The Leadership Conversation: Sir Peter Cosgrove

The Governor-General and former chief of defence knows a few things about leading – and says it’s not about command and control.

John Eales (left) interviewing the Governor General, General Sir Peter Cosgrove. Picture: Hollie Adams

When you meet someone outside the context in which they are best known, it’s sometimes difficult to reconcile the person before you with the leader they must be in their day job. This is often the case with leaders from the military. I’ve known Sir Peter and Lady Cosgrove now for many years. Sir Peter is one of those people.

In many ways it’s difficult to envisage him leading his troops in conflict; in other ways it’s not. I have always admired his ability to remain unruffled in all circumstances. He has been well regarded in his public roles, and has led with grace while maintaining an uncompromising sureness of self. Sir Peter has good judgment and it’s really not difficult to picture men and women wanting to follow him.

Sir Peter served in our armed forces for 40 years and retired as chief of the defence force in 2005. He has been on a number of boards and in various advisory positions, and even answered the call when it came to leading the emergency relief operations following Cyclone Larry in North Queensland.

The Deal - September 2018

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Sir Peter, you are Lead Ambassador for the Sydney Invictus Games. Why is this such an important initiative?

Invictus is a concept absolutely and just brilliantly captured. It’s a realisation that as we go through these agonies of war in a far-off place – and it’s a ruthless and bloody, very personal conflict – that our people come home to a nation that is busy, hard charging, doing non-warlike things. And these folks can feel lost and abandoned, just because society is busy and other people have no frame of reference about what they’ve been through. It took us a very long time to emerge from the paradigms of the world wars where we had huge numbers of our population in uniform and you had the shared notion of service. Now, people can come back, get a few weeks leave [and it’s] back to work. Even the other soldiers who haven’t been anywhere are saying, you know we’re all very busy. There’s no period of cushioning, readjustment.

Increasingly now we’re recognising everybody needs a bit of a cushion. But even when you provide the cushion, that’s on the understanding that people are sometimes broken physically or terribly bruised mentally. That’s the predicament.

Do the Invictus Games cater for people who are both physically and mentally traumatised?

Sure. We’ve got a number who are very obviously physically damaged and they will be seen – you know, people with prosthetics. But we’ve got a lot of people who have mental scars and are struggling to cope. Those are the people who might not obviously look like they have an issue but in the worst case can have a full breakdown. In even mild cases they are depressive, perhaps withdrawn, alienated, isolated, don’t feel self-worth. So they say, well I’m not handling it so there must be something wrong with me. There is something wrong with you but it’s not your fault. You’ve just been exposed to horrific experiences.

Sir Peter Cosgrove. Illustration: Johannes Leak.

I remember speaking to you about this exact issue more than 10 years ago and you identified that the wounds you can’t see are often the worst wounds. What can more can we do?

I think we were slow to say, OK, let’s work on the presumption that many of our returned people will have some mild through to severe medical effect and let’s minister to them, both before they leave the place where they’ve been serving and then when they get home. In a concerted way. Let’s interview them, put them through expert and comforting assessment, not punitive. Let’s treat it as if it’s a bloke who’s sprained his ankle, but in this case it’s a man or woman who’s sprained their mind. So we treat it objectively and take the stigma away.

Going back to World War I, World War II, you had this notion to just sort of toughen up. There wasn’t the appreciation that there were going to be lasting effects society should take responsibility for. And there were countless families around Australia where they’d say “Uncle Bill’s just had one of his turns”, or “Dad’s in one of his moods”. It was sort of stiff upper lip and just get on with it, and they had damaged goods going through the rest of their lives. If you take the stigma away by just saying, well look, we put the person there and there’s something about them that is broken or bent. Let’s just get on … find out how to fix it.

I remember when I was leaving East Timor, I instituted a level of assessment and assistance on the psyche side. Everybody had to have an interview before they left Timor to go home. Then if they showed any signs of needing further help, they’d have follow-up in Australia. I was sitting in my office only a couple of days before I came home and a psychology corps major knocked on my door. She was the boss of the whole extra group of people we had up there doing this assessment and I thought she was coming to give me a progress report on how it’s all going, so I asked her to sit down. How’s it all going? She said, fine, fine, fine … we’re getting through it. And I thought, that’s good. And then she said, now, how are you feeling? What? Me? I’m feeling pretty good cause I’m going home soon. And I started to laugh! This process is now embedded.

You’ve led at the highest level in the military, in business and now in a constitutional role as Governor-General. What are your insights from leading in those realms?

In the military, you’ve got to be technically as excellent as a long period of service can make you. The era of the bovine general has well and truly passed. It’s a very, very technically demanding career. You do that because in the end you must achieve your mission and come home safely and within the laws of war. I mean, there are limits to what you can do. So inside the boundaries the challenge is extraordinarily technical. In the military, you have to have all of the, I suppose, cheerful, optimistic, embracing leadership, but then execute it like a technician. So, first give me an expert and then we’ll see how good they are in leading. You can have plenty of technocrats who are rotten leaders and they’ll get indifferent results.

There’s a reason the best generals are often creeping up towards middle age. It takes so long to understand and master the art of being a leader at continually increasing levels, with the technical know-how that builds. So you can be a mighty platoon commander of 30 people and you could wield them around in a combat area with great professionalism but not be ready to be a general.

‘I don’t think you can train for resilience because it is somewhat spiritual.’

In corporate life, and remember I was on boards and wasn’t the chief executive of a civilian concern or business, you get the powerful binoculars from the board and you can see what’s happening in the company. And it’s a different form of leadership because it’s to some degree industrial, in the sense that there is a contract between the employed and the employer that is different from – binding, but in a lesser way – the contract between the person who signs up to be a sailor, soldier or airman or woman. The employees volunteer their labour, which can be withdrawn. More than that, they volunteer their efforts and their interest and their loyalty and their affection for the company. I have heard it said that in some companies people hate the company but don’t want to leave it, and at that point you know you’ve got a person who attends work but is not committed to the work.

I can understand that the relationship piece of a company can degrade to where the leadership is by fiat or dictate or email, along the lines of “there’ll be no leave until morale improves!”

I learnt a lot watching my corporate colleagues when I left the military, and they probably were surprised to discover that what we call command and control leadership – which is basically do it or I’ll put you on a charge, which everybody assumes is the military – isn’t the case. When you get to be very senior, you have to basically seduce and enlist people, win them to your view. Have them chomping at the bit because it’s the best thing to do. Because if you only do it by orders it’s probably a half-hearted plan. That’s more difficult to apply in corporate life but I’ve seen brilliant chief executives who had that knack of describing the vision splendid.

And what of your present role as Governor-General?

The bloke who best said it, I think, was Sir Ninian Stephen or Sir Zelman Cowen – one of those healing governors-general after the events of the ’70s – who described the job as holding a mirror up to the Australian people. And not just metaphorically holding up a mirror, but describing back to them the things we like to see in ourselves. Now, I’m going to be doing two days of investitures later this week, and that is a classic example of holding up the mirror. These are people who will be recognised with awards within the Order of Australia, within the military-type medals, within the Australian public service medal and some for bravery. This sort of varied group is united in one characteristic: they are ordinary people who have been found to be doing extraordinary things, and to be able to show them to other people receiving medals on the same day, or their loved ones or the officials in the front row, is really what this holding up the mirror is.

With the increasing amount of information available with which to make decisions, have you practised any particular decision-making techniques as a leader?

Yeah. I found that I had to become more ferocious than ever in devouring information, but there’s a discipline of discarding and pushing aside: this is unreliable; this is immaterial; this is seminal; this is important. Dragging the information you need out of what you see. So you come down to what I might call viable lines of analysis and decision and decide those, and if you’re not sure, test them on one or two people. But you must decide.

Who do you test such things on?

Well, people in the same game. Obviously in my game I can’t go shopping around for opinion. So I might have one or two people who live through these experiences but don’t have the responsibility. I might test my ideas and my concerns in-house, but then the core has to be me.

When I was CDF, the end of a line for my decisions could be life and death because they ordered men and women into harm’s way. That pretty much stopped when I left the role of CDF. After that, it’s a stewardship of other people’s money and the corporate health of a company – you know, do good things – but it was hardly likely that somebody was going to kick the bucket because of my decisions on the board. And now in this job it is hugely pressing, but not life and death.

‘You don’t bundy on and off; you eat, sleep, drink, breathe the challenge of leadership.’

Is resilience a learnt skill or is it more innate?

I think it might be more innate. I don’t think you can train for resilience because it is somewhat spiritual. You know, there are signs that you’re not being resilient and being snappy, flying off the handle. Being apparently good out there, but over here in a more private situation you’re a monster. Resilience is not something that is “go and sit down and become resilient”. It’s actually fairly innate.

It’s easy for people to look at the success you’ve had in so many forums and not realise it hasn’t all been easy. Was there a leadership blind spot you had to work on?

Every day. I mean look, I reckon any leader who in a day is running around expressing leadership has blind spots all over the place. Anybody who says that they had a perfect day at leadership, or even saw somebody else they think was displaying superb leadership, they would’ve done something wrong.

Is there anything you’re most proud of as a leader?

Yeah – to have those I’ve led be proud of what they did, because it’s always the team that does it. Proud of what they did, and in that context saying, “he’s not a bad bloke”.

So what can we most look forward to from the Invictus Games?

I think the triumph of will and spirit over sad times… sad times, because if you’ve been maimed physically that’s sad and often lifelong. If you’ve been damaged mentally it’s characterised by not feeling good, so in your life there’s sadness and that sadness is inhibiting. You’re not living as full a life as you want to. But there’s a mobilising moment where you say, I can do this; I want to be with these people. I’m going to participate in this and I’m going to do it despite any of these drawbacks, and to me, while there are races and competitions and teams and rules, and first, second and third and all that sort of thing, every one of the 500 competitors has won because they signed up. They’re going to be here and they’ll be standing alongside each other, and there’ll be tears and arms around each other and there’ll be lifelong friendships and there’ll be stacks, and there’ll be people who reckon they got dudded in the 100 and all that sort of thing. And all you can say to them is, mate, you’ve already won.

What leadership advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?

You’ve got to start with terminal accountability. You are accountable. You take on the role of leader, whether it’s been given to you or you design it and you gain it, you’re accountable. You don’t bundy on and off; you eat, sleep, drink, breathe the challenge of leadership. It doesn’t mean you’re always annoying the living daylights out of the team, but you never stop thinking about it, never stop thinking about who needs help. Who’s a leader in themselves? Who can help that person over there? It’s almost like a continually playing symphony in the back of your mind – I have this burden, I have this privilege, and I’m accountable – and it follows you all the way through.

I used to tell young officers: you might let your soldiers go at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon to have the weekend off and you might even go off to where you live and see your mates, but don’t stop thinking about it. You are the boss, and if something happens to one of those soldiers on the weekend you don’t say, “I can’t be bothered, it’s Saturday.” No, they’re yours. They’ve been given to you to look after.

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