Leadership, Command and Control and Basic Competences

Sense-making, trust, stress, group cohesion and resilience, case studies, cultural awareness, gender, communication skills, mediation & negotiation, self-reflection, organizational culture, diversity management, temporary units, physical and psychological characteristics, human factors analysis, cognitive abilities, recruitment and selection, education and training, post-traumatic stress, military medicine.

 

 

Dutch troops in the field          

Current Chair and contact for working group:

Dr. Petrus Hendrikus Johannes Olsthoorn

Associate Professor in Military Leadership and Ethics, Netherlands Defence Academy
Email  Website

 

 

 

 

Peter Olsthoorn is Associate Professor in Military Leadership and Ethics at the Netherlands Defence Academy. Besides leadership and ethics, he teaches on armed forces and society, war and the media, and on ethics and fundamental rights for Frontex, the border guarding agency of the European Union. His research is   mainly on topics such as military virtues, military leadership, military medical ethics, armed drones, and the ethics of border guarding. Among his publications are the monographs Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2010), Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy   (State University of New York Press, 2015) and the edited volume Military Ethics and Leadership (Brill, 2017).

 

BALTDEFCOL Co-chair for ISMS2026

LTC Tommaso Formato, Tommaso.formato@baltdefcol.org

Developing Science for Command Senior Enlisted Leaders

Book Project Update

Eric Begin (CA)

This cross‑working‑group panel advances the agenda launched at ISMS 2025 in Amsterdam, where scholars and practitioners reframed Command Senior Enlisted Leaders (CSELs) as a distinct professional expertise in the human domain. This year, we build on that momentum by drawing on insights from the Baltic Defence College’s NATO‑accredited Command Senior Enlisted Leaders’ Course (CSELC) and presenting the emerging outline of the first volume in a multi‑book project on Senior Enlisted Leadership. The panel examines how CSELs generate cohesion, translate intent into action, and steward organisational culture through relational authority rather than formal command. It explores the implications of the “inverted career,” the development of tacit knowledge, and the unique contribution of enlisted leadership to mission command and democratic defence institutions. Contributors will discuss methodological approaches, doctrinal implications, and priorities for future research, setting the foundation for follow‑on volumes that develop a systematic science of Senior Enlisted Leadership.

Past Chairs:

Soili Paananen, Finnish National Defence University 2013-2021
Aki-Mauri Huhtinen, Finnish National Defence University 2008-2013

Description

The Working group Leadership, Command and Control, and Basic Competences is a multidisciplinary, international and networking working group which aims at enhancing knowledge and understanding of military leadership-related issues. 

Topics

The range of topics included in the working group is wide and includes different aspects of leadership, such as leadership-as-skills and abilities, leadership-as-practice, leadership-as-communication, negotiation and networking, leadership-as-sensemaking, leadership education, training, learning-on-the-job, and professional development as well as leadership in different environments. The working group is especially keen on research which is contextualized in crisis management environments.

Scope

The working group offers for researchers a forum where topics about military leadership-related issues are analyzed and discussed during ISMS conferences as well as through research and publications. 

Recent publications

Paananen, S. 2021. The education and training of military leaders for crisis management environments: perceptions of its suitability for adaptive expertise. In M. Nuciari & E. Olivetti (Eds.) Leaders for tomorrow: Challenges for military leadership in the age of asymmetric warfare. Advanced sciences and technology for security applications. Cham: Springer, 63–81. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-71714-8

Articles:

Ihatsu, T., Paananen, S. & Sederholm, T. 2021. Violence resembling terrorism – From the First responder viewpoint. Journal of Applied Security Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/19361610.2021.1889895

Paananen, S. 2020. Sociomaterial relations and adaptive space in routine performance. Management Learning 51(3), 257–273. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507619896079

Paananen, S., Häyhä, L. & Hedlund, E. 2020. Diversity in teams: Perceptions of team learning behaviour in a military staff exercise. Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies 3(1), 1–17.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.31374/sjms.6