for-one onto the Leadership Code. That’s its real strength. They’re not an exercise in leader branding. They were observed, measured, and tested under some of the most demanding conditions imaginable, which is why they apply so well to any organization.
The Leadership Code
So, what does the Leadership Code look like in practice? The British Army expressed the seven behaviors as an acronym that’s, well … a little hard to forget: LEADERS. Each behavior is easy to remember and simple to explain, but a little more difficult to sustain. None require a uniform to understand, and each applies universally wherever leaders and people come together.
- Lead by example. Leadership isn’t a title; it’s a behavior. The most influential leaders live the standards and values they set for others.
- Encourage thinking. You want people to work smarter, not harder. As Patton said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
- Apply reward and discipline. Team building begins with recognizing exceptional effort and holding people accountable. Those two things will do more than anything else to set a winning culture.
- Demand high performance. Teams don’t rise to the occasion; they fall to their level of preparation. Set expectations high and drive toward them each and every day.
- Encourage confidence in the team. A team that believes in itself can accomplish anything. Challenge them and celebrate their successes.
- Recognize individual strengths and weaknesses. You’re leading a team of individuals, each with their own personality, goals, and motivations. It takes a practiced artist to lead them.
- Strive for team goals. You go further together. It doesn’t get any more basic than that.
None of these behaviors is revolutionary. That’s the point. They’re not about being charismatic or brilliant; they ask leaders to be consistent, to set the example, reward good effort, hold people accountable, and enforce standards.
The Code’s foreword is a familiar one: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” That concept applies as much in the boardroom as in the barracks. Organizations rise to the level of the behaviors their leaders model every day. Get those seven right, and performance tends to take care of itself.
