Meyler Campbell Anniversary

Meyler Campbell 25th Anniversary Lecture

🗓️ Thursday 13 November 2025 (this event has now passed)
🕕 📍 Royal Society of Medicine, London

As we celebrate 25 years of coaching excellence at Meyler Campbell, we are delighted that this year’s lecture was delivered by one of our own alumni – Langley Sharp MBE. As the British Army’s former Head of the Centre for Army Leadership, Langley brings a fresh perspective to leadership, purpose, and performance and offers powerful lessons for everyone concerned with developing their own and others’ leadership capability.

No One Leads Alone: Military-Inspired Lessons in Followership: Developing Responsibility, Empowerment, and Character to Drive High Performance

“Leaders matter greatly. But in searching so zealously for better leaders, we often lose sight of the people those leaders must lead.”  Robert E. Kelley

While the relationship between leadership and performance has been extensively studied, it is often portrayed as one-dimensional and leader-centric, overlooking the role that followers and followership play in shaping outcomes and influencing organisational success.

Drawing on over 20 years of military service, Langley Sharp MBE will seek to reframe leadership as a dynamic, interdependent system, demonstrating how both leaders and followers are intrinsically connected, each reinforcing the other to drive performance and serve a shared purpose.

Langley will challenge us and inspire us to:

• Recognise the fluidity, value and influence that exists in the co-dependent partnership between leaders and followers
• Explore the essence of effective followership – responsibility, empowerment and character – from both leader and follower perspectives
• Reflect on the role of coaching as a catalyst for enhancing the leader-follower relationship and, in turn, elevating both individual and organisational performance.

Langley Sharp MBE is the former head of the Centre for Army Leadership, responsible for championing leadership excellence across the British Army.

Graduating from Sandhurst two decades ago, his career in the Parachute Regiment, which included operational command at every rank, saw him deployed to Northern Ireland, North Macedonia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Among his many varied roles, he led a counter-insurgency Task Force operation, commanded a Parachute Regiment Battalion and delivered the Ministry of Defence’s training programme for the London 2012 Olympics venue security, for which he was awarded an MBE. He is the author of the British Army’s official account of leadership, The Habit of Excellence, distilling over three centuries of the Army’s experience in the art, science and practice of leadership.

The breadth of Langley’s life experiences has fostered in him a steadfast belief in the potential of people. As an executive coach (graduated from the Meyler Campbell Mastered programme in 2024) and leadership consultant, working with executives and senior leadership teams across the private and public sectors, his passion is to help unleash this potential. Langley is the Founder and Director of Frontier Leadership.

Ahead of his keynote at Meyler Campbell’s 25th Anniversary Lecture, Chief Science Officer and Faculty Member Simmy Grover sat down with Mastered graduate Langley Sharp MBE to explore his extraordinary military career and leadership philosophy.

Together they discuss learning mindsets, balancing tradition with change, role-modelling values and standards, and the challenges facing modern leaders. Langley also gives a glimpse of the insights he’ll share at the lecture, and what excites him about speaking to the Meyler Campbell community this November.

Full interview available here ⮕

Books

• The Habit of Excellence: Why British Army Leadership Works (Sharp, 2021)
• Habit of Excellence – Audio snippet
• Book Mention – What the army can teach us about leadership (2021)

Podcast Interviews

• The Centre for Army Leadership Podcast Episode with Lt Col Langley Sharp MBE
• Sporting Edge: Mastermind with Lieutenant Colonel Langley Sharp MBE

Articles

• The Reciprocity of Trust in High Performance Teams
• The Army’s Followership Doctrine Note that Langley wrote
• An Execution Mindset: Making It Happen by Langley Sharp
• Leadership lessons from the British Army’s “serve to lead” motto by Lieutenant Colonel Langley Sharp