Commanding change: What can we learn from the Swedish Armed Forces’ senior leadership program on gender equality?

Although understanding gender equality is of direct importance for military organizations' ongoing efforts for organizational capacity building and personnel procurement, most military organizations struggle to properly consider gender equality as part of regular organizational decisions and processes.

This vulnerability prevents getting at serious problems such as reduced unit cohesion and low retention levels of women personnel, risks which weaken the organization.

Organizational progress that enhances gender equality parameters can be some of the toughest to achieve, especially in a military context. While there has long been research acknowledging the centrality of leadership for effective organizational development, there is, in fact, very limited knowledge around what military leaders themselves view as the best ways to accomplish sustainable and concrete change. Learning from leaders is central for forming more effective strategies for capacity building and training.

By the end of 2025, the Swedish Armed Forces will have put over 150 of its senior leaders through a training program which focuses on improving the understanding of gender equality in relation to reaching the regular mandate and in making daily decisions. This is one of the most comprehensive leadership training efforts of its kind. Moreover, this takes place in the context of the organisation's rapid growth and capacity-building.

Insights produced in this training offers us unique opportunities to learn about leadership-driven change and how stronger paths for actual progress within organizations can be formed over time.

Based on 78 in-depth analyses produced by the senior leaders themselves combined with observations from one of the authors serving as a coach and lecturer within the training program, this commentary makes some initial reflections on how to strengthen the foundation for leadership-driven change and next steps for our research.

The Senior Leadership Program (JHC)

In 2019, the strategic leadership of the Swedish Armed Forces decided to institutionalize a training program entitled ‘Gender Mainstreaming for Senior Leaders’ (‘Jämställdhetsintegrering för högre chefer’, in Swedish – henceforth JHC). Earlier iterations of the program – the then-called ‘Gender Coach program’, run first in 2006 before three subsequent programs in 2013, 2015, and 2019 – had been attended by both former and current Chiefs of Defence. The strategic leadership had during the 2019 program articulated a need to build knowledge, especially among the higher mid-level leaders throughout the organization to create the foundation for change. To that end, the JHC program was instituted.

This decision was made at a crucial time as the Swedish Armed Forces was undergoing major and rapid changes overall. There was a national turn in defence – i.e. a need to quickly rebuild national defence capacity and to improve personnel procurement, including through re-instituting conscription, this time for both men and women - as the security in the Nordic region was deteriorating. This process would be further accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Sweden deciding to join NATO in 2022 (membership was realized in 2024). In addition to the JHC program, several integral components for change related to support on gender equality development – such as gender policy development and the use of gender advisors and experts on preventing harassment – were run in parallel.

In 2021, the JHC program was rolled out under the leadership of Course Director Ulrika Eklund, a trainer and expert with decades of experience on gender integration for organizational improvements both nationally and internationally. The program was placed at the Management Unit at the Military Academy Karlberg, the Unit that regularly handles internal professional development in the Swedish Armed Forces.

The program consists of 110 hours stretching over 12 months. This format both enables senior leaders to attend and allows for using a pedagogical approach combining three sets of approaches. This combination seeks to account for some recognized and serious challenges to using training to raise capacity:

1. Leadership seminars that combine expert presentations and readings with group discussions. These enable the i) forming of joint understandings of strategic decisions and policy, ii) identification of common leadership approaches, and the iii) sharing of experiences on how to address concrete issues. Combined, these serve to strengthen a coherent organizational leadership approach. Establishing joint understandings and common approaches among leaders in an organization are important as gender equality issues can be difficult for individual leaders to tackle given their systemic and complex nature. Promoting joint organizational approaches is furthermore important for overcoming what research has identified as a marginalization; that is, that issues associated with gender equality runs in separate weaker tracks in military organizations, away from regular decision-making processes. Hence, the program seeks to promote a consistent integral organizational approach through adapting established and regular decision-making processes with a focus on those that produce the main outcomes of the organization.

2. Coaching sessions with experts individually and in groups that allow for reflecting, on a confidential basis, on efforts and challenges that appear during a leader’s everyday practices.

The coaching seeks to strengthen the forming of leadership confidence and capacity in understanding their function for addressing gender-equality issues in an organizational context without risking to negatively affect regular processes or hierarchies.

3. Structured individual analysis and forming of action plan that supports the leader’s ability to systematically and in an in-depth manner identify and address gender equality aspects of their tasks and responsibilities. As part of the analysis, leaders each select one specific issue they identify as important and formulate an action plan for next steps to integrate gender in their organizational unit and daily work. In a manner of speaking, this is a gender mainstreaming analysis adapted to the leadership level.

This task consists of working throughout the 12-month period to – with regular input from their coach and their peers – form a detailed understanding of what it involves moving from understanding to practice around these issues, within their specific leadership role. This format of analysis and action seeks to move participants beyond a core challenge – that gender training remains too abstract (theoretical) and too generic (disconnected from a specific organizational context) – by allowing participants over time to develop a systematic understanding set in the context of their organization’s overall mission as well as their specific leadership responsibilities.

The coaching and individual analysis and plan connecting knowledge to concrete daily situations and actions are therefore key to the program. It is this unique individual-level analytical material from the leaders’ action plans that we draw on for our project, with the participants’ permission.

What can we learn from leadership perspectives?

The first JHC program courses in 2021 targeted leaders at the OF5 level; that is, the equivalent of colonels/commanders and their civilian peers. This is the group in focus for this blog. OF5 leaders participating in the program have been mainly male military officers, and the majority have either led a section at the Armed Forces’ HQ or worked as a head of a more independent organizational unit, such as a regiment, school, or centre.

When we study leaders’ potential to influence sustainable change around gender equality, the heterogeneity of this group is apparent and takes several forms:

i) What specific leadership roles and responsibilities leaders have within the organization - what we call their ‘functional responsibilities’ – varies substantially. For example, heading a regiment or being in charge of a section on military planning provides very different entry-points for processing the course content and connecting it to their everyday tasks.

ii) What forms of gender equality dimensions that fall under functional responsibilities. For example, being in charge of acquiring personnel equipment or formulating specifications to order new facilities involve very different gender equality issues than if you are responsible for long term operational planning. Likewise, if you run a regiment or school, you are responsible for overall working environment on an aggregate level, compared to being responsible for such matters in a smaller unit at HQ.

3. What forms of processes and resources leaders control that would make it possible for them to directly affect a more aggregate outcome on gender equality. For instance, the head of a regiment could have more control over outcomes in his/her organizational unit than a leader that contributes to one main part in a larger policy or planning process at HQ involving several other unit contributions to the outcome. Coordinated, however, the leaders operating around the same HQ processes could potentially produce larger outcomes. Leaders of independent units such as regiments, could also be overwhelmed by the sheer number of different issues under their responsibility.

Interestingly, as the program has progressed between 2021-2025, the OF5 leaders appear to have expanded from what we call a basic ‘professional responsibilities’ understanding, to one what we label a leadership ‘functional responsibilities’ understanding. That is, there appears to be a rising awareness among leaders themselves that they should focus on equality issues that fall directly under their specific leadership functional role.

While that would seem obvious, earlier programs displayed a higher degree of leaders rather attempting to align their action plans to the organization’s overarching strategic objectives. For example, a leader could choose to focus their plan on increasing the number of women in the Swedish Armed Forces, as they knew that this was a strategic priority set by the Chief of Defence – even in instances when personnel procurement was not an issue that this individual leaders could directly affect.[1] As the connection to individual leaders’ functional role has started to become articulated with the help of the course leaders, this challenge has decreased over time.

What do leaders want change? Moving from the aggregated generic to the granularly concrete

To ensure relevance, the JHC program in the 2021-2024 period formed its content around the policies that the Swedish Armed Forces have adopted. In this period, these had a focus on four areas, as outlined in Figure 1. i) Integration in regular processes, ii) Equal opportunities, iii) Increase the number of women, and iv) Gender in military operations. As also visible in Figure 1, the leaders mainly opted to focus their analysis and action plan on efforts to increase the number of women and adapting regular working processes and methods.

In conducting an analysis and formulating a plan for change, leaders have to move from wider and generic gender equality focused areas to identify a concrete problem to analyse and address. The effect of this is that they unearth numerous both complex and granular issues on gender equality that fall within their functional responsibility. In Figure 2, we map out some examples of types of issues that the action plans have identified.

As is noticeable, the starting point for the four wider generic areas is that these are articulated as aiming to improve gender equality per se and not necessarily explicitly connecting and explaining these areas in relation to fulfilling the mandate of the Swedish Armed Forces (i.e. defend Sweden and its allies). This is a challenge as it is the content of the organizational mandate that sets the overarching parameters for a leader's responsibilities. What is apparent in the material that the leaders produce, is that they therefore have to undertake an effort of what we call 'reframing'. That is, they have to start by identifying and placing specific gender equality issues within the Swedish Armed Forces’ overarching mandate and organizational needs – such as enhanced personnel procurement or more effective working methods. In Figure 2, we have categorized how they translate gender equality into needs for overarching organizational capacity building and mandate delivery.

Figure 2: Objective, category, and type examples

As a core part of leadership is to guide your employees to fulfil the organizational aim, the process of reframing gender equality is perhaps less than surprising. However, observing it does point to a potential stumbling block in gender integration. Many policies on gender requests a lot from individual leaders as the policies have not translated gender equality issues into the overall aim of an organization.

What we can also observe is that the objectives coming out of this reframing can be categorised in three groups. Two are most common as evidenced by the leaders’ action plans. Objectives that relate to reaching outcome results, such improved recruitment of women to improve personnel procurement or better equipment for all personnel so that they can perform effectively, and revising working methods, i.e., improved existing working methods to be able to handle gender equality dimensions consistently to strengthen the ordinary processes. Both of these are directly related to mandate and organizational needs. Importantly, however, leaders appear to not always be able to connect working method changes to actual outcome results in their analysis. If this is the case, this gap needs to be addressed to avoid gender equality efforts remaining symbolic or only bureaucratic.

A few leaders also consider, the third category - undertaking special gender measures, such as gender training or checklists - in their plans. The reason for why these are not often in focus may be that they are placed even further away from regular leadership processes and mandate over which the leader normally practices control - thereby making them difficult to use directly. There are also some caveats that should be discussed for when these measures are suggested. For instance, women’s professional networks are sometimes viewed as actors that should drive change on gender equality although they have no formal role and cannot affect decision-making.

Conclusions

What can we then preliminarily learn from the participating leaders’ on how leadership-driven change can be reinforced and obstacles overcome?

This blog post has presented some first insights from unique material produced in the context of the Swedish Armed Forces’ senior leadership program. This initial analysis allows us to identify several practical pathways for change to explore, pathways which may guide both efforts to enhance gender equality in military organizations and further research:

1. The importance of continuing to concretely clarify leadership functional responsibilities in order to drive change in the areas for which individual leaders are responsible.
2. The need to make visible and concretise the plethora of sub-objectives that fall under the military mission and organization. More specifically, leader insights indicate that parameters of expected change should be made clearer and be related to specific prioritized outcomes. This is related to the third observation.
3. Leaders motivate their efforts in the context of the main mandate, objectives, and processes of the Swedish Armed Forces – defend Sweden and its allies. If supporting policies on gender start from the viewpoint of improving gender equality per se, our results indicates that this could entail a costly process of reformulation; a translation that has to be undertaken by all leaders individually. A joint organizational approach, reinforced through regular doctrines and guiding documents can lessen this cost.

In short, the leaders’ insights demonstrates that there is no quick fix to the numerous and complex structural challenges identified in research and practice. However, they also suggest ways in which coordinated leadership efforts related to more concrete objectives could drive systematic change.

About the project

Funded by the Forte project Should I stay or should I go? The determinants of retention of female personnel in the Swedish Armed Forces – Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and the Swedish Research Council Project All Aboard!? A multi-level analysis of societal security and preparedness in Sweden and Norway – Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), we have received permission from JHC Course participants to use their analysis and Action Plans for research studies. This material allows for unique insights into how senior leaders assess factors and problems on leading change where gender equality is a core component. One of us have also acted as a presenter and coach in the program since 2021 (and since 2013 in earlier iterations of the program) which allows for more qualitative observations about the progress since 2021. This blog is based on the initial analysis of 78 Action Plans.

• Louise Olsson is a Research Director/Senior Researcher at PRIO
• Sara Lindberg Bromley is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University

[1] Interestingly, this has happened in parallel to a process on clarifying functional responsibilities overall in the Swedish Armed Forces.