From the Battlefield, the Bedside, and the Boardroom

What shapes the leader you eventually become?

Over more than twenty years, Jamie Lennon's leadership journey took him from the streets of West Belfast, through Iraq and Afghanistan, onto NHS wards during the Covid pandemic, and eventually into executive leadership and boardrooms across the public and private sectors.

Along the way, leadership rarely looked like the models described in textbooks.

It appeared in a maths teacher who recognised something in a child who had stopped believing in himself. In experienced Marines whose influence could strengthen - or undermine - the leaders around them. In nurses and healthcare assistants navigating professional identity and informal authority. In boardrooms where approaches that had worked throughout an entire career suddenly stopped working. And, unexpectedly, in a fourteen-year-old daughter who reminded a professional leadership coach when it was time to stop solving the problem and let someone else lead.

From the Battlefield, the Bedside, and the Boardroom brings together twelve true stories from a career spanning the military, healthcare and business. Some describe leadership at its best. Others explore mistakes, conflict, failure and the uncomfortable process of discovering that experience alone doesn't necessarily make us better leaders.

Running through them is a central idea: Leadership Identity - the accumulated experiences, assumptions, values and behaviours that shape how we understand ourselves as leaders and how others experience our leadership.

This isn't a book promising a new set of rules for becoming the perfect leader. It is an invitation to examine where your own leadership came from, which parts still serve you, which may need to change, and what your leadership might eventually leave behind in others.

Because the leaders we become are shaped by the leaders we have experienced - and, whether we realise it or not, parts of our leadership may one day become part of somebody else's.