James Cameron, CEO of armed forces charity Mission Motorsport and advocacy body Mission Community, honed his leadership skills during a 17-year military career before switching to the third sector. He talks to Al Clarke, Chairman of the Ennis & Co Advisory Group, about his pathway and the skills that make great leaders.
AL CLARKE: You’ve covered a lot of ground in your career. Obviously, there’s your 17-year Army career, where you rose to the rank of Major. You’ve worked as a journalist and as a motorsport instructor, you’ve done advocacy work, and now you are a CEO in the third sector. Did you have a set plan about how your career would unfold?
JAMES CAMERON: I don’t think I’ve ever been sufficiently strategic to stand back and think about my life goals. Instead, I’ve just followed the things that I’ve been passionate about. During my military career, I found things that I loved doing, and the same goes for the automotive, which appeals to me on an emotional level. So, passion has been the thing that has guided me rather than having a master plan about being in the Army for a certain period of time and then stepping out and entering the third sector.
The common thread in terms of how my career has unfolded is that everything has been about people and taking responsibility for people. In the military context, that is clear and straightforward. People always tend to obsess about kit when they talk about the military, but it’s people who operate the kit, and it’s the people of the armed forces that are really important. The third-sector work that followed my military career was really an extension of that.
AC: A lot of people who have had high-ranking careers in the military have had successful careers afterwards. What are the elements of military leadership that are most transferable to other areas of life?
JC: Leadership is something that’s talked about a lot in the military, and it’s something that I think other industries really struggle to talk about in the same way. In the military, leadership is formally taught as part of your training.
The type of leadership most people associate with the military largely involves shouting and getting people to run up hills in the pouring rain, but there are many more types of leadership than that. You need an entirely different form of leadership when soldiers are on their fifth month of a tour in Helmand and they’re thinking about home. The idea that you can get people to do what you want them to do just by shouting at them falls apart the moment you go on operations. Instead, you’ve got to help an individual to understand why you want them to behave in a certain way and for them to see it and believe in it to the point that they do it of their own volition. You need people to behave in a certain way without necessarily having to tell them what to do every step of the way. It’s about helping people to understand the purpose of what they’re doing.
The military is really good at making sense out of chaos. You turn up in a situation that’s less than ideal; it isn’t what you’ve trained for, and it’s an evolving situation. You’re always under pressure in terms of quantity, quality and logistics because you’ve never got enough of what you want to have, but you just have to get on with the things you need to do.
Ultimately, it comes down to how to motivate soldiers. When you look at the United States, there is a lot of flag saluting and singing of the national anthem that goes on in schools, but it’s a different culture in Britain. You can’t motivate soldiers through soaring rhetoric about Britain as a nation. It’s more about doing it for your mates and those around you. Helping everyone understand the part they play in the collective effort and helping them understand why it is important to do things in a certain way is crucial. It’s also important to lead by example because a fundamental aspect of human behaviour is that people will do something for you if they think that you would do the same for them.
Those kinds of leadership skills transfer seamlessly into civilian life in terms of helping people to understand the purpose of what they’re doing and taking them on the journey. In my current role, I spend a lot of time trying to motivate volunteers. If you can convince them of the purpose and your personal conviction, and they feel that they are supported by you, it’s amazing the lengths that they will go to in support of the common goal.
AC: I’m hearing purpose, I’m hearing trust and I’m hearing the ability to deal with pressurised and changing situations, all of which are great leadership skills and traits. But are there any gaps in terms of leadership skills when you move from military to civilian life?
JC: There’s a big culture difference for sure. In the military, you are either actively engaged in operations, or you are training to go on operations. Apart from when you are in a recovery period after intensive training or intensive operational stuff, those are the only two kinds of activities. It’s therefore a bit of a shock when you come out of the military to discover that people are in operations the whole time, though in low-intensity operations where you are less likely to die because of it.
For a lot of people, the passion and intensity just aren’t there, and so finding meaning is one of the single biggest challenges when you enter civilian life because you find that some people around them are coasting or free-wheeling – either knowingly or because that’s the way they’ve always seen it done.
If there is no sense of common purpose, and you’re used to having that in the military, it’s easy to feel a bit lost. Finding meaning and purpose is really important to service leavers because they’re used to an all-encompassing job in terms of what they do, where they sleep, the people they socialise with and the structure that is around them.
To give you an example, if you’re a young man who’s in the Household Cavalry Regiment and who is perhaps on ceremonial duties based in London, you eat, you sleep, you breathe and you work in a way that is unique to being a Household Cavalry soldier. Nobody else lives on the edge of Hyde Park and goes out riding at ridiculous times in the morning. No-one else has to sit on a horse and be an exemplar for the nation by tolerating misbehaving tourists. There isn’t anything like that in the civilian world and there isn’t a civilian job anywhere that is so unusual and extraordinary. Anyone who is stepping out of that all-enveloping environment and looking for civilian employment is always going to face a big culture shock.
To a certain extent, a lot of people who leave the services have an almost unrealistic expectation of civilian employment and think they will find a job that will be just as encompassing and defining as their service career. But leaving the services is also about finding yourself, finding the thing that defines you, as much as it is about finding a job. Whatever we can do to help people make a successful transition will pay off for the business employing them, for the individual and fundamentally for the country.
AC: If you’re a leader in an automotive organisation who is open to hiring someone with a military background for a leadership position, how would they go about finding a suitable candidate, and what would they need to think about when they’re looking for that person?
JC: The first thing I would do is look in the places that we’ve already paid for as taxpayers, such as the Career Transition Partnership or Op ASCEND. As a nation, we do actually spend a lot of money on ensuring there are good outcomes for those who have serviced in the forces, along with their families.
But there are all sorts of other ways to access ex-military people, and there’s also help available to support you in making recruitment decisions because deciphering a military person’s CV can be really difficult. Even I would struggle to read a Navy CV and know what it means because I don’t understand the ranks. I also get a lot of CVs from ex-forces people who grossly oversimplify or gloss over what they were doing while serving.
JLR is an interesting case in point because they were looking to bring people with a military background into leadership roles across the business. Most companies find that they don’t tend to attract job applications from ex-military people because the job descriptions are often written in industry speak, which is intimidating for somebody coming from outside the corporate world.
JLR navigated that issue by investing in armed forces community engagement and by recognising and empowering their veterans have developed a reputation for being a forces-friendly company. The lesson is to do more to engage with the armed forces community, even when you’re not hiring.
In terms of recruiting the best candidates, you need to look beyond CVs. If it’s written by a recent service leaver, the chances are that it’s the first time they’ve ever produced a CV and the first time they’ve written about themselves in the first person, so it’s unlikely to be a perfectly articulated portrait of themselves. The single best way to get around that is to deal with candidates face to face and have conversations with them. Once you have an armed forces community within your organisation, you can use them to help read military CVs because they speak the same language.
AC: How successful is the transfer of skills and people in terms of adapting to work beyond the armed forces? Is there any data on whether they stick and succeed? Are there any specific challenges they face that may require support from the business?
JC: I can only talk in generalisations, but people who have served in the forces are used to being on a ladder where there is clarity about where they sit, what the next rung is, what qualifications they need to make the next step up and what the overall pathway looks like for them.
What service therefore teaches them is that the route is upwards, and so they see a pathway to progression by sticking with the business. Taking an alternative route by hopping from employer to employer is completely alien to many service candidates because that is simply not what they are used to. They’re much more likely to see progression in terms of remaining in the business rather than stepping outside.
Of course, there will be some candidates who struggle to manage the huge cultural change after leaving service for many of the reasons that I’ve already talked about. For people like that, the better the support you give them and the better the community that you can put around them, the more likely they are to succeed.
AC: It’s interesting to hear about service leavers generally favouring a sequential route to promotion. A number of senior leaders we have spoken to have gone outside their comfort zone and done different things. For example, a head of marketing might move across into operations. The ones who succeed are the ones who are prepared for that leap of faith rather than sticking to what they know best. Is that something that is also familiar in the military?
JC: Heavens, yes. The military is such a broad place, and people can find themselves doing extraordinary things simply because that’s what they’ve been sent to do. You’ve got people like the Household Cavalry soldier at the beginning of their career who I spoke about earlier. Or, at the senior end, I have one friend who is very senior Navy Submariner who for the last 20 or so years has been doing an incredibly critical role around managing Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent.
Officers can often be posted around in different areas of responsibility. It’s possible that in some of the more technical areas, people are more likely to stick with their speciality. For others, there could be a change every two to three years, often involving moving around the country or abroad with family in tow. You are constantly being dropped into jobs where you’re lucky if you get a bit of handover, and you can find yourself spending a year just getting your head around the subject. Just when you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll be posted off to somewhere else. This can drive a certain behaviour, with some people getting itchy feet at the two- or three-year point and seeking a new challenge to give them an opportunity to develop.
AC: Reflecting on your career, what pivotal moments or decisions have most significantly shaped your leadership style?
JC: There are many and varied. I’m someone who hoovers up information all the time, and I’m at a fortunate point in my career because I get to interact with people who are in senior leadership positions, whether in politics or industry. It’s fascinating because you get to see people’s different leadership styles and how they apply influence in very different ways. Alison Jones, at Stellantis, is an example of one of the people I’ve quietly observed. She’s an empathetic leader who is extremely professional and effective. I’ve seen some incredible leaders in the military, but I’ve also seen some who were getting it incredibly wrong.
Equally, in the automotive executive space, there are some extraordinary characters who I really look up to and others who I have little time for. A lot of that comes down to how people deal with people, and I always look at how they treat the least senior person in the room to get a good read on them.
Seeing how some people take out their frustrations on the people around them is just beggars’ belief because it’s one of those things that’s so easy to get right if you have a sense of humility. When you see someone react badly to a minor frustration, it makes you wonder whether they can be trusted when things are really difficult and important decisions need to be made. It harks back to what I said earlier about leading by example.
AC: Who have been your most significant mentors or inspirations in your career? What was it about them which made them memorable?
I’ve been fortunate to have been helped by a lot of people at all sorts of levels, but I would single out Richard Nugee – a Royal Artillery officer who, by the time I first met him, had risen to the rank of Lieutenant General and was Chief of Defence People. He was effectively the HR director for the entire Ministry of Defence, not just those serving in uniform but the civil service as well.
I first encountered him at an event where I was talking about some of our activities at Mission Motorsport, and he said he was interested in what I was saying and invited me to come and see him. We later had a half-hour meeting where he listened to me, asked some genuinely insightful questions and told me about some of his own experiences. He now chairs the Board of Trustees for our Mission Community advocacy arm.
For someone so senior to have bumped into someone a lot further down the food chain, made space to listen and then changed the pathway of what he was doing and ultimately the pathway of what we as an organisation were doing is quite exceptional. I’ve had a lot of interactions with people of similar levels of seniority who, if they gave you half an hour of their time, would use it to give their opinions. Richard didn’t do that. He sat and listened to me, and what he did on the back of that meeting was transformational both for me and for the way he set things in motion at the MoD that has led to some of the amazing stuff we do now.
