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The Value With Nowhere To Go
A value can be completely intact and still have nowhere to go. How to find the one that has gone quiet, and where to put it back.
Clear Air: Difficult Conversations at Work
Monday morning, investment committee. Your CIO cuts across you for the third meeting running. Nobody else seems to notice. You say nothing, make a sharp note in your pad, and spend the afternoon replaying it. By Thursday, the story is set: He doesn't rate you. He's positioning for the next role. He always does this. He has no idea any of it is happening. Silent Cost Why the conversations you avoid end up running the relationship Most difficult conversations at work never happ
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
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
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
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
Leading with Your Core Values
Your inner compass in times of change Somewhere in a drawer, or a photo on an old phone, there is probably a flipchart page with your values written on it. Freedom. Integrity. Growth. Then Monday arrived. Board papers, a team issue that could not wait, three things that were already late. And the words went quiet. This is not a failure of seriousness. It happens to most of us, and it has happened to me more than once. Values tend to go quiet precisely when the pressure rises
💥The Paradox of Strength
We celebrate strengths for good reason. They’re what we lean on when things get tough. They shape our leadership style, how we build relationships, and how we navigate challenge. In interviews, development plans, and boardroom conversations, strengths are what we’re encouraged to play to. But here’s the paradox: The very strengths that fuel your success… can also quietly hold you back. It’s something I see often in coaching conversations with high-achievers: They’re not stuck
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