Tough Wounded Leader – Leading in Challenging Times: David Richmond CBE Inspiring Leadership interview with Jonathan Bowman-Perks MBE

Colonel David Richmond CBE, Director Office for Veterans’ Affairs – Leading in challenging times

David as a Lieutenant Colonel Commanding Officer was the most senior UK officer wounded in Afghanistan.  David served for 26 years and Commanded on operations at all levels up to and including Battle Group before losing 10cm of his right femur to a Taliban bullet during a firefight north of Musa Qaleh in June 2008.

After four years of reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation he was medically discharged and joined Help for Heroes where he created their recovery services for wounded, injured and sick service personnel, veterans and their families from scratch. After working as a leadership advisor and coach, during which he co-founded Worldmaker International, which works with communities and businesses to help them build human resilience, he was appointed as the first Director of the Office for Veterans’ Affairs in the Cabinet Office. Leadership across all these roles has had some common themes: articulate a compelling vision your team can align with, stay focused on the outcome and don’t be distracted by the bump and grind of day to day work, build trust and belief in your team through delegation, know when to follow and keep smiling.

David describes himself as follows:

I have the depth and breadth of experience in senior leadership positions to help you improve leadership across your business and create focused, high performing teams. I’ll work with you to understand your challenges and design impactful, relevant workshops that will improve teamwork, collaboration, communication and bottom line business performance.  I have a track record of success built on a personable and purposeful leadership style, building great teams, empowering them to deliver, clearing obstacles out of their way to enable them to do so and making complex issues as simple as possible.

I am:

A senior leader comfortable in start-up and change/ transformation environments, able to develop and articulate a compelling vision and inspire its delivery across a multi-disciplinary team and multiple locations

A fluent, accomplished communicator, effective on all channels able to distil complex subjects into simple messages for internal audiences, external stakeholders and the media.

A strong advocate able to negotiate positive outcomes and win collective endorsement.

A skilled and accomplished relationship builder able to find common ground between multiple stakeholders and used to operating across organisational divides.

An empowering leader capable of building, inspiring and leading high-performing teams to deliver the highest quality results while developing their capabilities for the future.