Tim Collins

Why organisations work with Tim Collins

• He has commanded under live fire. The lessons on composure, communication, and accountability are drawn from running the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group in Iraq, not a leadership model.
• His eve-of-battle speech is one of the most studied pieces of leadership communication of the last twenty years, hung in the Oval Office and quoted in business schools. Few speakers can talk about leadership communication from that position.
• Eight years as an officer in 22 SAS, including as Operations Officer, gives him a vocabulary on small-team performance, selection, and trust that very few corporate speakers can match credibly.
• He builds the talk around the audience’s actual leadership tension. The military stories are evidence, not the point.

Biography highlights

• Commanded the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
• Eight years as an officer in 22 SAS, including service as Operations Officer.
• Appointed OBE in 2003 for service in Iraq.
• Author of Rules of Engagement: A Life in Conflict (Headline, 2006).
• Co-founder and Chairman of New Century Consulting, an intelligence-led security services firm working with government clients since 2006.
• Regular media commentator and columnist on defence and security, with bylines in the Telegraph and other UK national press.

Biography

The eve-of-battle address to the Royal Irish Regiment Battle Group, delivered in Kuwait on 19 March 2003, was extemporised and recorded in shorthand by a single journalist. President George W. Bush later had a copy hung in the Oval Office. It is now a fixture on leadership reading lists, taught for what it does in five minutes: set the moral frame, give the team something to hold onto, and accept the weight of command without flinching.

The speech is not why senior leaders book Collins, but it explains what they get. He commanded a battalion in combat, with all that implies for accountability, communication, and the long shadow that command throws over a career. He came back to allegations of war crimes, cleared his name, and was promoted to colonel. That sequence, command, scrutiny, recovery, is the substance of what he teaches.

Before Iraq, Collins served eight years in 22 SAS, including as Operations Officer, and led troops through Northern Ireland, the Falklands, and Cyprus. The earlier work shapes how he talks about selection, small-team trust, and what actually holds a unit together when the plan fails. His memoir Rules of Engagement (Headline, 2006) is the long-form version.

Since retiring from the army in 2004 he has built New Century Consulting, an intelligence-led security firm working largely with government, and become a regular commentator on defence and security in the UK national press. The corporate keynote work draws on all of it: the command experience, the public scrutiny, the second career building a business with a payroll and contracts.

Key speaking topics

• Command leadership under pressure
• Leadership communication in high-stakes moments
• Small-team performance and trust
• Decision-making with incomplete information
• Accountability and the weight of command
• Resilience after public scrutiny
• Lessons from operational command for civilian leaders

Ideal for

• CEOs, executive committees, and divisional MDs preparing teams for high-stakes operational moments
• Leadership development programmes for newly senior leaders taking on command-level accountability
• Sales and operations conferences where the central leadership question is composure under pressure
• Board offsites focused on crisis readiness, succession, or the human side of restructure

Audience outcomes

• A clearer picture of what leadership communication actually does in the moment that counts.
• Practical handles on composure, accountability, and team trust, drawn from command experience rather than theory.
• A more honest reading of what holds a team together when the plan changes.
• A reference point, the eve-of-battle speech, that audiences carry back into their own leadership conversations.