A question from an audience member at a recent speaking engagement really got me thinking. He simply asked me "what's the most important thing you learnt in the Army that transfers to your corporate life?"

Sure, we got to do lots of cool stuff like jump out of airplanes and abseil out of helicopters but as transferrable skills goes, they’ve got to be fairly low on the list of things I’d ever put on my resume now.

My experience tells me that the corporate world is catching up, in some regards, on how it develops its leadership talent if the billions of dollars we spend annually on leadership development training is any yardstick. But, it has to be said, I think there’s at least one area where the corporate world is falling short. There’s one truth about leading others that doesn’t ever seem to get a mention.

Leading is lonely.

When I was deployed to Bosnia as part of a NATO peacekeeping mission, minefields were something we came across fairly regularly. They were marked in a range of ways - some had the fairly obvious skull and crossbones on a red triangle and even if you couldn’t read the Cyrillic underneath, it didn’t take much imagination to work out that if you were on the side of the sign without writing then your day had taken a turn very much for the worse.

The biggest difference I’ve observed consistently between the corporate world and the military is how we view leadership.

From the moment an Officer Cadet arrives at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS), an institution that has, in one form or another, trained the British Army’s Officers for over 200 years, it’s drummed into them that their role is simple - it’s to serve those they lead.

Whether it's on combat operations in Afghanistan or managing multi-million dollar projects there's one word that my team have learned not to use when they're briefing me on their planned course of action.

That word is hope.