Leadership Lessons From the Military to Business: A Conversation with Chris Gore
- SPOR Group
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Chris Gore on leadership lessons from the military to business, council estate upbringing, 13 years in the army, founding SPOR Group and what he learned about leading people.
SPOR Group | Updated 2026
Listen to the full thing here:
Chris Gore grew up on a council estate in Liverpool. Oldest of four boys. Father was an alcoholic who left when Chris was twelve. No GCSEs. No job prospects. At sixteen he looked at the path he was on and decided to join the army. They put him through some tests and discovered he had more brain than he had been given the opportunity to use. He spent thirteen years in the military. Then he left, moved to London, and founded SPOR Group.
Seven years later, 35 staff, projects delivered across the UK, Europe, Singapore, Sydney and Hong Kong, and a first acquisition just completed. This is what he learned about leadership along the way, as discussed on the Debbie Williams Storytelling Podcast, published 23 August 2026. Listen to the full episode at debbiewilliamspodcast.com.
The Two Best Things He Ever Did
"The two best things I ever did were to join the military and to leave the military. In that order."
That is the summary. The military gave Chris what his upbringing had not. A father figure. Discipline. Role models. A framework for how to operate. The structure that had been absent in the years between twelve and sixteen, when he was effectively trying to be the man of the house as a child.
The Leadership Lesson From the Military That Still Shapes Everything
The single biggest thing Chris took from the military is not what most people would expect. It is not discipline or resilience or how to manage under pressure, though all of those came with it. It is process.
"Every single thing I do, I create a process out of it. In the military they have a publication for everything. How to shine your boots. How to iron your kit. How to shave. There is a process for all of it. And the reason is simple, if you create a process out of something, you can scale it. If someone tells me they did something great and I ask how, and they say they winged it, I say: reverse engineer it, write the process, and let us do that properly from now on."
This is now the operating principle of SPOR Group. Every function, every department, every repeatable activity has a process behind it. Not because processes are the goal, but because without them, nothing scales and everything depends on one person knowing how it works.
The Hardest Adjustment From Military to Business Leadership
Chris is direct about this one. In the military, you tell someone to do something and they do it. There is no question. There is no pushback. Rank defines the dynamic and the outcome is not in doubt.
In business, people can say no. And Chris has found that adjustment, after thirteen years of the military model, genuinely difficult. Not as a criticism of the people he manages. As an honest assessment of where his own limitations as a leader sit.
"I am not a great manager. I think I am a good leader. I think I am a good visionary. But physically managing people, I do not think I am very good at it. So I have hired people who are." That self-awareness, and the willingness to build a senior leadership team around his gaps rather than pretend they do not exist, is one of the things that has allowed SPOR Group to grow beyond what one person can carry.
The Three Characters Every Successful Business Needs
This is one of the most practical frameworks Chris shared in the conversation. His view, based on his own experience building SPOR Group, is that a successful business needs three distinct character types working together.
The visionary
The person who drives the company forward. Who sees where it is going and communicates that clearly enough that everyone else can navigate towards it. Chris is explicit that the visionary is often not the best manager, organiser or detail person. The strength is direction, not execution.
The organiser
The person who takes the visionary's direction, sometimes described as chaos, and creates the structure through which it can actually be delivered. Departments aligned. Priorities clear. The business organised in a way that makes the vision achievable.
The product person
The person who translates the vision into something that can be sold and delivered. What is the product? How is it packaged? How does it reach the client? Without this person, the vision stays theoretical and the organisation never produces something the market can buy.
"If you do not have all three, it is really difficult. You will just have a visionary causing absolute mayhem with nobody keeping things in order."
How He Keeps the Business Accountable Without Being in Every Meeting
SPOR Group runs on five meetings a week. That is it. Non-movable in the diary.
Monday senior leadership meeting — mission, goals, blockers, challenges from the previous week
Department meetings — each department head takes the outputs of the senior leadership meeting into their team
Water cooler catch-ups — informal weekly check-ins at team level
Monthly individual performance meetings
Quarterly individual performance reviews
Chris attends the senior leadership meeting and the quarterly performance reviews. That is all. Everything else is delegated to the senior leadership team to run.
"I only need to know about things on a Monday morning. My job is the direction. Their job is the execution. Keeping those two things separate is what stopped me being dragged into everything."
On Resilience: Can It Be Developed?
This is the question Chris answered most honestly. His view is that resilience is built through experience. Specifically, through the experience of being told you cannot do something and deciding to do it anyway.
"When I told people from Liverpool I was joining the army, one particular bloke said: you will not last five minutes, I will see you in a week. And every time someone said something like that, I thought: watch me. I did thirteen years in the end."
He is cautious about claiming resilience can simply be trained. His resilience was built from childhood experiences that were genuinely difficult. He does not present that as something to be replicated, but as a factor in why setbacks in business do not stop him. When a contract goes somewhere else because of something happening in the background, his response is the same: figure out another way.
On AI: Optimise Output. Do Not Outsource Thinking.
This is where Chris lands on AI, clearly and without hedging. The wrong way to use AI is to outsource your thinking to it. Ask it what you should think about a subject, accept the output without checking it, present it as your own perspective. He described a recent job interview where a candidate presented AI-generated slides they could not explain when questioned. Good use of the tool. No engagement with the content.
"The right way to use AI is to keep your own thoughts and use AI to formulate the plan on those thoughts. We use Claude CoWork to pull CRM data, review sales performance, understand what is happening in the business. That saves time. What I do not do is ask AI what I think."
On the Next Generation of Leaders: EQ Over Everything
The final theme Chris raised is the one he thinks matters most for the next generation. Not technical skills. Not AI literacy. Emotional intelligence and human connection.
Hybrid working means it is now possible to spend weeks without meaningful human interaction. AI means it is possible to produce output without engaging deeply with the thinking behind it. Both of those trends make EQ more valuable, not less, because the thing that cannot be replicated or automated is genuine human leadership, the ability to read people, to build trust, to make others feel seen and supported.
"You can work from home and be productive. You can use AI to optimise your output. But if you are spending every day alone and outsourcing your thinking, something is missing. The next generation of leaders need to be more intentional about human connection, not less."
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Frequently Asked Questions
What did Chris Gore learn from the military about leadership?
The most transferable lesson is process discipline — creating a documented process for every repeatable activity so that it can be scaled and does not depend on one person knowing how it works. The military has a publication for everything. Chris applies the same principle to every function at SPOR Group.
What are the three characters every business needs?
The visionary who drives direction, the organiser who structures the business to deliver that direction, and the product person who translates the vision into something that can be sold and delivered. Without all three, the business struggles to grow beyond the limitations of any single character.
How does Chris Gore use AI in his business?
SPOR Group uses AI to optimise output — pulling CRM data, reviewing sales performance, saving time on repeatable tasks. The principle is to keep your own thinking and use AI to formulate the plan on those thoughts. Outsourcing your thinking to AI and accepting the output without engagement is the wrong way to use it.
What does Chris Gore say about resilience?
His view is that resilience is built through experience — specifically through being told you cannot do something and deciding to do it anyway. He is cautious about claiming it can simply be trained. His resilience came from genuinely difficult childhood experiences, and the same instinct that got him through those is what drives him to find another way when things go wrong in business.
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