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The Altitude Question
From expert to strategic leader A five minute read for senior leaders and founders whose role changed before their reputation did. There is a kind of expertise that quietly stops paying. Not because you got worse at it. Because the room changed around it. It rarely announces itself. Sometimes there is a promotion. Often there is not. The company doubled. The board turned over. You hired someone better than you at the thing you were best at. Or nothing visible happened at al
Why Insight Is Not Change
Insight is not change. Why senior leaders understand their pattern completely, repeat it anyway, and what actually shifts it.
The Power of OKRs: Setting Goals That Actually Mean Something
Something I keep noticing, across years of working with leaders and founders. So many of us can articulate a vision beautifully. We know what we want. We can speak about it with real conviction. And yet, three months in, we find ourselves wondering how we got so far from it. It's rarely about ambition. And it's rarely about capability. More often, it's about the gap between wanting something and having a clear, honest structure to get there. That's where OKRs come in. And whi
Beyond the Pitch: The Trust Question Too Few People Ask
"The best presentations rarely win the room. Trust does." You have prepared thoroughly. The deck is clear. The numbers stand up. You know your material. And yet, as you leave the meeting, something tells you it didn't quite land. For fifteen years I worked in fundraising and investor relations, supporting fund managers through capital raises, investor relationships and more meetings than I could possibly count. Over time I noticed something. The people who struggled were rare
What High Achievers Don't Say Out Loud
The drive that built your career is a forecast, not a flaw. Here is where it stops paying, and why slowing down is not the fix.
The Art of the Better Question
Most leaders ask a lot of questions. Few have ever been taught how. Questions are neutral. Except they’re not. The words we choose, the order we use them in, the way we hold the silence after - all of it lands somewhere in the nervous system of the person being asked. It either opens them up or closes them down. Creates safety or activates threat. Generates thinking or shuts it off. The gift of my work is that I get to witness this up close. Recently, a client came into a ses
Scaling Selves
I have sat in rooms where a leadership team had done everything right - the right framework, the right structure, the right quarterly rhythm - and something still wasn’t working. The scorecard looked fine. The rocks were set. The accountability chart made perfect sense on paper. And yet. The same issue kept appearing. In different clothes, with different names, in different meetings. And nobody could quite explain why. If I am honest, I could not see it at the time. I was
Find Yourself On This List
Delegation, and the twelve things that actually get in the way. Read it, find your line, and skip the rest.
Executive Communication: When knowing enough is no longer the hard part
In the last post, I wrote about the gap between knowing what to say and being able to access it under pressure. This post is about the next gap. The one that sits between finding your clarity - and making it land. Because access is only half of it. The harder question, particularly as roles become more senior, is whether your thinking actually reaches the person on the other side of the table. Whether they can follow it. Whether they can act on it. Often, they can't. Not beca
Starting Point
Why effort is contextual, and what that means for how we lead.
Open Doors.
Choosing to be coached is a brave thing. And yet there is a trap worth naming honestly, because I have seen it catch good people. This is what I have learned about the difference between paying for coaching and truly being ready for it.
Beyond the Role You Were Once Known For
A personal brand is not always something we build from scratch. Sometimes, it is something we outgrow. That is a part of this conversation I do not think gets enough attention. Because by the time many senior professionals start thinking seriously about personal brand, they are not trying to invent who they are. They are trying to close the gap between who they have become and how they are still being perceived. And that gap can quietly shape opportunity. I wrote some time ag
The shadow side of what matters most
Some of the qualities we are most praised for can also become the source of our greatest blind spots. That is what makes values so powerful and, at times, so tricky. We often talk about values as if they are automatically positive. As if naming them is enough. But in leadership, it is rarely that simple. Values are like an inner compass. They shape what matters to us, what we prioritise, and what feels right, important, or worth protecting. Shalom Schwartz, one of the key res
Beyond External Validation: The Power of Self-Feedback
In many of my coaching conversations with senior leaders and founders, a pattern keeps emerging. High performers waiting. Waiting for the next performance review. Waiting for stakeholder feedback. Waiting for someone senior to say, "Well done." External feedback absolutely matters. We are wired for it. Yet something powerful is often overlooked: Our capacity to give ourselves meaningful, grounded feedback. Not empty self-praise. Not harsh self-criticism. But thoughtful, evide
Executive Presence and Kindness
Can we be too nice? This is a question I’ve been carrying with me for a long time. Not because I ever doubted the value of kindness. I don't. It is one of my core values. However, because something about the way niceness showed up in my own experience never quite settled. There were moments when being described as kind or warm felt slightly uncomfortable. Not wrong. Just incomplete. At times, I wondered whether it was holding me back. I noticed that people who were more di
Rethinking Feedback
“Can I give you some feedback?” Even when it’s well-intended, that sentence often lands with tension. Shoulders tighten. Attention narrows. Defences quietly come online. That reaction isn’t weakness or sensitivity. It’s human biology. Somewhere along the way, feedback became synonymous with criticism - something delivered formally, infrequently, and often too late to be genuinely useful. And that’s a problem. Because growth doesn’t happen in annual rituals. It happens in ong
Start As You Mean To Go On
Why the first few weeks of a team quietly decide the next six months There is a moment most leaders walk straight past. The first meeting of a new team. Or the first meeting after something shifts: a reorganisation, a new joiner, a wider remit, a bad quarter everyone is politely not mentioning. It feels like a beginning. Something to get through before the real work starts. It is the real work. Week One What gets decided without anyone deciding it Teams settle fast. Faster th
Seeing Clearly
On influence, power, and what we politely refuse to name I've been circling this topic for a long time. Not because it isn't important - quite the opposite. Because every time I tried to write about it, the result felt too neat. Too binary. As if it missed the lived messiness of what leaders actually describe to me, again and again, behind closed doors. It took a lot of listening to work out why. This isn't really about behaviour. It's about what happens when the rules you re
The In-Between
As the year draws to a close, many people sense a shift. Something ending. Something wanting to begin. And a quiet discomfort in the space in between. I’ve written before about transition moments — the small, often invisible shifts we move through every day — and how the energy we carry from one moment into the next shapes our presence and performance. This piece stays with the in-between itself a little longer. Because year end has a way of bringing it into focus. Change a
Inner Standards
This is a topic I’m deeply passionate about (my clients know:) - because I’ve seen, time and again, how quietly powerful values are when things get hard. Not in theory. But in real life. A moment that stays with me I remember a client saying to me, halfway through a session: “I know what the ‘right’ decision is — I just don’t know if I’m brave enough to act on it.” When we slowed things down, it wasn’t a capability issue. It wasn’t even a strategic one. It was a values moment
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