Escape to the Legion

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Psychologist's view

Bear Grylls’ band of recruits were browbeaten by a punishing regime aimed at forcing them into a coherent, well disciplined team. Their team leaders were three ex-legionnaires with over 40 years of combined experience in the Legion. Legion trainers have to build units within which individuals are prepared to die for one another. In other words, they must build teams in which individuals cease to exist.

We asked business psychologist Jonathan Middleburgh to interview the recruits, watch the films and give them all a psychometric questionnaire. Jonathan normally works with teams in a business setting, where he aids the team-building process.

Here he reports on how the individuals, the team and the Legion squared up from a psychologist's point of view.

The strong survive

The Legion has a simple philosophy of team-building – break down each group of raw recruits before building it back up. The idea is to winnow out the weak, the idle and the uncooperative.

The approach is brutal, uncompromising and surprisingly effective. Group punishments are meted out for individuals’ mistakes; ‘weak’ team members are barracked; and harsh physical discipline is imposed. The weak are pushed to the wall. The strong survive and are then trained up to Legion standards.

Most of the recruits I spoke to had a grudging admiration for the process. It seemed to weed out the weakest and end up with the toughest – mentally, if not physically. Yet some of the recruits saw it as a crude process and several of the survivors found it relatively easy to play the game.

That said, a gentler version of the Legion experience could benefit a number of individuals and teams. A number of recruits felt that it softened the strongest egos and made them more compliant. Punishing the entire team for the faults of the individual is also liable to make the individual think twice before stepping out of line.

Mind over matter

For many of the recruits I spoke with, their time with the Legion had been a genuinely transformational experience, in ways that had surprised and delighted them. It gave them a chance to step out of their normal routine and to reappraise what was most important in their lives. It also forced them to work cooperatively with a bunch of strangers and those who met the challenge told me that they had made friends for life.

Nevertheless, all of the recruits told me that the Legion was an extreme and often brutal challenge. It pushed them to the limit, both physically and mentally. Even Bear Grylls, who has scaled mountains and crossed oceans, was surprised by the rigours of the challenge. Everyone I spoke to said that it was the mental challenge, rather than the physical, which was most powerful.

In such an environment, a wide range of intellectual and social skills are necessary to survive. What struck me when interviewing the recruits was that those who survived used a range of mental techniques to meet the challenge.

One of the survivors described distancing himself mentally from the rigours of desert marches, focusing on the beauty of the desert scenery in a way that resembled a Buddhist meditation. Others described how they consciously focused on the immediate task, avoiding thinking of the enormity of the entire challenge – a useful technique in any stressful situation, known in the business world as focusing on ‘smart’ objectives.

What makes a survivor?

I used a psychometric questionnaire to ascertain how team members typically behave towards others and how they like others to behave towards them. The questionnaire was developed by a US Navy psychologist to analyse what made some submarine crews perform so much better than others. Results from the questionnaire provide some useful clues as to whether team members are social animals or loners, whether they want to engage in deep and meaningful relationships with others and whether they prefer to take orders or give them.

There was no neat, clear, pattern running through the answers. The recruits, both survivors and those that left early, had a range of scores relating to sociability and emotional involvement. True, most of the recruits had very high scores on leadership behaviour, and those who survived had particularly high scores on controlling behaviour, suggesting a real need to make decisions and call the shots.

Based on my observations, interviews and psychometric profiling, I think three main factors marked out the survivors from the non-survivors. First, the survivors were all highly controlled (and controlling) individuals, even if their previous life experiences hadn’t brought out their innate self-discipline. Second, the survivors were generally adept at stepping out of their immediate situation, however horrible, and remembering that the experience was finite and time-bound. If they occasionally lost it, they were resilient enough to bounce back. Third, the survivors had a highly positive outlook. They sought to learn from the experience rather than focus, like Terry, on the absent girlfriend or, like Lee, on the meagre rations.

Overall then, it wasn’t the physical challenge that marked out the winners from the losers. Everyone I spoke to said that the challenge was won or lost on the mental battleground. And on that front the key weapons were mental toughness, resilience and self-discipline.

Business team-building

Team-building techniques advocated by business psychologists tend to be softer and certainly claim to be more sophisticated than the Legion style. As opposed to bullying and barracking, a typical team-building process might consist of psychometric questionnaires along with feedback, one-to-one interviews between the psychologist and team members and team away-days. All this is aimed at getting the team to gel, through a process of mutual understanding and cooperation.

What works in the military would invariably fail in the world of business. In the corporate world, team members have to learn to work together and accept their colleagues, warts and all. The challenge for the business psychologist is to help team members recognise their colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses and to learn how to work more effectively together.

Of course, business teams operate in an entirely different context to the Legion. In the business world, team members may face flak from colleagues and clients: they don’t face a hail of enemy bullets if they make mistakes. Fear of a common enemy cements team bonds in a way that doesn’t happen in the business world. It also gives the team leaders latitude to impose harsh discipline in a way that simply doesn’t exist in the civilian context.

Marching Legion in 1930s

Marching recruits