In this edition of Teamship in the Spotlight, Jenson8 founder Jena Davidson speaks with former Regular and now Reservist Army officer and current HR consultant Andy Carre. Andy’s career spans officer training at Sandhurst, multiple operational tours in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq and beyond, and now commanding more than 350 people in an Army Reserve organisation while working with corporate clients in the HR space.
His lived experiences of Teamship – the highs, the breakdowns and the moments of moral courage (and failure) – offer powerful lessons for any organisation trying to build stronger teams.
The foundations: Trust as the glue
Andy’s first real experience of Teamship came at Sandhurst, where 25–30 strangers are thrown together and expected to become a functioning platoon. Within about five weeks, they must be working as an organisation that looks after each other, understands individual strengths and weaknesses and has each other’s backs.
For Andy, the non-negotiable ingredient is trust.
Lateral trust: confidence that peers will do what they say, support you and tell you the truth.
Vertical trust: belief that commanders are making sound decisions and that subordinate leaders will own and execute those decisions with clarity.
Training is where this trust is built – not just in technical skills, but in understanding who you’re relying on when the pressure comes. “Trust is the glue that brings everyone together,” he says.
High points: “We’ve got each other’s backs”
Asked about the best teams he’s been part of, Andy shares two high-water marks, both in military contexts.
The first is a year-long stint as a platoon commander, including an operational tour, during which he gained enough experience and had a wise platoon sergeant by his side. With a full-strength platoon and continuity over time, he was able to shape training, build capability, see the team judged alongside peers, and perform strongly.
The second is more visceral: taking over a unit in Iraq mid-tour, after it had suffered casualties, including a friend of his. The team had already bonded through adversity, and he had to insert himself quickly and authentically as their new leader.
A particular incident in Basra captures what teamship felt like on the ground.
Surrounded by a strongpoint under intense fire – mortars, RPGs and small arms from 360 degrees – Andy’s team had to clear and hold a complex of buildings under strict rules of engagement, with civilians all around.
Inside, they were coordinating cordons, clearing rooms, handling casualties, integrating new 18-year-old soldiers on their first operations and dealing with everything from sniffer dogs to international media rushing into the firefight.
In that chaos, he recalls a sense that “everybody’s on fire” in the best way: everyone doing their job, communicating clearly and caring for each other. Those moments, he says, are built on prior training, deep trust and knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses – and they are as relevant to corporate crisis teams as to combat units.
An unspoken part of the glue in that context was regimental identity: the cap badge. Being the only group from their regiment within a larger formation created a powerful sense of representing not just themselves, but their home unit and each other. No one wanted to “drop the ball” for the cap badge, and new joiners understood they were stepping into something bigger than themselves.
Low points: Toxicity, fractures and moral courage
Teamship doesn’t just fail in dramatic moments; it often unravels quietly. Andy describes how early warning signs appear as public back-chat between leaders and subordinates, open arguments and people refusing to “own” orders once they leave the room.
He’s unequivocal about toxicity: it is corrosive and incompatible with genuine teamship.
In the military, toxic behaviour is hard to hide because its impact on trust and cohesion is so obvious.
In commercial settings, toxic leaders can sometimes hide behind results measured in revenue and growth, but the internal damage is still there.
Andy argues that even high-performing toxic individuals should be removed, because the long-term organisational cost is “seismic.”
He also shares a painful personal learning: tolerating an act of physical aggression by a junior NCO against a private soldier many years ago. At the time, in a different cultural context, the soldier had made a serious ethical error that endangered others, and the assault went unchallenged by Andy.
Looking back, he calls it a failure of moral courage and something completely unacceptable under today’s standards. That experience has significantly shaped how he now thinks about leadership, correction versus punishment and the responsibility to intervene.
Leadership reimagined: From command-and-control to servant leadership
One of the biggest myths Andy calls out is the belief that “what the leader says goes.” Command-and-control leadership, driven by fear or ego, may deliver compliance but not growth or high-performing teams.
Instead, he favours a servant leadership model, literally inverting the traditional pyramid.
The leader sits at the bottom, setting boundaries, resources and the “sandbox” in which the team operates.
Within that sandbox, people are given space to grow, take ownership and contribute their best work.
This is not laissez-faire leadership; it is active condition-setting with clarity about non-negotiables. Over the last 15–30 years, Andy has seen military culture shift towards more emotionally intelligent, supportive and nurturing leadership – a trend he sees mirrored in progressive organisations.
He also emphasises the role of organisational “scaffolding”: systems, role models and feedback loops that nurture people rather than relying on discipline and fear.
Emotional intelligence, vulnerability and the unnamed emotion
In earlier phases of his career, the expectation was to “show no fear” and avoid emotional openness. As operations became more intense and life experience accumulated, Andy observed a marked rise in leaders' emotional intelligence and acceptance of vulnerability.
He describes returning from a 2004 tour and crying in front of his men during a briefing, something that would once have been unthinkable, but which he now sees as a legitimate human response and part of healthy vulnerability.
For Andy, vulnerability has to be strategic:
Leaders must understand their own weak spots, whether personality traits (like introversion) or capability gaps.
That awareness allows them to delegate effectively and give others opportunities to step up, without collapsing into helplessness or oversharing.
When asked which emotion teams feel but rarely name, his answer is simple: love. The genuine care people have for each other, forged through shared hardship and purpose, is what holds teams together and helps them avoid “really badly wrong” outcomes.
He notes that leadership is inherently lonely and stresses the importance of at least one confidant – often outside the immediate team – as well as strong personal relationships; in his own case, he describes his spouse as his primary outlet.
Where real teamship begins
Looking back, Andy says he wishes he had understood earlier the power of emotional intelligence and the value of being comfortable with vulnerability as a teammate, not just as a leader.
If he could remove one behaviour from teams everywhere, it would be toxicity. He has never seen anyone successfully “manage” their own toxic tendencies; the only answer is to identify and remove them, ideally at the selection stage.
And when does real Teamship begin? For Andy, it starts the moment an individual decides to be a true team player. It’s about owning your role in the system – on the pitch or on the bench – and committing to the team over pure individualism.