My first corporate job was an internship in the wealth division of a well-known bank in one of London’s poshest neighbourhoods. The pay was somewhere between symbolic and barely legal, but I could see Harrods from my window and the after-work socials were excellent, so life felt pretty good.

When my internship came to an end, I told my managers I’d love to stay and applied for several internal roles.

A few weeks later, I had a catch up with a senior director who told me I’d done a great job during my time with them and he was very impressed with my CV.

I could feel myself glowing.

We kept talking and, at some point, he said, “I didn’t know you could speak several languages”, closely followed by, “I didn’t realise you studied Economics.”

As a 22 year old fresh out of university with precisely zero relevant work experience, those were the only two interesting things on my CV. Literally. Everything else was my best attempt at convincing recruiters that babysitting, tutoring and working in a shop had somehow prepared me for the corporate world.

So he hadn’t read my CV.

I remember feeling confused, then hurt. I’d been hired because of my Economics degree and placed in an international division because I spoke several languages. Did he even know my name?

In the space of a few minutes, I went from feeling like the most important person in the building to wondering whether he knew who I was at all.

His compliment hadn’t made me feel recognised. It had made me feel invisible.

That was the beginning of the end.

By the time they offered me another position, I’d already accepted a job elsewhere. I never once regretted leaving.

We all have a fundamental need to feel seen. When that doesn’t happen, we gradually disconnect. Often it isn’t salary or perks that push people out of the door, it’s the feeling that our contribution doesn’t really matter. If effort goes unnoticed, no salary can make up for that.

Gallup research shows that employees who receive high-quality recognition are 45% less likely to leave their organisation over a two-year period.

So the question becomes, how do we do it well?

Recognition Done Well

Recognition is most effective when people perceive it as authentic, meaningful and earned. Mine felt automatic rather than genuine.

Telling someone “Great job” may feel nice in the moment, but it doesn’t tell them much.

Telling them, “Your analysis helped the team make a better decision because you identified the risk early” tells them exactly what they did well and why it mattered.

That’s the difference between praise and recognition.

Done well, recognition shapes culture more than policies ever could, because culture is reinforced by what leaders consistently notice.

Good recognition starts with paying attention. Every message should be:

Specific, what exactly did they do well?

Significant, why did it matter?

Swift, while the achievement is still fresh.

So, the next time your team spends a month working on an important project, resist the temptation to settle for a quick well done or wait until the next all hands meeting to acknowledge them.

Instead, explain what you value, why it mattered and do it while the achievement is still fresh.

It might sound something like this:

“I really appreciate the time you’ve invested in understanding the client’s challenges and tailoring our proposal to their needs. You’ve positioned us as trusted advisors rather than suppliers, which will help us long after this project finishes. That’s exactly the sort of behaviour we want to be known for. Well done.”

Specific recognition does more than make someone feel appreciated. It tells the whole team which behaviours matter. Every example becomes a small lesson in what good looks like.

Recognition isn’t just about making people feel seen, it’s about helping them feel they belong. It sends a simple message, this is how we do things here. These are the behaviours we value and you’ve embodied them.

Recognise Behaviours, Not Just Results

In many organisations, recognition scales with revenue. The bigger the sale, the louder the applause, and the more senior attention you get.

But that can leave people feeling surprisingly hollow.

If all we recognise is the result, people can easily conclude that nobody noticed the weeks of preparation, collaboration and persistence that made it possible.

Imagine two employees working on separate pitches.

Both invest time understanding the client’s needs. Both produce thoughtful, high quality solutions. Both deliver excellent presentations.

One wins the deal.

The other loses because the client’s budget is cut at the last minute.

We all know what typically happens next.

The person who secured the deal gets celebrated. Senior leaders congratulate them. There may even be a bonus attached.

The other person will probably receive a polite great effort and perhaps some acknowledgement of the work involved, assuming the culture is a good one.

But it rarely feels equivalent. Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question. Is that actually fair?

After all, both people demonstrated the same level of skill, effort and professionalism. External factors, completely outside their control, heavily influenced the outcome.

When organisations reward outcomes alone, they risk undervaluing people doing excellent work in difficult circumstances.

The salesperson whose client suddenly loses budget.

The manager who supports an employee in moving on because the role wasn’t right for them, despite knowing it will damage retention figures and possibly their own bonus.

Metrics tell us something, but never the whole story.

That’s why leadership still requires something wonderfully old fashioned, observation, judgement and a healthy dose of human common sense.

So, what can you do differently?

Recognise behaviours, small steps, creativity, effort and innovation, not just results.

These are the things that make people feel seen, valued and motivated.

Align recognition with your culture, values and mission.

If your vision and values emphasise teamwork and collaboration, but your Employee of the Month award consistently goes to the person with the highest sales or the biggest client win, you’re sending a different message. Employees pay far more attention to what you recognise than to what’s written in your values statement. Recognition reveals what an organisation truly values, whether that’s intentional or not.

Don’t save recognition for the big wins.

Build it into everyday conversations, your weekly catch-ups, the coffee after a client meeting, one-to-ones and formal reviews. Every interaction is an opportunity to reinforce the behaviours you want to see more of.

Leadership is fundamentally about attention. Whatever leaders consistently notice, recognise and celebrate quickly becomes what people believe truly matters.

The Recognition People Remember

Years later, I can’t remember much about that internship. But I do remember how that conversation made me feel.

That’s the thing about recognition. People rarely remember every compliment they receive. They remember whether it made them feel seen.

Recognition isn’t about making people feel good for five minutes. It’s about showing people what success looks like here, what behaviours matter and what your organisation genuinely values.

Done consistently, recognition becomes one of the most powerful leadership tools we have. Not because it boosts egos, but because it quietly shapes culture, influences behaviour and helps people feel they truly belong, one conversation at a time.

Subscribe now

This is a guest post from , Board Whisperer and gentle consultant. She helps technologists and leaders get cut-through in the ways they communicate with each other and those they want to influence.

Her day job is helping people and teams understand and adopt the strategies and practices that have powered born-tech companies’ success. She runs an active women-in-tech community with >1200 members in more than 60 countries.

The 95% rule

A veteran consultant friend once shared a golden nugget of advice he’d been gifted from one of his university professors.

*When you’re trying to understand the root cause of a business problem, it invariably comes down to one of two things.

Either someone’s overcomplicated the simple, or oversimplified the complex.

More than 95% of the time, it’s the former.*

My friend—who turned round floundering businesses for a living—built a career on being able to quickly spot which of these was playing out for his clients. And acting accordingly.

At first I wrote it off as an oversimplification itself. But the more time I’ve spent observing, analysing, reflecting, and advising; the more often his professor’s pearl of wisdom has proved to be a truism.

None more so than today, when it feels like we’re drowning under content.

It’s coming at us from all angles, on every screen, device, or pretty well any means of communicating with anyone.

So it’s time to spend more time in that 95% space.

For consultants, this is our happy place. Clients expect us to be able to quickly get to the heart of a problem. To spot and address the things that will unlock business value; improve customer experience; or radically reconfigure systems, processes, and operating models.

In high complexity regulated industries this means finding balance. We respect the macro strategic ambitions for the organisation, while observing how these play out in day-to-day processes. We spot the disconnect between teams; the unintended governance bottlenecks and missed control checks that dramatically improve product quality or customer impact. We help explain where AI adoption is at, and how to make the most of it.

Vitally, we’re seeking to avoid adding further complexity. Because fast doesn’t always mean simple. And “solutions” that seem simple in the demo, may mask the true subtlety and complexity of the problem.

This is 5% territory.

Managing this 95% : 5% ratio also plays out in small ways and in every day situations.

It applies to any industry sector, process, technology, or role.

Get used to seeing it and you can use it to your advantage. To help yourself, your team, and your organisation.

So where can we avoid overcomplicating the simple?

Starting with fewer words

Let’s take those situations when we’re trying to influence.

We’re trying to put our best foot forward, yet we’re at the greatest risk of tripping over our shoelaces.

We default to showing everything we know. Covering every base. Anticipating every question and answering them before they get asked.

What we should really focus on, is finding, and then answering, the one simplest question our audience wants an answer to.

Take three examples:

1 | The project’s veering off plan.

You’ve got a scheduled update with your sponsor. You focus on the details of how you got here, what you’ve learnd along the way, and who you’re going to involve in precise steps from here, to get back on track.

It feels like diligence. It comes across as oversharing.

All your sponsor needs to know: “How do you want me to help?”

2 | The time’s right to ask for a pay rise.

You’re preparing for your next one-on-one.

You’ve researched the market and found out what peers and similar roles are earning. You’re armed with a long list of your achievements over the last two years, and the best of the feedback from your regular performance reviews.

It feels pitch perfect. It comes across like you’re singing from a different song sheet.

All your boss wants to know: “How does the business case (to pay you more) stack up in today’s environment?”

3 | You’ve finally secured a long awaited product demo slot with a target customer.

It’s a chance to get in front of the “economic buyer” you’ve been working on for weeks.

You’ve been preparing for all the things you learned in pre-sales training. The context for the global market, likely problem cues, your product’s latest features, and lists of sales objections.

It follows a process. It comes across like you’re following a process.

All your prospect wants to know: “Is this a company and team we could work with?”

Making your message land

Your audience wants to do the right thing.

If they’ve turned up to your meeting, your presentation, or just opened your email, it’s because you are worth listening to or reading.

But they’re overloaded themselves, and often trying to make decisions with partial context and many distractions.

Ten to one—or make that 19 to 1, or 95% of the time—you’re at risk of overcomplicating your message.

Be kind to your audience by doing the simplification for them.

It might take you more time with preparation: to get to the very essence of what you’re trying to say. But if it means your team gets a faster decision, if you (and your audience) don’t have to meet again to thrash out the issue further, or if you just finish early… you have given the gift of time.

And clarity is how you give that time back.

For people to make decisions faster, you need to make it easy for them to understand what matters, what you’re asking of them, and why now.

Simple disciplines can help:

1 | ⁠Start your presentation/email/conversation with your main message.

You can add context or supporting evidence, but you’ll grab their attention—and readiness to stay on the topic you want them to focus on—if they know what this about from the outset.

Make it the email subject line, the title (and/or subtitle) of your talk, or the first page of the presentation.

2 | ⁠Be direct with your language.

If you’ve done the work and the thinking for your audience, make it visible.

If you’re writing, imagine you were standing in front of them. Read it out loud to yourself asking “Would it sound like this if I was just speaking to them face to face?”.

3 | ⁠⁠Make your message the one that stands out.

Your audience is subject to constant content deluge from all types of channels and angles. How can you make sure they remember your message among all the others they’ve been bombarded with that day?

Bring yours to life using unusual examples or case studies. Or connect with a personal story or a powerful analogy to back up facts and data.

This is less about making things briefer for the sake of it. It’s more about making the important thing easier to see.

Of course you can make things simpler for people using AI, although it comes with a health warning.

Get complacent, and AI can drop you in that 5% territory with a bump.

Avoiding the AI yawn

If people’s use of AI helps them summarise, it can also risk helpping them become unnecessarily verbose and long-winded.

As with any exercise in finding good answers, your AI output is based on the quality of your questioning. And questioning is something else that as consultants, we rely on as a core competency.

Well-crafted questions are better than smart answers. They get people thinking, and help them change their minds by getting a fresh perspective. They challenge assumptions and validate hunches.

But assuming you’re AI-proficient, you’re well aware of this. You’re most likely using it to get past your writers block, organise your ideas, or be the sparring partner for your point of view.

However, there’s still a risk that the quality of your questioning has over-generated your AI output.

Before you hit send, publish, or share screen with your AI-generated output, just check yourself that you’ve really tackled the content from the reader’s view.

This article includes reminders of three things for doing this, whether you’re using AI or not:

1 | Know your reader.

Keep checking and rechecking yourself on:

• who they are (not just what they do or are responsible for)

• what they need to know or decide or do (and what they know, have decided, or done already)

• why it matters (to them, to their stakeholders, and at this moment in time).

Importantly, what needs taking out. That will complicate and dilute the essence of your message.

2 | Make it flow.

Give your reader a clear thread to follow. A structure that has more than just a beginning, a middle and an end. But a clear and safe set of stepping stones through your logic.

Your audience might look like they’re impressed you’re solving a Rubik’s cube of logic in realtime in front of them, but they’re hardly going to remember it when your message needs to be on-shared to others or used by them for decisions when you’re no longer in the room.

3 | Keep it genuine.

Without a doubt, AI helps you structure and sharpen your thinking. But it’s your judgement, your voice, your stories, and your perspective that makes your message worth hearing.

As AI continues to be harder and harder to detect, and be used for wider and wider inputs or data or content, it’s your personal stories and viewpoints that will stand out and be remembered.

Keeping something human and relateble, is a surefire way to be memorable.

Summing up

In a world of ever-increasing complexity, remember that 95% of the time you have the opportunity to simplify. Your content, your message, your AI output.

Simpler messages reflect well on you, your team, and your company. You’ll be thanked for it.

And perhaps there’s a bigger implication.

The ability to simplify is a leadership discipline. Leaders are constantly asking other people to absorb information, make decisions, change direction, and act. With ever-increasing speed and potential consequences. Every unnecessary word, layer of process, or piece of complexity adds to the cognitive load their teams have to carry.

The best leaders do the hard work of understanding the complexity, then make it easier for others to navigate.

That’s the quiet discipline of being easier to understand.

Know when you’re in the 5%. But whenever you can, do the work to bring everyone else back to the 95%.

Enjoyed this article? Discover more from Claire on her Substack, where she shares more thoughtful writing and insights.

Gentle Consulting

Helping consultants and clients do their best work together. Stories, ideas, tips and musings gathered from actual experience in the field on both sides of the consulting < > client relationship. With a peppering of women in tech stuff.

By Claire Barrett

Subscribe now

I took my six-year-old to a Lego technology club last week, and we bumped into a friend from school from a year above. They were assigned a task to complete together, and his friend quickly stepped into the role of senior partner in this newly formed building duo. That involved making suggestions that didn’t always make sense structurally or aesthetically. 

My son is obsessed with building, magnetic tiles, wooden blocks, 3D puzzles… you name it. And he’s surprisingly good at it. But here, he was quiet, just following the lead of his older friend.

I didn’t really want to intervene, but I gently stepped in asking “what do you think?” or making the occasional subtle comment like “this is very similar to some of the ones you’ve built at home”.

Those little nudges gave him permission to speak up, voice some of his concerns and share new ideas, and his original intimidation slowly faded away.

I’ve felt that same intimidation at work more times than I’d like to admit. The difference is that I didn’t have someone standing beside me encouraging me to speak up.

What I needed were leaders who understood that when there’s a perceived gap in status, authority or expertise, speaking up can feel risky. Not because people lack ideas, but because they’re weighing up the social cost of sharing them.

That’s the challenge of power distance. And when leaders fail to recognise it, valuable voices often stay silent.

When Power Distance Gets in the Way

When people find themselves in a room full of senior leaders, clients or recognised experts, they’re often asking themselves questions like:

What if I’m wrong?

What if everyone already knows this?

Do I really have anything valuable to add?

Those thoughts rarely get spoken aloud, but they influence participation every day.

I’ve been there myself. I still remember attending a board-level client meeting where I brought in senior leaders from my organisation. I was leading the client relationship and knew their business well.

Throughout the meeting, I had valuable things to contribute, but I stayed quiet every time.

Everyone else seemed more experienced, more senior and somehow more entitled to an opinion.

Looking back, that wasn’t a capability problem. It was a power distance problem.

More than a decade later, I can still remember how intimidating that room felt.

What’s interesting about power distance is that it doesn’t need to be real to have an impact. It only needs to be perceived. A director may genuinely welcome challenge and debate, but if the people around them conclude that disagreement is risky, they’ll stay quiet anyway.

The best leaders don’t assume an invitation to attend a meeting feels like permission to participate in it. They recognise that capability and contribution aren’t the same thing.

When power distance goes unaddressed, organisations lose more than confidence. They lose challenge, creativity, perspective and ideas.

Often, the most valuable insight comes from the person saying the least.

Three Ways to Reduce Power Distance

Wiley’s latest research found that only 53% of individual contributors feel safe taking risks at work. That means almost half are holding back in some way.

How many useful ideas, concerns or challenges never make it into the conversation because nobody created the conditions for them to emerge?

Here are three ways to reduce power distance.

1. Flatten hierarchy

The more senior people become, the less they often realise how intimidating their presence can be. But it can be.

A useful reframe is to move the conversation away from titles and towards the role each person has to play.

Most high-stakes meetings begin with introductions. Sometimes the first slide is an organigram displaying everyone’s names and job titles in the most hierarchical way imaginable. It’s often intended to impress the client. Look at all the important people we’ve brought to this meeting.

But for the person sitting at the bottom of that chart, it’s hardly the most confidence-inspiring start.

When you shift the focus from titles to roles, people become equals. In fact, the person at the bottom of the organigram often moves right to the top.

More often than not, they’re the person who knows the client best, understands the challenges first-hand and has the strongest relationships. Their role might be to share what’s happening on the ground, highlight risks or connect big strategic conversations to everyday realities.

That doesn’t sound so junior anymore, does it?

The shift is subtle but important. When you move the focus from titles to contribution, people stop seeing a hierarchy and start seeing a team.

2. Reinforce their credentials

Flattening hierarchy is the visible part of the work, and the invisible part matters just as much.

When you’re inviting more junior team members into meetings with senior colleagues, particularly if they’re not used to those environments, be clear about why they’re there and what you expect from them.

This is one of the simplest ways to remove status barriers to participation.

Be explicit about why they’re in the room. Maybe they know the client best, understand the challenge most deeply or have built the strongest relationships.

Reminding people of the expertise they already bring makes it easier for them to contribute.

Then go one step further.

Talk through the role they should play in the meeting. Discuss the contributions they could make. Explore different scenarios and what would be useful from them in each one.

That clarity ahead of the meeting is what moves people from being a passive attendee to an active participant.

3. Invite contribution

Even with preparation, people can still go quiet when they’re surrounded by more senior colleagues.

That’s where leaders can play an important role.

Inviting contribution isn’t about putting people on the spot. It’s about creating an easy way into the conversation.

Make gentle openings. If you know what they’ve prepared or where their expertise sits, create opportunities for them to join the conversation. A simple What are your thoughts on this? or You’ve been closest to this piece of work, what’s your perspective? can make all the difference.

And when they do contribute, acknowledge it. It signals that their perspective is valued and encourages others to engage with their ideas. Those little gestures help them feel part of the conversation.

Often, that’s all it takes.

Once people get that first contribution out into the room, the intimidation starts to fade and the rest of the conversation becomes much easier.

The Voice Was Already There

When I was with my son at the Lego club, I didn’t tell him what to do. I didn’t rescue him and I didn’t speak for him.

I simply asked a question that helped him express what he already knew.

That’s often the role of a leader.

Not to dominate the conversation or have all the answers, but to create the conditions where others feel confident enough to contribute theirs.

Because people rarely need a voice.

More often, they need someone to create the conditions that make using it feel safe.

Subscribe now

It’s summer holiday season, woohoo!

Summer holidays have a different feel, don’t they? They tend to be longer and slower, less about squeezing in a long weekend and more about genuinely stepping away. For many of us, they’re also the one time of year when we’re given permission to stop.

The question is, do we?

Because physically leaving work isn’t the same as mentally leaving it.

It’s entirely possible to be sitting beside a swimming pool while mentally rehearsing next week’s presentation. To be building sandcastles with your children while replying to emails in your head. To be having dinner with friends while wondering whether now is the perfect time to reinvent yourself and change careers.

Our bodies often arrive long before our minds do.

A few months ago, I wrote Five Practical Tips to Switch Off from Work, an article focused on creating practical boundaries before and during time away. If that’s where you’re struggling, I’d recommend starting there.

Today is a bonus article about what comes next. Not simply leaving work behind but allowing yourself to fully arrive wherever you are.

Why Presence Matters

Being present is about giving your brain permission to experience what’s actually happening instead of constantly predicting, planning or problem solving.

When we’re always thinking ahead, we miss the very moments we’re taking time off to enjoy.

Wherever our attention goes, our experience follows. If our attention stays at work, part of us stays at work.

The same applies to anything else taking up headspace: conflict with a friend, money worries or the kitchen renovation that’s somehow become your entire personality.

This article isn’t about solving those problems. It’s about noticing what’s pulling your attention away from the present and gently bringing it back.

Presence Is a Practice

Presence isn’t something we either have or don’t have. It’s something we practise.

Sometimes it’s listening to your child tell the longest story imaginable without mentally composing your reply to an email.

Other times it’s sitting quietly with a coffee without feeling guilty for not doing something productive.

These moments sound ordinary. That’s exactly the point.

Life is mostly made up of ordinary moments.

The more we practise being present with our morning coffee, during a walk or while playing with our children, the easier it becomes to be present everywhere else.

You don’t need to meditate for an hour every morning or empty your mind. You simply need to notice when your attention has wandered and gently bring it back to where your feet are.

Again. And again. And again.

Presence isn’t perfection. It’s returning.

Here are three things that help me when my mind starts replaying the past or fast forwarding into the future.

1. Take a few slow, deep breaths. The exaggerated ones where you can feel your chest and stomach expand and soften. Breathe out fully and simply notice how your body feels.

2. Bring your attention to your senses. If you’re at the seaside, feel the cold water around your feet, smell the salty air and notice the different shades of blue. Sometimes it’s as simple as feeling the warmth of the sun on your face instead of reaching for your phone.

3. Allow your thoughts to come and go. I don’t meditate regularly, not yet, and my brain usually runs at about 100 miles an hour, so aiming for a completely blank mind is unrealistic. I’ve found it’s far more helpful to notice my thoughts and gently return my attention to the present. The pitch presentation I need to finish next week might pop into my head, that’s OK. But instead of mentally designing the slides, I acknowledge the thought and bring my attention back to the present.

This isn’t about becoming a mindfulness expert. It’s about learning to notice where your mind has gone and gently bringing it back.

Your Body Can Help You Get There

But sometimes our minds are moving so quickly that we don’t notice we’ve left the present until our body tells us.

That’s where somatic intelligence can help.

Somatic intelligence is our ability to notice the physical sensations that accompany our thoughts and emotions, and use them as information rather than ignoring them.

Think about the last time you noticed your shoulders creeping towards your ears during a stressful conversation. Or perhaps your jaw tightens every time a particular subject comes up. Maybe your stomach drops before opening your inbox, even when you’re technically on holiday.

Those sensations can be clues.

In the same way that presence asks us to notice what our mind is doing, somatic awareness asks us to notice what our body is telling us.

Our bodies are constantly giving us information about our mental state:

• Shallow breathing

• Tight shoulders

• A clenched jaw

• Restlessness

These aren’t just physical sensations. They’re signals.

Learning to notice them can help us catch stress or worry before it quietly takes over, and give us another route back to the present.

Instead of simply trying to get rid of the tension, try asking what it’s trying to tell you.

• What am I feeling in my body right now?

• What emotion might this sensation be pointing to?

• What was I thinking about just before I noticed it?

• Is there something I’m worried about or trying to control?

• What does my body need from me right now: movement, rest, food, connection or simply a few moments of quiet?

The aim isn’t to judge yourself or make the sensation disappear immediately. It’s simply to become curious.

When we learn to listen to both our minds and our bodies, we have more opportunities to notice when we’ve drifted away from the present, and to find our way back.

If you’d like to explore somatic intelligence in more depth, has recently written a two-part series that’s both insightful and practical, you can read it here.

A New Mindset

We live in a world that’s full of noise. Everything competes for our attention. We celebrate productivity, multitasking and being busy, while rest often arrives with an unwanted side of guilt.

Perhaps that’s why being present has become a skill rather than something that happens naturally. It takes intention to put the phone away, stop mentally solving tomorrow’s problems and fully engage with what’s happening today.

So, this summer I’m trying something different.

It’s not about how many places I visit, how many people I catch up with or how much planning I can do for September.

It’s about how often I’m completely there. Not replaying what I could have done differently last month. Not worrying about the post holiday to do list. Just being present.

Because those moments are usually the ones we remember.

And this isn’t just about holidays. It’s about how we show up every day.

The more we practise being present while playing with our children, sharing a meal with friends or walking the dog, the easier it becomes to bring that same presence into the workplace. We listen more carefully. We notice more. We connect better.

The greatest gift we can give someone isn’t always our advice or our expertise, sometimes it’s our full attention.

Perhaps that’s what this summer is really about. Not escaping our lives for a couple of weeks, simply remembering to be fully present in them.

Subscribe now

For the past twenty years, I've had a work twin.

We interviewed for the same graduate role on the same day, got hired together and, by complete coincidence, started work on exactly the same day too. We spent years in the same department, often in the same team, sharing clients, office gossip and enough stories to keep us entertained for decades.

We both started our careers in commercial roles, and I loved every minute of it. I enjoyed the variety, managing client portfolios, leading a team, developing people and juggling the dozens of different things that landed on my desk every day. The busier it was, the happier I was.

My work twin? Not quite.

At the heart of our role was data analysis, and that’s where she came alive. She loved having time to think, spotting patterns that everyone else had missed and turning rows of numbers into stories that helped clients make better decisions. She was exceptionally good at it.

Managing a team of ten people, handling sales targets and spending half her week in meetings? That wasn’t what motivated her.

Could she have done it? Absolutely. She’s one of the most capable people I’ve ever worked with.

Did she want to? Not even slightly.

That isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s ambition pointing in a different direction.

Every career move for her involved trade-offs. Conversations about creating roles that didn’t yet exist. Negotiating responsibilities. Finding managers willing to be flexible enough to build a career around her strengths instead of expecting her to follow the traditional route.

She’s far from alone.

Increasingly, people are questioning whether climbing the management ladder is actually the career goal they’ve been told it should be.

Research from recruitment firm Robert Walters found that 52% of Gen Z professionals don’t want to become middle managers. Instead, they’re more attracted to developing specialist expertise, building portfolio careers, freelancing, creating content or exploring opportunities outside traditional corporate structures.

The same research found that 72% would rather progress through personal development and skills growth than manage people.

So, is this the beginning of the end for middle management?

I don’t think it’s quite that dramatic.

But I do think it’s a wake up call.

Organisations are still defining success in ways that no longer reflect what many people actually want. And that’s something leaders can no longer afford to ignore.

Success Doesn’t Look the Same for Everyone

Many organisations still only offer one career ladder. From individual contributor to manager to executive.

But someone can be an outstanding engineer, designer or salesperson and have absolutely no desire to coach people, recruit new team members or navigate difficult performance conversations.

Those are valuable skills, but completely different from the technical expertise that made someone successful in the first place.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that success meant becoming someone’s boss, even if people were never the thing you wanted to manage.

In doing so, we’ve accidentally created workplaces where the only way to progress is to stop doing the work you actually love.

Now add a generation that is increasingly questioning whether management is worth it, and suddenly the cracks in that model become much harder to ignore.

That’s why more organisations are beginning to introduce dual career pathways, creating opportunities for people to become more senior because they’re exceptional specialists.

Expert careers, technical careers, distinguished specialists... Whatever the title, the principle is the same. People should be able to grow their careers without becoming managers if that’s not where their strengths or ambitions lie.

Of course, many of us don’t have the authority to change our organisational structure, but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. There are still plenty of opportunities to have more open conversations about what people actually want from their careers, redefine success, reshape roles and rethink what gets rewarded.

What Leaders Can Do Differently

The workplace is changing at remarkable speed.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping jobs, expectations around work are shifting and younger generations are challenging assumptions that many organisations have taken for granted for decades.

Being aware of those changes isn’t enough.

If we want to attract, engage and retain great people, leadership has to evolve alongside them.

Here are a few places to start.

Redefine Career Conversations

One question has appeared in almost every performance review I’ve ever had:

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I’ve been asked it countless times. Then, somewhere along the way, I started asking it myself.

The challenge is that most people immediately think about job titles. But it’s hard to know what role you’ll have five years down the line. It may not even exist yet.

Instead of focusing on titles, focus on curiosity:

What kind of work gives you energy?

What skills would you love to develop?

What parts of your job do you wish you could spend more time doing?

What does success look like for you?

Those conversations help you understand where people thrive, what motivates them and how you can shape opportunities around their strengths.

Every person in your team has their own version of success. Understanding what it looks like is the first step in helping them build a career that feels meaningful.

Stop Treating Promotion as the Only Reward

One of the biggest signals organisations send is what they celebrate.

If the only achievements that receive recognition are promotions into management, people quickly learn that leadership is the only thing that really matters.

It shouldn’t be.

Expertise deserves recognition. So do innovation, mentoring and collaboration.

Someone who transforms how a team works, becomes the organisation’s leading expert in a specialist area or develops others through coaching is creating enormous value, even if they never manage a single person.

Recognition doesn’t always have to come with a new job title. Sometimes it’s about visibility, influence or trust.

Mentoring is a good example. It allows experienced specialists to develop others, share their knowledge and influence the organisation without taking on formal line management responsibilities.

Leadership doesn’t always require direct reports. Sometimes it’s simply about making the people around you better.

Create More Flexible Career Paths

Even if you can’t redefine career structures in your organisation, where possible, think creatively.

Could responsibilities be shared through co-leadership?

Could a specialist spend part of their time mentoring others while continuing to do the work they love?

Could projects provide opportunities for people to lead without taking on permanent management responsibilities?

Could success be measured by impact rather than hierarchy?

The organisations that answer yes to questions like these are often the ones that keep their best people for longer.

Because when people feel they can grow without becoming someone they’re not, they’re far more likely to stay.

A New Definition of Success

Today’s workforce is telling us that success is becoming more personal.

My work twin taught me that years ago. We started in the same place, but success took us in completely different directions. Neither path was better than the other. They were simply built around different strengths, different motivations and different definitions of a fulfilling career.

Perhaps that’s the promotion myth we’ve held onto for too long: the belief that the only meaningful way to progress is to become someone else’s manager.

The organisations that thrive over the next decade won’t be those with the tallest career ladders, but those that offer more than one route to progression. They’ll recognise expertise and influence as much as authority, create careers in more than one direction and ask people what success means to them instead of assuming they already know.

Because helping people build careers around their strengths may become one of leadership’s most important responsibilities.

Subscribe now

Whether you’re looking to lose weight, build a thriving business or become a better leader, success isn’t determined by how strong your goals are, but by the behaviours you choose to encourage.

Last month marked my tenth wedding anniversary and I suggested to my husband that we celebrate with a small photoshoot. Nothing extravagant, just our closest family, our wedding outfits and, most importantly, our children, who weren’t even a twinkle in our eyes ten years ago.

Now, my wedding dress is very fitted. It looked fabulous on the day, even if I say so myself. But ten years and two children later, recreating that same look felt... ambitious.

So naturally, I decided to lose a couple of kilos. Nothing dramatic, just a sensible little goal.

Most mornings, I’d step on the scale.

Down a bit? Excellent.

Up or exactly the same? Deep sighs and mild outrage.

My strategy was admittedly rather loose. Say no to sweets, eat slightly smaller portions, maybe skip the occasional snack. Very scientific stuff.

My attention was fixed on the number on the scale.

And honestly, that’s exactly how many organisations approach performance.

They obsess over the final outcome: sales, retention rates, growth, profit... while paying far less attention to the habits, behaviours and systems that actually create success in the first place.

The Measurement Trap

Most organisations love metrics. KPIs, outputs, targets, rankings, productivity dashboards, the full corporate buffet.

And to be fair, they’re useful. Metrics tell us what happened. They give leaders a snapshot of performance.

But here’s the problem. They rarely tell us why it happened.

Most performance problems are visible in behaviour long before they appear in a dashboard. By the time the numbers shift, the habits producing those results are often already firmly established.

When organisations focus only on performance metrics, things can quickly go sideways. Short-term thinking creeps in and the wrong behaviours may start getting rewarded.

Take revenue targets, for example.

If employees are judged purely on quarterly sales figures, the focus quickly becomes hitting the number at all costs. Discounts get handed out more freely. Aggressive sales tactics replace relationship building. Short term wins become more important than long term trust.

And occasionally things drift even further into risky territory, inflated reporting, cutting corners or avoiding difficult but necessary decisions.

Checking only the scoreboard can be misleading. You might reward excellent performance, or you might accidentally reward luck, shortcuts or behaviour that creates problems later on.

The more useful question is this: What should we be measuring before the results appear?

Economist Charles Goodhart famously observed that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

The moment people are judged solely on a number, they often start optimising the number itself rather than the behaviours that originally produced it.

Ultimately, outcomes tell you whether you succeeded. But it is behaviours that tell you whether you’re likely to succeed again.

We should be playing the long game.

So, how do we shift the focus?

Putting Behaviours in the Spotlight

Performance metrics still dominate most conversations. Partly because they’re easier to measure and partly because they’re what the outside world notices.

We need a subtle but important mindset shift. Stop obsessing over outcomes alone and start paying closer attention to the behaviours producing them.

If the behaviours are right, the results tend to follow, even if not immediately.

Ask yourself: What actually moves the needle here?

For a sales team, that might mean focusing less on the number of closed deals and more on the actions that increase the likelihood of closing them:

• Building rapport with contacts

• Demonstrating empathy when issues arise

• Being proactive with meaningful check ins

• Building trust over time

For a client service team, success may come from:

• Developing a deep understanding of client challenges

• Sharing relevant insights that genuinely help

• Being consistently responsive and reliable

• Building credibility and sharing your industry expertise

The goal is to identify the real ingredients behind success so you can intentionally reinforce them.

These behaviours rarely appear neatly on dashboards, but their impact on performance is enormous.

So, it’s worth asking:

How do these behaviours currently show up in my team?

What would excellent look like?

What needs to change to close the gap?

But there’s another question that matters just as much:

Am I rewarding those behaviours?

And be honest with yourself on that one.

It’s easy to recognise outcomes. Positive client feedback. An impactful presentation. A major sale finally crossing the finish line.

But are you recognising the behaviours that drove those results?

More importantly, are you recognising those behaviours when the result wasn’t the one you hoped for?

When organisations reward outcomes alone, they risk undervaluing people doing excellent work in difficult circumstances.

But My Senior Leaders Are Still Obsessed with Metrics

Many senior leaders aren’t close to the day to day reality of every team. They can’t observe hundreds of interactions, conversations and decisions every week.

Metrics are often their way of understanding whether things are broadly heading in the right direction.

Is it ideal? Probably not.

Is it practical? Usually.

Your senior leadership team probably understands that curiosity, expertise and empathy matter. The challenge is that they’re difficult to measure consistently.

So those qualities often get translated into targets, revenue growth, retention rates or customer satisfaction scores.

And that’s perfectly reasonable.

The mistake is treating those targets as the entire conversation.

They should be the starting point.

If senior leadership decides employee retention should sit above 75 per cent, don’t stop at the number.

Start asking better questions.

What makes people stay here?

What causes people to leave?

What do our best managers do differently?

What are other organisations doing better than us?

While senior leaders continue monitoring retention figures, you and your managers can focus on the factors that actually influence them: the systems you create, the behaviours you encourage and the everyday experiences people have at work.

That’s where meaningful change happens.

And that’s how you move from hitting a target once to sustaining success over time.

Results Follow Behaviour

Organisations that focus only on performance are essentially measuring history. Organisations that focus on behaviours are shaping the future.

It’s a bit like my bathroom scale.

The number wasn’t going to magically change because I stared at it every morning with enough emotional intensity.

What I actually needed was habits, structure and consistency.

The same applies to organisations.

Results matter, of course they do.

But they’re usually the outcome of hundreds of smaller moments happening every day. How people communicate. How decisions are made. How problems are handled. What gets rewarded and what gets quietly ignored.

Focusing on results alone won’t create sustainable success.

Reinforcing the right behaviours just might.

So, ask yourself:

If someone wanted to earn recognition in your organisation tomorrow, what behaviours would they quickly learn to display?

And are those the behaviours you actually want more of?

Subscribe now

I’ve been signed off work with burnout. Could we meet up for a chat?

That’s the message I received last month from a senior partner at a law firm.

Over the following weeks, we had several conversations trying to understand what had pushed him over the edge.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a single culprit when your days are a blur of board meetings, high-stakes client conversations and expert panels. All while you’re transitioning into a more senior role.

You keep doing your old job because you don’t want to let your team down. You start taking on new responsibilities because you don’t want to let your bosses down either. Somewhere in that transition, you let yourself down.

You may read this and recognise that feeling. The pressure, the urgency, the constant busyness.

I certainly did.

It made me wonder why the slow movement has transformed so many aspects of our lives, yet never really made it into the workplace. Back in 1989, the Slow Food movement emerged as a response to fast food culture, championing quality, enjoyment and sustainability over speed and convenience.

Nearly forty years later, we have slow travel, slow fashion and even slow parenting.

So, where’s slow work?

Why Slow Work Matters

Let’s start by defining what slow actually means. According to Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, being slow means controlling the rhythm of your own life. You decide how fast you go in any given situation.

That distinction matters because slow work isn’t about doing everything slowly. If today calls for speed, you move quickly. If tomorrow requires deeper thinking, you slow down. It’s about having the autonomy to choose the right pace for the task in front of you.

We can think of slow working as the deliberate practice of prioritising focus, quality, recovery and sustainable performance over constant busyness. It’s not about doing less work, but doing the right work, at the right pace, with enough space to think.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve accidentally created workplaces where being busy has become a status symbol. Fast replies, back-to-back meetings and multitasking have become badges of honour. We’re always on.

The problem is that these behaviours often create the appearance of productivity rather than productivity itself.

This is what Cal Newport calls pseudo productivity, where visible activity gets mistaken for valuable work. He argues that many knowledge workers are rewarded for looking busy rather than producing meaningful outcomes.

I was recently having a pint with a friend who’s an art director and asked him how work was going. I’ve rarely seen him so frustrated. Design is his passion, but he feels everything has become urgent. Every request seems to need doing yesterday.

His biggest frustration isn’t the workload, but the constant urgency that leaves no room for creativity.

That raises an important question for leaders.

Is the goal to do as much work as possible, or to produce the best work possible?

Realistically, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Corporate life is busy, deadlines pile up and work has to get done. But in that balance, have we tipped too far towards speed at the expense of quality?

Sometimes slowing down is the quickest way to get things right.

Think about:

• Rushing a hiring decision and recruiting the wrong person

• Rushing a strategy and missing obvious risks

• Rushing feedback and creating misunderstanding

• Rushing projects and creating rework

The slower is faster principle has been observed across many systems where excessive speed actually reduces overall performance.

And not just performance, wellbeing too.

Burnout isn’t simply driven by workload. It’s shaped by how we work. Constant interruptions, endless task switching, unclear priorities and the pressure to always be available all take their toll.

Research consistently links slow work with lower stress, improved wellbeing, greater creativity and more sustainable performance.

What Slow Work Looks Like

Slow work isn’t a grand organisational transformation.

Often, it’s a series of small choices.

Protecting thinking time

We know that being busy and being productive aren’t the same thing. Yet many of us spend entire days reacting rather than creating.

Protect time to think. Schedule it if you need to. We wouldn’t expect our best ideas to appear halfway through our tenth meeting of the day, so why leave thinking to chance?

One hour spent thinking clearly today can save ten hours fixing problems next week.

As a leader, set the example. Block out time for focused thinking and treat it as seriously as any meeting. When your team sees that uninterrupted thinking is valued rather than seen as a luxury, they are far more likely to protect their own time too. Over time, this helps create a culture where thoughtful work is valued just as much as visible busyness.

Reducing competing priorities

If everything is urgent, nothing is. Worse still, nothing gets the attention it deserves.

Be realistic about what fits into your week and have fewer priorities at any one time.

Alongside our core responsibilities, many of us volunteer for projects, mentor colleagues, join working groups and somehow end up organising the team social as well. They’re all worthwhile, but very few of us have time to do them all well.

Your calendar should reflect your priorities, not your guilt.

Your vision and values are often the best filter for deciding what deserves your time. If that’s something you struggle with, I’ve written an article about it.

As a leader, don't just celebrate people who always say yes. Help them choose where they can make the greatest impact. Protecting your team's capacity is just as important as achieving today's goals.

Building recovery into work

Recovery isn’t the opposite of work. It’s part of work.

The research on slow work consistently identifies recovery as essential for sustainable performance. Yet many organisations optimise for efficiency while forgetting that people need time to reflect, learn, connect, create and simply recharge.

Slow work isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about recognising that human beings have limits, and working with those limits instead of pretending they don’t exist.

As a leader, make recovery part of the way your team works, not something people have to earn. Encourage breaks, protect annual leave, discourage after-hours emails where possible, and model healthy boundaries yourself. Teams perform best when recovery is treated as an essential part of high performance, not a reward for it.

As for Me...

Writing this article has made me reflect on my own relationship with work.

Many of the habits and expectations I developed at the start of my career, almost twenty years ago, contradict everything I’ve just written, including how I approach writing itself.

I love writing these articles. They’ve never been a tick box exercise. I spend a lot of time thinking about relevant topics. I read, I research and I rewrite. The version you read is often version eight, and occasionally Final 3.

That takes time.

And I can see the difference between the articles I rush because I don’t want to miss the deadline and the ones that I’ve had time to review, reflect on and reshape. The better articles almost always had more thinking time.

So, I’ve decided to practise what I’m preaching.

For the rest of the summer, I’ll be publishing every other Monday instead of weekly.

I’d rather share something I’m genuinely proud of than something that’s simply on time.

As for You...

Many organisations reward visible busyness because it’s easy to measure. Fast responses, packed calendars, long hours and constant activity are all easy to see.

But perhaps we’re measuring the wrong things.

If we reward speed, we’ll get speed.

If we reward thoughtfulness, focus and quality, we might end up with something much more valuable.

So, what small step could you take this week to slow your work down, just enough to do it better?

Subscribe now

Once upon a time, and no, this isn’t about my mum before anyone asks, there was a grandmother who felt quietly heartbroken on Mother’s Day.

She spent most of her week helping her daughter raise three young girls. School runs, babysitting, meals, park trips, she was the dependable one. The granny everyone relied on.

So, when Mother’s Day arrived and her daughter spent it with her mother-in-law instead, it hurt.

To her, it felt personal. After everything she did for the family, on the one day meant to celebrate mothers, she felt forgotten.

But her daughter saw it completely differently.

She’d been invited to lunch by her in-laws two hours away. Bringing her mum would have meant a long day, loud children and a lot of stress. Knowing how much her mum already did for them, she genuinely thought she was being considerate by not asking her to come.

One person thought they were giving space and consideration.

The other felt hurt and left behind.

And that’s the thing about so many conversations at work too. The issue is often not the decision itself, but how much context people are given and whether they feel included in the thinking behind it.

The Meaning-Making Business

There’s a fancy term for this in organisational psychology: sensemaking.

Karl Weick, one of the key thinkers behind the concept, described sensemaking as the process through which people interpret and give meaning to what’s happening around them.

In less academic language, humans are basically walking meaning-making machines.

Something happens, somebody says something, a decision gets made and within seconds we start building a story around it. Usually with alarming confidence and very limited information.

As leaders, we influence that process constantly.

Whether the business is restructuring, freezing promotions, changing strategy or merging with a competitor, our role is rarely just to communicate information. We become translators of reality. We decide what gets shared, softened, emphasised or left out entirely.

And sometimes we overdo it.

We hold back context to avoid unnecessary worry. We simplify messages so they feel manageable. Sometimes we even rush to provide answers before people have had time to think things through themselves.

The intention is usually care. But over-filtering reality can unintentionally distort it.

Research on sensemaking and organisational trust suggests people are more likely to trust leadership decisions when they understand the reasoning behind them, when uncertainty is acknowledged rather than hidden and when they are treated as capable of handling complexity rather than being shielded from it.

Or put differently, adults generally prefer being treated like… adults.

When Helping Starts Getting in the Way

Managers sit in a strange middle ground.

One minute you’re trying to make senior leadership sound less alarming. The next, you’re trying to make your team sound less alarming to senior leadership.

In that position, it’s very easy to slip into over-managing information, emotions and decisions.

The risk is that when leaders do too much of the interpreting, teams get fewer opportunities to build judgement for themselves.

That has a real cost.

It can show up as confusion, misalignment and endless speculation when people don’t understand the context behind decisions. But it can also show up as reduced ownership, lower confidence and slower development when people become too reliant on leaders to provide all the answers.

Because good leadership is not just about solving problems. It’s about developing better thinkers.

And that creates a couple of tensions leaders constantly need to navigate.

1. Transparency vs protection

Most managers withhold context for good reasons.

You don’t want to create panic. You don’t want people worrying unnecessarily. You don’t want half the team updating their LinkedIn profiles because somebody used the word restructure in a meeting.

So, we soften. We simplify. We decide what people need to know.

The problem is that when people sense there’s more going on than they’re being told, they rarely assume the best. They fill in the blanks themselves, often with stories far worse than reality.

Just like the grandmother on Mother’s Day, people react not only to what happened, but to the meaning they attach to it.

And without context, humans are incredibly creative storytellers.

This doesn’t just apply to organisational decisions. It also applies to the everyday conversations we have with our teams.

When we ask someone to produce a report, lead a project or prepare a presentation, do they understand why it matters? Do they know how their work contributes to the bigger picture, or are they simply completing another task on a long to do list?

People are much more likely to feel motivated and take ownership when they can see the whole puzzle, not just the piece they’re holding.

You don’t need to share everything. But sharing more of the reasoning, constraints or purpose behind a decision often builds far more trust and engagement than polished reassurance ever will.

Some questions to reflect on:

• How often do I explain why, not just what?

• When I delegate work, do people understand how it contributes to the team’s goals?

• What assumptions am I making about what my team already knows?

• What information am I withholding to protect people, and is that protection actually helping?

2. Clarity vs autonomy

Leaders love clarity. We’re told constantly that one of our jobs is to create it.

And it is.

But sometimes, in our desperation to be helpful, we remove too much thinking from the process.

We answer every question immediately. We over-explain. We prescribe exactly how something should be approached. We jump in with solutions before people have even had time to wrestle with the problem themselves.

Which feels supportive.

Until you realise your team has quietly stopped thinking independently because you’ve become the organisational equivalent of sat nav.

Part of development comes from sitting with uncertainty long enough to form your own judgement. From figuring things out instead of being handed fully processed conclusions.

Clarity matters.

But so does leaving enough space for people to think.

Sometimes the most developmental thing a leader can say is:

What do you think?

Not every silence needs filling. Giving people time to reflect builds judgement, confidence and independent problem solving over time.

Some questions to reflect on:

• Do I answer questions too quickly?

• When was the last time I responded with a question instead of an answer?

• Am I solving problems my team could solve themselves?

• Where could I create a little more space for people to think before I step in?

The Goal Is Better Thinking

The grandmother didn’t need a different decision. She needed access to the thinking behind it.

Had she understood the reasoning, she may still have felt slightly disappointed. But she would likely have told herself a very different story about what the decision meant.

The same thing happens in organisations every day.

People rarely judge decisions based solely on outcomes. They judge them through the meaning they attach to them.

The goal of leadership is not to make reality simpler for people. Neither it is to do all the thinking on their behalf.

It’s to help people engage with complexity more intelligently, even when that involves uncertainty, ambiguity or uncomfortable conversations.

Because growth rarely comes from removing complexity. It comes from helping people build the confidence to navigate it themselves.

So, ask yourself: what might become possible if you shared more of the story and trusted your team to think for themselves?

Subscribe now

I went dress shopping for a friend’s wedding at the weekend. I had the loveliest shop assistant: endlessly cheerful, she kept appearing with new options, plus accessories, shoes, the works. Everything looked great, too great in fact.

After trying on what felt like half the shop, I reached peak overwhelm, standing in front of the mirror, spinning slightly, with no idea what to do next.

At that point, another assistant came over and asked, very simply:

How do you want to feel on the day?

I was completely thrown. Not what colour? or what style? but how do you want to feel?

I paused and pictured the day: me with my husband and friends, no kids in tow, dancing, laughing, having a brilliant time.

And suddenly everything shifted.

I wasn’t just looking at dresses anymore; I was imagining a version of myself in that moment.

From there, the decision became a lot clearer.

Because once the question changed, so did my perspective. I stopped focusing on dresses and started focusing on the day itself.

And that’s really what made the difference. The quality of a question is often determined by the quality of the thinking it unlocks.

The Two Types of Questions

Broadly speaking, most questions fall into one of two categories:

• questions that gather information

• questions that prompt thinking

The first type benefits the person asking.

You ask because you want to know something.

This is what happens when your friend misses a party and immediately launches into:
Who was there?
What happened?
What did everyone say?

Or at work, when your boss asks:
Who attended the client meeting?
What did you cover in the presentation?
What feedback did they give?

These questions are useful. Necessary, even.

But they don’t really expand the thinking of the person answering them. You’re simply transferring information from one brain to another. Like human Bluetooth.

The spotlight stays on the person asking.

The second type of question does something very different.

These are the questions that make people pause.

The ones where you don’t immediately have an answer ready and waiting. The ones that force you to reflect, reassess or look at something differently.

Questions like:
What’s really driving this frustration?
What assumption might you be making here?
What would ideal look like if there were no constraints?

These questions create movement.

They challenge thinking, uncover blind spots and surface ideas that were sitting quietly in the background waiting to be noticed.

And importantly, the benefit shifts.

The person answering the question no longer feels interrogated. They feel challenged, stretched and trusted to think, and walks away with something new.

The spotlight moves onto their ideas rather than their memory.

Questions That Move Thinking Forward

If you want better conversations, ask questions that help the other person think more deeply, not just speak more quickly or more often.

That doesn’t mean you need a memorised list of clever questions for every meeting.

Great questions are rarely scripted. They come from actually listening properly, noticing what’s missing and picking up on small moments where you can gently deepen someone’s thinking in real time.

That’s where the real value is. Those questions prompt reflection and unlock better thinking.

Most powerful questions tend to do one of three things:

1. Prompt Deeper Thinking

These questions move beyond the first answer, which is usually the most polished, safest or socially acceptable version.

• What do you think is really going on here?

• What’s underneath that frustration?

• What haven’t we talked about yet that matters?

• What’s the conversation we actually need to have?

Sometimes the most important part of a conversation only appears once the first answer has run out of steam.

2. Challenge Assumptions

Humans are exceptional storytellers. Unfortunately, many of the stories we tell ourselves are not entirely true.

These questions help people separate fact from interpretation.

• What assumptions might you be making here?

• What evidence do you actually have for that conclusion?

• What could you be missing?

• What might the other person’s perspective be?

Very often, the breakthrough is not finding a new answer. It’s questioning the old one.

3. Explore More Options

These questions create possibility and movement.

Especially useful when somebody feels stuck, boxed in or convinced there’s only one path forward.

• What other ways could you approach this?

• If there were no obvious constraints, what would you try?

• What’s the smallest step you could take next?

• What might become possible if you approached this differently?

Sometimes people don’t need advice.

They need help seeing beyond the first option their brain latched onto at 2am

Why Better Questions Matter

High-quality leadership conversations tend to move through all three stages. They go deeper, challenge assumptions and explore possibilities. That’s often where better decisions emerge.

Not because somebody gave brilliant advice, but because somebody asked a question that helped another person think differently.

And in a world full of people waiting for their turn to speak, that is surprisingly powerful.

The quality of discussions inside a business is often shaped by the quality of the questions being asked.

So, before your next conversation, ask yourself: what question could unlock a better insight here?

Subscribe now

I went out for dinner with some friends last weekend, and there was an asymmetry in the conversation that became impossible to ignore.

One of my friends works a low paid factory job. Whenever he talks about shift work, early starts, night shifts or exhaustion, the whole table responds instinctively with empathy. Everyone understands the hardship. The reaction is immediate and sincere.

Another friend runs his own electrical business. He’s not a millionaire, but he’s doing noticeably better than most of the group. When he talks about chasing unpaid invoices, worrying about cash flow at 2am, never fully switching off or working weekends, the reaction completely changes.

The sympathy disappears.

Instead, the jokes start.

Comments about his money. His success. His supposed glamorous entrepreneur lifestyle, which mainly seems to involve stress, admin and eating lunch in a van.

The jokes are framed as harmless banter, but the message underneath is clear:

I don’t feel sorry for you.

And it made me think about how differently we respond to struggle versus success.

Compassion downward is socially safe. It often comes naturally because there’s no threat attached to it. Supporting someone who is visibly struggling rarely costs us anything psychologically.

But supporting someone who is rising? Someone becoming successful, confident, visible or admired? That can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

There’s a growing body of psychological research suggesting people often find it harder to empathise with someone succeeding than with someone suffering. Researchers sometimes describe this as the difference between negative empathy, feeling concern for someone in pain, and positive empathy, genuinely sharing in someone else’s success, momentum or joy.

And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere.

Especially at work.

The Paradox

Many leaders are excellent at supporting junior people in their teams.

They coach them, advocate for them and invest in their growth. They’re patient with underperformers and compassionate towards people in crisis.

And to be clear, those things matter.

But they also reinforce a psychologically comfortable identity:
I’m experienced. I’m helpful. I’m the leader.

This kind of support earns social credit. It feels good to give and it feels good to receive.

But it’s also status-safe empathy.

Because the real test of leadership is not how you respond to people below you. It’s how you respond to people rising around you.

Some leaders, not all, become noticeably colder when a peer gains visibility or when a high performing direct report starts attracting attention from senior leadership.

The warmth changes. The generosity shrinks. The support becomes conditional.

Lateral empathy can feel much harder than downward empathy because comparison quietly enters the room.

Human beings constantly evaluate themselves relative to others. And workplace relationships become psychologically complicated when someone close to us in status starts accelerating. This can become especially challenging when it involves direct reports.

Suddenly, admiration collides with insecurity.

Leaders are mentoring them but also comparing themselves to them and somehow competing for recognition.

They want them to succeed, but perhaps not that much.

This is where status threat starts to creep in.

Another person’s suffering rarely threatens your identity, but their excellence sometimes does.

Leaders love talent, but sometimes just in theory.

The Hidden Behaviours of Threatened Leaders

Threatened leadership rarely looks dramatic.

The behaviours are subtle enough to remain socially acceptable and deniable.

Things like:

• becoming less generous with visibility

• withholding sponsorship

• subtle criticism

• reducing autonomy

• excessive control

• moving goalposts

• excluding people from strategic conversations

• praising privately but not publicly

Most of these behaviours don’t feel malicious in the moment. That’s what makes them dangerous.

Often, they’re forms of identity protection.

Secure leaders tend to experience other people’s success as collective success. Their identity comes from building strong teams, not from being the smartest person in every room.

Insecure leaders personalise comparison. Talent starts to feel threatening rather than exciting. Visibility feels competitive. They become territorial.

Some leaders say they want talented people, until those talented people become visible.

And the consequences are real.

People start playing small.

Innovation gets suppressed.

High performers leave.

Not because they lacked opportunity, but because they sensed the ceiling above them was emotional, not organisational.

The people most likely to leave companies are often not unsupported low performers.

They’re unsupported high performers.

The Uncomfortable Question

Most people reading this will immediately think of a manager they’ve worked for.

That’s easy.

The harder question is whether parts of this apply to you.

Have you ever felt irritated by someone else’s momentum?

Have you ever downplayed another person’s success to make yourself feel safer?

Have you ever been slower to celebrate someone because their growth triggered comparison in you?

Most of us would like to believe we’re endlessly supportive, emotionally mature and thrilled when others succeed.

But human psychology is messier than that.

We’re often generous with empathy when people are struggling because struggle keeps status differences intact.

Success changes the hierarchy.

And that’s where people discover whether their support was genuine or conditional.

Leadership Maturity

Leadership contains competing emotional systems: caregiving, status preservation, identity defence, affiliation, competition. Which means leadership emotions can get complicated, fast.

Many organisations overestimate leadership quality because they mainly evaluate leaders on how they treat vulnerable people, not on how they respond to emerging equals.

Just like my friends could easily empathise with the hardship of someone working exhausting factory shifts, but struggled to extend that same empathy towards an entrepreneur perceived to be more successful than them.

Leadership maturity is not measured by how supportive you are when nobody threatens your position.

It’s measured by your emotional response to other people’s momentum.

Can you genuinely celebrate people who are becoming exceptional around you?

Can you sponsor someone who may eventually outshine you?

Can you detach your identity from hierarchy long enough to want growth for others without making it about yourself?

That’s the real test.

Because secure leaders develop talent while insecure leaders quietly contain it.

And most people can feel the difference long before it’s ever spoken out loud.

I hope this made you just uncomfortable enough to reflect on your own behaviour.

That discomfort might be useful.

Subscribe now

Last weekend my nephew was invited to a family gathering. Nothing dramatic, just one of those we’ll all be there, you should come too kind of things.

He politely said no.

Not because he had plans. Not because he was busy. But because, as he put it: I don’t really see the point in going if I’m just going to sit there for hours doing small talk.

It was not rude, more matter of fact. What struck me was not the refusal itself, but the reasoning behind it. There was no guilt about opting out, no sense that obligation should override meaning. Just a quiet confidence that time should be spent on things that actually feel worth it.

To be honest, part of me admired it. Another part wondered whether this means the future of family gatherings is now dependent on having a strong enough value proposition.

Still, it made me think about how differently generations define worth it.

The Changing Psychology of Work

Over the past few decades, workplace priorities appear to have shifted across generations. Earlier generations, particularly Baby Boomers and to some extent Generation X, were often associated with valuing financial security, career progression, organisational loyalty and professional responsibility. Success was frequently measured through stable employment, promotions, managerial authority and salary growth.

This mindset was shaped partly by the economic conditions of the time, post war rebuilding, industrial expansion and more traditional career structures where staying with one employer for decades was relatively common.

Younger generations, especially Millennials and Generation Z, still care about salary and career progression, particularly in a world of rising living costs and economic uncertainty. But research suggests they place far greater emphasis on purpose, personal values, flexibility and wellbeing when deciding where to work and whether to stay.

Global Deloitte research involving more than 23,000 respondents found that 89% of Gen Z and 92% of millennials believe having purpose is important to their satisfaction and wellbeing at work.

Even more strikingly, the same research found that around 40% had rejected an employer, role or assignment due to ethical concerns or lack of purpose, while roughly 45% had left a job they felt lacked meaning.

That is a significant shift.

Previous generations were often more likely to separate identity from work and tolerate jobs that were not especially fulfilling, as long as they provided stability, income and progression. Younger workers appear far more willing to walk away when meaning is missing.

This does not mean older generations did not value meaningful work, or that younger generations do not care about money. The difference is largely one of emphasis. Younger workers are increasingly asking: Is this worth my time, energy and attention? If the answer feels unclear, loyalty alone is often not enough.

Creating Meaning at Work

So, how well does your team actually understand its purpose?

This is not just about knowing what you do or how you do it. It is about something bigger, understanding how your work contributes to the world around you.

Employees are far more engaged when they feel their work has meaning, contributes to something larger and aligns with a clear organisational purpose.

Many companies still define themselves by what they produce or deliver. The stronger ones define themselves by the impact they create.

Nike is not really about shoes, it is about human potential and performance.
Patagonia is not really about outdoor clothing, it is about environmental responsibility.
Airbnb is not really about accommodation, it is about human connection and belonging.

You get the idea.

The focus shifts from product to impact, which is a big part of what makes these organisations so compelling. It attracts customers and motivates employees who want to feel they are contributing to something meaningful.

These organisations are very good at translating what they do into why it matters.

In your world, what does that look like?

If you work in engineering, is it really about coding, or is it about creating systems that make people’s lives easier?

If you work in consultancy, is it really about data, or is it about inspiring clients to make better decisions confidently?

If you work in HR, is it really about policies, or is it about helping people do their best work without losing the will to live by Thursday afternoon?

Of course, purpose is easy to talk about and much harder to embed. A useful way to test whether it is genuinely understood is to explore a few questions that help teams connect their daily work to the impact they create.

How does your service change the way people feel, not just what they can do?

That question shifts the focus from transactions to impact. It’s not about what your service does, but how it changes the experience of people using it. People rarely remember the technical details of a service, but they do remember feeling reassured, confident and understood. Often the greatest value organisations create is emotional rather than operational.

What would become harder, slower or more expensive if you did not exist?

Many organisations underestimate their value because the problems they solve have become so normal that nobody notices them anymore. Often the real impact of good work is invisible. It quietly removes friction, saves time, prevents mistakes and makes complex things feel easier. When teams recognise that, it becomes much easier to connect daily tasks to meaningful outcomes.

What do you want people to be able to do or become because of your work?

This encourages teams to think beyond deliverables and ask bigger questions about long term impact, contribution and progress. The strongest sense of purpose often comes from helping people grow, improve, achieve something meaningful or solve problems they could not solve before.

What do we consistently refuse to compromise on, even when it is inconvenient?

Purpose is not only about customers or society. It is also shaped internally through standards, beliefs and culture.

That question often reveals more about an organisation’s real purpose than any carefully written mission statement. Values become meaningful when they influence decisions, especially difficult ones. Employees pay close attention to what organisations prioritise under pressure, because that is usually where the true culture becomes visible.

These conversations matter because purpose is rarely communicated through one big announcement. More often, it is built gradually through clarity, consistency and everyday decisions.

People do not need grand speeches about changing the world. Most simply want to understand that their work contributes to something useful and worthwhile. When organisations fail to explain that clearly, employees will often create their own conclusion, usually that the work is just about targets, deadlines and inbox management.

And once people stop seeing meaning in what they do, disengagement tends to arrive surprisingly quickly.

The Real Question

What we are seeing more and more is not a rejection of responsibility from younger generations. Any organisation that frames it that way risks misunderstanding the shift entirely and missing out on attracting and retaining talented people.

People are questioning whether traditional career rewards still justify the personal cost. Long hours, constant pressure and blurred boundaries feel far harder to sustain when the meaning behind the work feels unclear.

People engage more deeply when they understand why their work matters.

It is not just about what you make, it is about what you exist to improve.

Perhaps the real question for organisations is not: What do we do?

It is: What do we make better?

Subscribe now

If there’s one sentence at work that’s been flogged to death, it’s suspend your agenda. Every listening-skills workshop, relationship-building course or corporate seminar will tell you the same thing. But let’s be honest, how practical is it?

I get the theory: don’t bulldoze your agenda; show empathy, be understanding, listen… all very noble. But in the real world, we all have agendas. If there’s no agenda, what are we even doing, just gathering for a casual chat over a cup of tea?

It’s the same with people management. Clarity is key. We need to know why we’re talking to someone and what we hope to achieve. So how do we balance being fully present, genuinely listening and still keeping an eye on the meeting’s purpose?

The answer might be simpler than we think: co-create the agenda.

Agendas deserve more love than we usually give them. Done well, they’re the unsung heroes of productive meetings – setting the scene, outlining preparation, aligning objectives, allocating timings and guiding discussions on the day. Think of it like sport: a match is only as good as the training that goes into it. In business, the success of a meeting often hinges on what happens before anyone even sits down at the table. Agendas aren’t just formalities; they’re the blueprint for making every conversation count.

The Tension in Meetings

The traditional purpose of an agenda is clear enough. Provide clarity. Encourage preparation. Support good time management. Sensible and efficient.

The problem is that agendas are often one sided.

We circulate them in advance or include AOB and assume that will do the trick. Yet that is a little like cooking a full meal and only asking for feedback once it is served. At that stage, the most anyone can do is add a sprinkle of salt. The structure is already set.

We usually do this in the name of efficiency. We convince ourselves that a tightly defined agenda guarantees focus and productivity. Without realising it, we prioritise efficiency over inclusion and alignment.

When people have not genuinely contributed to the agenda, tension tends to surface in predictable ways:

• Disengagement. Multitasking, glazed expressions, polite nodding.

• Hidden resistance. Agreement in the room, pushback afterwards.

• Derailment. Sudden attempts to introduce entirely different topics.

• Missed opportunities. Valuable insights and alternative perspectives never emerge.

• Power struggles. Hierarchical tensions become more pronounced.

• Eroded trust and morale. Repeatedly sidelined voices stop offering input.

Derailment is particularly common in people management. Have you ever sat down for what you thought was a straightforward quarterly review, only to find yourself navigating unexpected tears because someone is frustrated about a promotion they did not receive? You were prepared to discuss performance metrics. They arrived ready to discuss fairness and recognition.

A little advance notice would have helped. And more often than not, with the right preparation, you would have seen it coming.

When I talk about agendas, I am not referring to format or design. It does not matter whether it is a beautifully structured two-page document or a simple conversation beforehand. Co-creating an agenda means ensuring that all parties are aligned before the interaction takes place. It is about being on the same page before sitting at the table.

If the word agenda feels heavy, call it priorities alignment. Call it goal clarification. Call it setting strategic intent. No one would suggest suspending that.

Aligning Purpose

Meetings rarely fail because of a lack of effort or capability. Some do, certainly. But many fail because of a lack of alignment.

This is where you come in. One of your most valuable roles before a meeting is to align purpose.

What does my team genuinely want to get out of this interaction?

It sounds straightforward. Often, it is not. Sometimes people do not fully know themselves. Your role is to help surface the concern they have not quite articulated. At other times, challenges are difficult to raise and need a gentle nudge. Left unexplored, they tend to emerge later and usually at the least convenient moment.

Whether you are preparing for a performance review or a project update, reflect on the conversation that needs to happen in advance so everyone is clear about how time will be used and what preparation is required.

You might ask:

• What would you like to get out of our next meeting?

• What feels most pressing for you right now?

• Where can I help you most?

• What does progress look like by the end of our time together?

• Is there anything you are concerned we might overlook?

• What context would be helpful for me to understand beforehand?

• Are there data, feedback, perspectives or examples we should review in advance?

• What might I not be seeing from your perspective?

• How will we know we have moved the needle?

Questions like these communicate something powerful. This is not my meeting or your meeting. It is ours.

When you explore these areas ahead of time, you uncover hidden challenges, assumptions and expectations. Sometimes it leads to stronger preparation. Occasionally it completely reshapes your plan because you realise you need a different conversation altogether. That is not a failure. It is progress.

This approach transforms meetings from calendar obligations into intentional conversations. And that is far more productive than suspending your agenda and hoping for the best.

Deliberate Leadership

From a leadership perspective, co creating the agenda is not about being democratic for the sake of it.

It is about being deliberate.

Strong leaders do not cling rigidly to their own plan, nor do they drift aimlessly in the name of openness. They create clarity and invite contribution in equal measure. They understand that alignment is not a happy accident that occurs in the room. It is built beforehand, through thoughtful preparation and purposeful questions.

When you take the time to align priorities in advance, you signal respect, strengthen trust and elevate the quality of the conversation.

That is not soft leadership. That is strategic leadership.

Subscribe now

A few months ago, I watched a manager give some fairly standard feedback to someone on their team. Nothing harsh or unusual. But the employee became defensive almost immediately. Short answers, visible frustration, the atmosphere changing within seconds.

The easy conclusion would have been:
They just don’t take feedback very well.

But a follow-up conversation revealed something else entirely.

Months earlier, the employee had put forward a project they genuinely believed in. It was rejected due to budget constraints. Soon afterwards, budget was approved for a different initiative, one they didn’t believe in but were now expected to lead on top of an already heavy workload.

The frustration in that meeting had very little to do with the feedback itself.

What looked like defensiveness was actually disappointment, pressure and feeling unheard.

It was a reminder that the first thing we hear is rarely the full story. Surface reactions often sit on top of deeper frustrations, worries or emotions that people haven’t yet said out loud.

In part one of this article, I talked about dialling up your curiosity, showing up with genuine interest and a real desire to learn from the person in front of you.

Now we’re taking it a step further. Authentic listening requires depth, and that comes from staying in the conversation for long enough to understand what’s really going on underneath.

Creating Depth in Conversation

If part one of this article was all about curiosity, part two is all about depth.

It’s about the role you play in helping surface insights that might not have emerged otherwise. It’s about moving a conversation from the surface to something more meaningful.

That requires a shift from simply receiving what’s being said to gently challenging it. Not taking everything at face value but prompting reflection. In many ways, it’s about slowing things down just enough to create space for thinking.

Because the real value of a conversation isn’t in how much is said, it’s in what finally gets uncovered.

Deep Listening in Practice

Deep listening is about elevating the quality of the conversation, not by adding more of your own thinking, but by helping the other person go further with theirs. It’s about creating the space for them to explore, uncover something new and, at times, gently challenge their own assumptions. The spotlight stays firmly on them, you’re there to guide the thinking, not take it over.

Slow conversations down

Leaders are often under pressure to move quickly. The downside? Rushed conversations tend to produce shallow thinking and missed risks.

Slowing things down doesn’t mean making conversations dull or dragging them out. It means creating just enough space for thinking to happen, rather than rushing from one point to the next. It’s about allowing moments where something can land, be explored and deepen.

In practice, that might look like this:

Pause before responding. It often encourages the other person to go further or say what they really meant.

Stay with something interesting instead of moving on too quickly.

That’s interesting, what made that challenging?

Don’t rush to fill silence. If someone pauses, let them. Silence can feel uncomfortable, but it’s often where the most valuable insights live.

Good listening, combined with pauses and reflective questions, creates space for better judgement and fewer assumptions, which leads to more considered action.

Make people feel heard, which isn’t the same as agreeing

Affective skills matter just as much as cognitive or behavioural ones. You need to be motivated to pay attention and to empathise.

Empathy doesn’t mean agreement. It means understanding someone’s point of view and accepting their perspective without judgement.

Notice when you’re mentally drafting your reply, we all do it, and gently bring your focus back. Feeling heard requires presence. And presence is surprisingly easy to spot, it shows up in your body language, your responses and your level of interest.

Summarising or paraphrasing can help confirm understanding and show you’re paying attention.
So what I’m hearing is…

Show understanding by taking action. If someone is overwhelmed by their workload, telling them you understand will only go so far. Work with them to explore what needs to change and what small steps could improve the situation.

When people feel genuinely listened to, they open up, engage more fully and are far more willing to contribute and challenge.

That’s when conversations shift from performative to productive.

Notice what’s not being said.

Observation plays a bigger role than we often realise.

Yes, listen to what’s being said, but also pay attention to what isn’t. Notice body language, shifts in tone, moments of hesitation.

What made them pause? What landed awkwardly? When did they seem uncomfortable?

Those reactions often tell you more than words ever will. Use them to guide what needs exploring next.

Ask better questions than you give answers

Most people listen with the intention to reply. Try holding back. Make sure you’ve fully understood before offering your view.

It’s not just about asking clarifying questions, they only focus on what has already surfaced. Aim for discovery questions, the kind that make people think a little harder.

What would a better outcome look like?

What’s one small step you could take?

What could you try instead?

What are you avoiding?

What if…?

The best discovery questions aren’t complicated, they’re thoughtful. They don’t push for quick answers, they create space for better ones.

Sometimes a simple and what else? gives permission for further thinking and unlocks a whole new layer of thinking.

As a rule, try asking one more question instead of giving your view.

Better Conversations, Better Outcomes

Great leaders don’t add value by speaking more, they add value by helping others think better. And that starts with listening well and asking the kind of questions that make people stop, reflect and see things differently.

Most people don’t say what they really think straight away. They go with what feels safe, quick or expected.

Good listening, paired with a well placed question, helps you move past that first layer and raise the quality of thinking in the room.

When you ask questions that make someone stop and reflect, you help them organise their thoughts, challenge their assumptions and see things from a different angle.

They begin to own both the problem and the solution.

Over time, that builds confidence, capability and accountability, leading to better decisions and better outcomes.

The real power of listening isn’t in hearing more, it’s in unlocking better thinking.

So ahead of your next conversation, ask yourself: What assumptions need to be challenged to uncover better insights?

Subscribe now

I used to run training sessions on listening skills for client service directors. One thing that always caught me off guard was the silence in the room when I asked, when was the last time you experienced truly good listening, someone genuinely focused on you?

You’d think I’d asked when they last saw a unicorn on the Northern line.

And yet, it often felt about as likely.

Why is that?

We live in a society that prizes talking over listening. The workplace is no exception. We’re trained to speak more persuasively, present more slickly and land our points with impact. All admirable skills, but they tend to get far more airtime than the quieter, arguably more powerful skill of actually listening.

Why Good Listening is Surprisingly Rare

You might expect listening to be weaker at junior levels and improve with experience. In reality, that’s not quite how it plays out. According to the 2025 Employee Engagement Trends report, only 56 per cent of employees believe senior leaders make the effort to listen to staff, down from 65 per cent in 2023.

So why is good listening so rare?

We live in a world that rewards speaking, not listening. And when we do listen, we often listen to respond, not to understand.

Then there are the distractions. We’re rarely far from a screen, phones in hand, laptops open, notifications quietly competing for our attention. Giving someone our full focus can feel surprisingly difficult.

At work, meetings don’t always help. They can feel more like performance arenas, where being heard seems to matter more than hearing. Those who speak are noticed, so our attention often drifts to what to say next or how to sound knowledgeable, rather than truly taking things in.

The impact of poor listening is very real. It shows up in misalignment, work being redone, missed ideas and weaker decisions. And on a human level, it leaves people feeling ignored or undervalued, which has a direct impact on engagement.

Good listening isn’t a nice to have. It matters, for the work and, more importantly, for the people doing it.

Listening Beyond the Basics

Most people think they are good listeners. They let others speak, they don’t interrupt too much, they wait their turn.

But there’s a big difference between waiting to speak and listening to understand.

Listening to understand requires genuine curiosity, not just politeness.

When that curiosity is there, the behaviours we associate with strong listening tend to follow, almost without effort:

• Being present and giving the other person your undivided attention

• Letting them speak without interrupting so ideas and insights can fully emerge

• Allowing silence, giving space for thinking and reflection

• Asking thoughtful questions to explore and learn more

• Reflecting back what you’ve heard to check understanding

Not because you’ve memorised a list, but because you’re actually interested.

So rather than treating listening as a checklist, it’s more useful to think about intention. Good listening starts with an honest desire to understand more about the topic or the person in front of you.

Think about a time when you were genuinely curious about something. Chances are, you were fully present, you asked thoughtful questions and you listened closely. You probably didn’t need to remind yourself to do any of it.

When that curiosity isn’t there, something else tends to creep in, performative listening. You follow the script, you wait for your turn, you focus on asking a good question rather than a real one. The spotlight shifts to you and how you’re coming across, rather than what you’re learning.

Stop Preparing What to Say, Start Preparing How to Listen

If authentic listening starts with curiosity, the question becomes, how do you dial it up?

Next time you want to practise proper listening, forget the script and forget crafting the perfect question. Instead, take a moment to reflect on what you want to get out of the interaction.

A few questions can help shift your mindset before you walk in:

• What’s the real purpose of this interaction, not just the calendar title?

• What would make this conversation genuinely useful for both of us?

• What assumptions am I bringing into this meeting?

• What might this person see that I don’t?

• What’s the most interesting thing I could learn from them?

Think of this as a short warm up. Not preparation for what you’ll say, but preparation for how you’ll listen.

It helps you focus on the value of the interaction so that, when you sit down with the other person, your attention naturally shifts to learning.

And that’s what moves you from performative listening to authentic listening.

The Real Advantage at Work

Listening is the skill everyone claims and few practise.

And yet, when it’s done well, the impact is immediate. Conversations become more meaningful, decisions become better informed and ideas surface that might otherwise have been missed. People feel valued, not just included. Trust builds more quickly. Work tends to move faster because there’s less rework and fewer crossed wires.

In a world where everyone is trying to be heard, the real advantage often sits with those who take the time to listen.

The fastest way to become more influential at work isn’t to speak more, it’s to listen better.

In Part 2, we’ll explore how deeper interactions can elevate conversations, sharpen thinking, and surface hidden insights.

Subscribe now

Last week, I had a conversation with a friend that made me think about interpersonal awareness, and how rarely we talk about a skill so fundamental to leadership.

Here’s what happened.

Her company has been through a fair bit of restructuring recently. Only last month their MD, HR and Finance Directors all vanished from the business. No announcement, no explanation, not even a polite nod on the way out.

Unsurprisingly, uncertainty and speculation crept in. And yes, a few began quietly wondering whether their own roles might be next.

Then came the monthly all hands meeting, previously run by the MD. This time it was hosted by a newly appointed global director, Joshua. Finally, people thought, some clarity.

Joshua opened by introducing himself and sharing a bit about his hobbies. He loved football. In fact, the first five slides of his presentation were photos of him visiting stadiums, watching different teams and proudly showing off his collection of football shirts.

Interesting. Just not, perhaps, top of everyone’s list at that particular moment.

Eventually, almost in passing, he mentioned that the previous MD, HR and Finance Directors had left the business. At that point the room leaned in. People were ready. Waiting for context or an explanation. Anything, really.

Instead, Joshua moved straight on to the next agenda item, a performance review.

True story.

It sounds surprising when you read it. Maybe even a bit unbelievable. But if you think about it for a moment, there’s a good chance you’ve seen something similar in your own career. Perhaps not five slides of football shirts, but a definite mismatch between what was said and what people actually needed.

Noticing More, Leading Better

Interpersonal awareness is about truly tuning in to the people around us. It’s not just hearing words, it’s sensing how people feel and picking up on what sits beneath the surface. It’s having a read on someone’s mood or needs before they spell it out.

At its core, it’s the ability to accurately understand other people’s emotions, motivations, perspectives and reactions in everyday interactions. It’s the perception side of emotional intelligence.

Some leaders walk into a room and instantly sense the mood. Others, like Joshua, miss it entirely. The difference is interpersonal awareness.

That ability to read people and situations leads to better communication, stronger engagement, deeper trust and, quite often, fewer awkward meetings. It isn’t just perception; research shows that it creates tuning between people that increases cooperation and engagement in real time.

Leadership isn’t purely analytical. It’s social.

And the good news is this isn’t some rare personality trait reserved for naturally empathetic leaders. It’s a skill. And like most skills, it can be developed.

Do the Homework Before You Do the Talking

Interpersonal awareness doesn’t start in the room. It often begins before you even walk in.

Sometimes it’s not about asking others straight away. It’s about asking yourself a few better questions first.

• How are people experiencing this situation?

• What concerns might they have?

• What might I be missing?

• What do they actually need from me right now?

Taking a moment to reflect can completely change how an interaction unfolds. It’s the difference between turning up and hoping for the best and showing up with intention.

Imagine if Joshua had paused to think about how people were experiencing the changes in his organisation.

He would likely have realised that uncertainty was the dominant emotion, quickly edging into fear. People felt in the dark. Some were already worrying about redundancy. What they needed wasn’t a personal introduction or a tour of football stadiums. They needed clarity. Context. Reassurance.

There’s nothing wrong with sharing personal stories. In fact, done well, it builds connection. But timing matters.

The cost of misreading a situation is often this, over sharing what feels irrelevant and under sharing what matters most.

Reading People and the Room

Interpersonal awareness starts with understanding how others are experiencing a situation.

That means paying attention to emotional cues. These show up in body language, tone of voice, behaviour or subtle shifts in communication. Often, it’s about noticing what isn’t being said.

Are people leaning in, smiling, contributing? Or quietly typing away while you speak, which is rarely a sign of overwhelming enthusiasm.

Your job as a leader is to notice these signals and make sense of them. Is there tension in the room? Are people energised, uncertain, disengaged? Are they curious and asking questions or slightly withdrawn?

A small word of caution though. This isn’t about turning yourself into an amateur body language detective.

People respond differently. Extroverts and quieter personalities behave in very different ways. Someone who appears disengaged might simply be thinking things through. The quietest person in the room isn’t always the most unhappy. Sometimes they are just, well, quiet.

A more reliable approach is to look for changes.

When people behave differently from their usual selves, something is often going on.

• A usually talkative team member goes quiet.

• Someone who rarely interrupts starts cutting people off.

• A proactive colleague becomes noticeably passive.

• A confident voice turns hesitant.

These shifts often signal underlying emotions like uncertainty, frustration, disengagement or concern.

That’s your cue as a leader to pause and reassess.

When you sense something is off, ask. Invite people to share their perspective. Encourage disagreement. The goal isn’t to remove differing views, it’s to surface them in a way that feels safe and constructive.

Better information leads to better decisions.

And the real value lies in what you do with it.

You adjust. You pivot. You change your tone, your pace, sometimes even your plan. You let the room guide how you lead.

Because your role isn’t just to deliver a message or land a presentation. It’s to understand what’s happening around you while you do it.

That requires curiosity, observation and a bit of humility, especially the willingness to check your assumptions before acting on them.

The power of feeling understood

Most leaders are very clear on what they want to get out of a presentation or conversation. They focus on efficiency and delivery. Joshua certainly did. But that same focus can become a blind spot. It can stop you seeing what others need from the interaction.

Strategy sets direction, but relationships determine whether anyone follows.

When people feel understood, they respond with greater trust, motivation and engagement. In other words, performance doesn’t just come from clarity of message, it comes from the quality of the interaction itself.

Leaders who develop interpersonal awareness do something subtle but powerful. They pick up on emotional signals others miss. They create a sense of being seen. And that changes how people show up.

Because people don’t just commit to what they understand, they commit to how they are made to feel.

How often do people around you leave an interaction feeling truly seen, rather than simply informed?

Subscribe now

Last week, I met up for drinks with some former colleagues I hadn’t seen in years, the evening quickly turned into a highlight reel of memories, some hilarious, some heartwarming. And one story, in particular, has stayed with me.

One of my former colleagues was recalling her early days on the team, fresh out of university and stepping into her first role. Just a few weeks in, she made a mistake with some data used in an analysis. As you’d expect, she panicked. She was visibly upset, worried about what it meant and what might come next.

Her manager’s response?

“It’s just data.”

Simple. Calm. Reassuring.

And yet, those three words have stayed with her ever since.

Sometimes, the smallest phrases carry the greatest weight.

Words Carry More Than Meaning

In consultancy, it’s never just data. Everything we build, every insight we share, every story we tell depends on it. Get that wrong and things can unravel quickly, with unhappy clients and awkward conversations.

In that moment, many managers would have focused on the data issue, even if to turn it into a lesson.

But not this manager.

She chose to focus on the person, not the problem.

Her graduate was clearly feeling the weight of that mistake on her shoulders. And her manager recognised that what mattered most wasn’t the data, it was the confidence of someone at the very start of their career.

With just a few words, you can build someone’s confidence or quietly erode it, create trust or make it that much harder to build in the future. In moments like these, the stakes are higher than we think.

Words are never just words; they are filtered through the listener’s world.

The Science of Interpretation

Language from leaders is one of the biggest drivers of psychological safety, and yet it’s something we don’t talk about nearly enough. As a leader, your words don’t land at face value, they land with impact. Once they’re out, there’s no edit button.

The more senior you are, the more your words are amplified. Casual comments can carry unintended weight. Even silence says something, often louder than we realise.

The ladder of inference is a model showing how people don’t just hear words, but interpret, assume and draw conclusions, often unconsciously. It shows how quickly we jump from what we hear to what we believe, filling in the gaps with our own assumptions. You might think you’re pushing someone to improve. They might walk away thinking they’re not capable.

A simple comment can quickly turn into a personal belief, I’m not good enough.

Words aren’t neutral. They carry intent, but also interpretation. What we say is not always what people hear. Interpretation is shaped by experience, context, confidence levels and, in leadership, power dynamics too.

To make things even more interesting, humans are wired with a negativity bias. We remember negative comments far more strongly than positive ones. One careless phrase can outweigh a dozen encouraging ones, which feels slightly unfair, but here we are.

Small Shifts, Big Difference

What science is telling us is that there’s a powerful gap between intent and impact. Most leaders have good intent, but people experience impact, not intent.

The framing effect is a cognitive bias that shows that the way information is presented can change how people respond, even when the underlying facts are identical. Essentially, how we frame our message can alter people’s responses.

“This needs fixing” vs. “This is a great start, let’s refine it”

Same message, very different experience. One feels like a red flag, the other like a nudge in the right direction.

The language we use matters, and language often follows mindset. If we shift how we think, we naturally shift how we speak.

Take judgement, for example, a common reaction when reviewing someone’s work. Something feels off, something isn’t quite there yet. The instinct might be to point it out.

So what happens if you swap judgement for curiosity?

That small shift changes everything, including your words:

This isn’t where it needs to be. → Let’s walk through this together.
This needs improvement. → What would make this stronger?
Why did you do this? → Can you talk me through your thinking?

It’s a subtle shift, but it lands very differently.

It’s not about overthinking every sentence, but about making small, conscious adjustments in how you see a situation first, and then how you speak to it. When you shift the frame, your language naturally follows. And this isn’t limited to moments of feedback, it’s available to you in every interaction.

Here are some common situations where changing your perspective first can naturally shift the words you choose:

Curiosity over Judgement
Reframing judgement as curiosity encourages you to ask questions and explore possibilities, shaping your words to invite dialogue rather than point out faults.

Context over Conclusions
Focusing on context helps you understand the reasons behind someone’s actions before forming conclusions, allowing your message to convey understanding instead of assumptions.

Clarity over Cleverness
Prioritising clarity ensures your words are straightforward and actionable, guiding your team rather than confusing or impressing with clever phrasing.

Questions over Assumptions
Choosing questions over assumptions prompts you to seek explanations, shaping your language to show openness and avoid misjudging intentions.

Guidance over Criticism
Framing feedback as guidance directs your words towards next steps and solutions, rather than highlighting faults, making your message constructive.

Progress over Perfection
Emphasising progress celebrates learning and forward movement, framing your words to encourage effort rather than focusing on flaws.

Recognition over Silence
Acknowledging effort and achievement ensures your words reinforce confidence and safety, shaping a message that your team’s contributions are valued.

These are small adjustments, but they make it far more likely that intent and impact actually line up. Tiny shifts in language can completely change how a message lands. A few thoughtful words can turn a moment of doubt into a moment of learning, a moment of fear into a moment of confidence. They help ensure that what you mean to say is actually what the other person hears.

In leadership, that alignment is everything, because it’s not just about delivering information, it’s about shaping how people feel, how they grow and how much they trust you along the way.

The Lasting Power of Words

Small phrases stick. They can linger far longer than we ever realise. When someone makes a mistake and their manager responds with “It’s just data”, it sends a powerful signal, you’re safe, I’ve got your back, we’ll figure this out together. That is psychological safety in action.

Every word you choose sends a signal about what’s valued, what’s safe and what kind of culture you want on your team. The right phrase can build confidence, inspire trust and encourage people to take ownership and grow. The wrong one can quietly erode all of that.

Because in the end, words matter more than you think.

So the next time you’re about to communicate, ask yourself: what’s the impact I want this to have? How can I reframe this situation so my words reflect that intent?

Subscribe now

My home football team was relegated over a decade ago. Since then, things have gone from bad to worse. This year they might go down again. Muted despair would probably be a fair description of the mood of supporters.

Then, just when hope was fading, the club appointed a new manager, David Navarro.

His approach has not involved complicated tactics or grand promises. Instead, he has focused on rebuilding the team’s mental strength. He reframed the situation from we can’t afford to lose to we need seven victories. Simple, clear and far more energising. The emphasis has been on teamwork, belief and taking things one step at a time.

The team won their first couple of games in weeks, and something shifted in the stadium. People started singing again, cheering instead of booing. For the first time in a while it genuinely felt like hope had returned, and with it, energy.

One thing Navarro said to the players and supporters has stayed with me:

“Falling into the water isn’t the problem. Staying under it is.”

It is not bad advice for football teams, or for leadership.

Resilience in Business

Resilience has become one of the most important leadership skills of our time. Many teams are operating in a state of near-constant uncertainty, what some commentators have started calling a permacrisis.

And yet many organisations are not investing enough time in building it. Research from McKinsey found that eighty-four percent of leaders feel underprepared for future disruptions, while sixty percent of board members believe their companies are not ready for the next major shock.

At its core, resilience is the ability to absorb shocks, adapt and keep moving forward. It is not blind optimism, ignoring problems or simply toughing it out. Real resilience means adjusting strategy, learning from setbacks and recovering quickly. Research from IMD highlights it as one of the defining characteristics of high-performing leaders.

Resilience operates at two levels: how organisations are designed to withstand and adapt to shocks, and how people respond in the moment.

That second layer is where leadership plays a critical role. Leaders shape how teams respond to adversity, which is why emotional regulation matters so much. Teams tend to mirror their leaders emotionally. When leaders panic, teams panic. When leaders remain calm, teams think more clearly and act more decisively.

Importantly, resilience is not only about leaders strengthening themselves. It is also about protecting the energy of the people around them. Leadership is only sustainable when individuals and teams can consistently recover their energy after pressure or setbacks. It is a skill that can be developed and, as a leader, it is something you can actively cultivate in your team.

Three Practical Ways to Build Resilient Teams

Even with the best preparation, teams face cancellations, restructures or redundancies. The challenge for leaders is navigating those moments while keeping their teams focused and moving forward.

Here are three ways to do it.

1. Communicate honestly and clearly to keep trust alive

When challenges arise, your communication shapes how your team interprets the situation. The tone you set can dial up confidence and clarity or do the opposite.

Be open and honest about what is happening. Do not shy away from difficult messages. Most teams appreciate transparency because it creates a sense that we are facing this together.

Provide context so they understand what is happening, give people time to digest the news and encourage questions.

Sometimes managers try to protect their teams by carrying the weight alone. In doing so they forget that their team members are capable adults who can help shoulder the load.

Honesty does not mean delivering doom and gloom every time something goes wrong. Your goal is to maintain energy and momentum. Stay solution focused, invite contributions and direct attention towards what comes next.

Importantly, honest communication must flow both ways, downwards as well as upwards.

During the 2008 financial crisis, in Ford’s weekly Business Plan Review meetings, leaders were expected to flag problems openly. At first, everything was marked as green (no issues), even while the company’s survival was uncertain. Ford CEO Alan Mulally challenged this and actively welcomed bad news. When one executive finally marked a programme as red, instead of criticism, Mulally applauded the transparency and asked, “How can we help?” That moment reset the tone and became a powerful trust builder, showing that honesty was genuinely valued. Problems became something to solve together, not something to hide.

And when problems surface early, they can be solved early.

Resilient organisations do not just bounce back. They bounce forward.

2. Reframe setbacks to unlock opportunity

If part of your role is restoring energy in the team, negative language will not help much.

Reframing challenges means turning what feels like a setback into a platform for progress.

For example:

We lost someone talented. → This is an opportunity for someone else to step up.

Roles are changing after a restructure. → The new scope allows people to learn and build new skills.

We lost two contracted clients. → What have we learnt and what will we do differently next time?

Maintaining an upbeat spirit during uncertainty helps stabilise morale and keeps people engaged and focused instead of stuck in worry.

When David Navarro shifted the message from, we can’t afford to lose to we need seven victories, he moved the focus from pressure to possibility.

The same mindset applies in business.

Next time you get a project cancelled or you lose a major client, try opening the next meeting with a simple question: If we had to win this client back in six months, what would we do differently starting today? This conversation shifts immediately from disappointment to ownership

3. Learn fast, pivot smart

Strong leaders treat difficult moments as learning loops, not one-off events. They don’t just reflect after failure, they build simple systems that force reflection into the workflow.

They run short, structured reviews after key moments, asking three simple questions: What did we expect? What actually happened? What will we do differently next time? The goal is speed and clarity, not lengthy analysis.

Those insights allow teams to introduce new practices, avoid similar problems in the future and adapt to changing circumstances.

For example, many teams introduce 30-minute “after-action reviews” at the end of projects or major milestones. These are fast, focused sessions where the team reflects on what worked, what didn’t and what to improve next time. Some leaders also add a simple rule: no project is considered finished until a review has been completed and one process improvement has been agreed.

Learning only matters if it leads to action.

Over time, this creates a habit where teams expect to learn from every outcome, not just the successful ones, and adjust their behaviour accordingly rather than repeating the same mistakes.

Rising After the Fall

Challenges, setbacks and uncertainty are part of life, whether on the football pitch or in business.

Many leaders grow stronger precisely because they have faced failure or crisis. Those experiences forge resilience.

As Navarro puts it Falling into the water isn’t the problem. Staying under it is.

Success is rarely about avoiding adversity altogether. More often it comes from knowing how to respond, regroup and keep moving.

The real skill is not simply surviving the moment. It is emerging from it with renewed energy.

So ask yourself: is your team built to withstand pressure or only to perform when things go smoothly?

Subscribe now

We all like to think our team meetings are open, honest and brimming with brilliant ideas. But the data tells a rather different story. Around 60% of employees have held back an idea or concern at work in the last year because they feared negative repercussions, and only 45% of employees believe their manager consistently creates an environment where they feel safe to speak up.

That gap between perception and reality isn’t just a minor embarrassment. It’s a serious organisational blind spot. We talk a good game about psychological safety, collaboration and creative input, but unless we actively facilitate spaces where people genuinely feel comfortable contributing, those good intentions remain… well, intentions.

Enter constructive facilitation: the skill of consciously creating the conditions for great ideas, especially from the quieter voices, to surface, get heard and drive better outcomes.

This article is the first collaboration between and . Together we will dive into what constructive facilitation really is, why it matters more than ever, and how leaders can put it into practice.

The Case for Constructive Facilitation

When leaders invite contributions, it’s remarkable how often we hear from… the usual suspects. The confident few. The quick thinkers. The ones already halfway through their second sentence while everyone else is still locating the unmute button.

Silence, meanwhile, is dangerously easy to misread. It does not automatically mean alignment. It can mean uncertainty. Or hesitation. Or someone quietly calculating the social risk of disagreeing with the most senior person in the room.

Once a strong view has been expressed, especially by someone senior, challenging it can feel socially daunting.

And so valuable insight hides behind a polite nod.

[I experienced this firsthand during a retrospective after a long campaign rollout with a pharma client. The atmosphere was tense. The client had the floor almost entirely, and what started as a debrief quickly turned into a one-directional download of feedback. I suggested we pause and collect input in writing first, using a shared Miro board, so that the people who weren’t speaking could contribute too. The client wasn’t comfortable with it at first. But by the end, the energy in the room had shifted. And the content — the actual substance of what people shared — was far more constructive than anything that had emerged in the first half of the meeting.]

Some people simply find contributing in groups harder. They may be reflective rather than reactive. They may need a moment to think before they speak. They may not enjoy interrupting. They may also be sitting on the most thoughtful contribution in the room.

Constructive facilitation isn’t about turning quiet people into extroverts. It’s about designing the conversation so different personalities can contribute without having to fight for airtime. Without constructive facilitation, personality dynamics override intelligence.

Constructive facilitation is the intentional practice of creating the psychological, structural and relational conditions that enable people to think well together. It’s about intentional inclusion.

The following approaches will help you elevate the collective thinking far beyond what any one individual, however brilliant, could generate alone.

1. Give Time for Individual Thinking

Before opening the discussion, pause, and give people a few minutes to reflect. This small shift levels the playing field between fast processors and deep thinkers. You’ll get fewer off-the-cuff reactions and more considered insight. And your quieter colleagues will arrive in the discussion already prepared to contribute.

In Facilitating with Ease!, Ingrid Bens strongly advocates using structured processes, including silent idea generation and written input before open discussion. Her rationale is that structure reduces dominance by more vocal participants, increases participation equity, prevents early anchoring and improves the quantity and quality of ideas.

2. Separate Idea Generation from Evaluation

Brainstorm first. Critique second.

Be explicit about this distinction. Say it out loud: we’re generating ideas now, no evaluation yet. When people know their ideas won’t be immediately dissected, they’re far more willing to share them. Early criticism has a remarkable ability to suffocate promising thinking before it has had the chance to breathe.

Divergent thinking first. Convergent thinking later. In that order.

3. Prevent Early Anchoring

Encourage everyone to speak once before anyone speaks twice. It sounds simple, but it’s powerful. Once a decision begins to solidify, the window for genuine input narrows dramatically. What looks like efficiency can actually be exclusion.

When a strong view is expressed early, others may unconsciously align with it. Not necessarily because they agree, but because it feels easier than disrupting the flow. Before long, what appears to be consensus may simply be compliance.

True teamwork draws strength from diversity: personality, experience, values and perspective. But diversity only improves decisions if it is heard.

Your role as a leader is not to dominate the conversation. It is to design it.

4. Favour Questions Over Opinions

People interpret reality differently. Our purpose is to examine assumptions and surface hidden beliefs and insights, in a way that encourages participation from everyone. These questions do precisely that:

1. What assumptions are we making?

2. What perspectives have we not considered?

3. What might we be missing?

4. What would make this fail?

Notice what these questions do. They don’t put individuals on the spot. They don’t demand opposition. Instead, they invite exploration and normalise productive dissent. They create permission, even encouragement, to introduce alternative views without appearing awkward, confrontational or out of step.

That subtle shift in language matters. And once you’ve asked the question, pause. Allow the silence. Resist the urge to rescue everyone from it. Give people time to think. What emerges in those quiet moments is often the most thoughtful contribution in the room. More often than not, that’s where stronger decisions, sharper ideas and genuine innovation begin. Because growth usually sits in the uncomfortable.

The Leadership Shift

Workplace discussions are often filled with unspoken concerns, quiet doubts and thoughtful perspectives that never quite make it into the conversation, not because they lack value, but because someone isn’t entirely confident enough to voice them. Yet these are precisely the contributions that stretch collective thinking, spark creativity and innovation, and ultimately lead to better decisions.

Left unspoken, they quietly limit us. Brought into the room, they move us forward.

Challenge, growth and fresh thinking don’t always politely announce themselves. Leaders sometimes need to go looking for it. And that’s what constructive facilitation is all about. It isn’t about having the best answers. It’s about ensuring the best thinking makes it into the room. It’s not a technique. It is a leadership stance.

How much of what you call “team alignment” is actually just silence that nobody has found the courage to break yet?

Subscribe now

Lately, I’ve caught myself moaning, with increasing frequency, about my mental workload.

My husband, to be fair, regularly offers to help. A solid, decent offer. And yet… I somehow struggle to identify anything suitable to hand over.

If he takes charge of booking the after-school clubs, will it be done promptly? (By promptly, I of course mean with the same military precision I apply.) What if the boys don’t get their preferred clubs?

If he manages the household bills, can I truly picture him comparing tariffs with the determination of someone on a one-woman mission to outsmart the energy companies?

And so, the list rolls on, impressively detailed and entirely self-inflicted.

Which begs the question: is this a workload issue or a trust issue dressed up as efficiency?

You see the problem.

The Hidden Cost of Not Trusting

In leadership, when we talk about trust, it’s usually about how to earn it. How to be authentic, supportive, dependable; how to create psychological safety and build credibility.

All important.

But there’s a slightly uncomfortable question we don’t ask often enough:

What if the real issue is that we don’t trust them?

That’s where it gets awkward. Because we can’t rewire someone else’s personality. We can’t control their behaviour. And if something is niggling at us, trust can quietly erode from the inside out.

Here’s what that tends to look like in practice:

• We just quickly redo someone’s work.

• We sit in meetings we don’t really need to attend.

• We hesitate to delegate the meaty projects.

• We tell ourselves the team isn’t quite ready yet.

And before long, we’re overworked, at full stretch, and wondering why we’re still reviewing decks at 10pm.

A lack of trust is expensive.

It costs time, energy, growth, and often morale.

So instead of focusing only on being trusted, what if we worked on becoming better at trusting?

The TRUST Model

A practical way to build trust in others through five steps:

• T: Triggers

• R: Reflection

• U: Understanding

• S: Skills

• T: Target

Simple. Memorable. And surprisingly powerful.

T: Triggers

First, identify what’s actually setting off your lack of trust.

Sometimes it’s internal:

• If I delegate this, I’ll lose control.

• It won’t be done the way I’d do it.

Sometimes it’s about capability:

• I’m not sure they have the skills.

• They’re not experienced enough.

Name the trigger plainly. Vague unease is hard to solve. A clearly labelled concern is much easier to work with.

You can’t address what you haven’t identified.

R: Reflection

Once you’ve spotted the trigger, challenge it.

A powerful question is:

Is this fact, or is it my interpretation?

Be honest. If a neutral observer (your manager, a trusted colleague) looked at the same situation, would they reach the same conclusion?

If it is interpretation, follow it with:

What else might also be true?

For example:

“My concern is the quality of the work won’t meet my standard.”

If that’s my interpretation, the following could also be true:

“The work could be done differently and still be entirely successful. Different could actually mean innovative.”

Reflection creates space between instinct and action. And that’s where better leadership decisions tend to live.

U: Understanding

If, after reflection, there is a genuine gap, seek to understand it properly.

Have a conversation to explore their perspective and clarify expectations.

Sometimes what looks like incompetence is actually ambiguity. What looks like carelessness is misaligned priorities. What looks like disengagement is lack of context.

Other times, these conversations will expose a genuine capability gap, which simply informs your next steps and the support they need from you.

Either way, practising understanding pinpoints the real issue and stops you solving the wrong problem.

S: Skills

If there is a skills gap, excellent. That’s solvable. Training. Coaching. Shadowing. Clearer feedback.

Leadership is a long game. Developing capability now reduces friction later. Investing in developing their skills pays dividends in autonomy and confidence.

And let’s be honest: if we never let people stretch, they never grow. And then we quietly confirm our own belief that they’re not ready.

When the challenge is a skills gap, it won’t be resolved overnight. But putting the right support in place is the first step towards reinforcing trust.

T: Target

Finally, reframe the target.

Many trust issues stem from confusing process with outcome.

We fixate on the right way to do something, usually meaning our way, and expect others to follow suit. Instead, shift the focus to the end result.

Be crystal clear about:

• The outcome required

• The purpose behind it

• The constraints that matter

Then give them the freedom to decide how to get there. The journey is where experimentation and learning happen. They may reach the goal via a completely different route than you would have taken and still arrive successfully.

In fact, they might even improve on your version.

Let your team surprise you.

Rethinking Trust

At work, we often assume control is safer than collaboration. We prioritise efficiency over empowerment.

What we need is a shift that is not just simple in principle but powerful in practice: moving from controlling to trusting, from doing it myself to allowing others to shine.

Just as letting my husband take the reins at home can save me mental bandwidth and even produce surprisingly good results, letting your team take ownership at work builds capability, confidence and clarity and frees you up to lead where you are truly needed.

Trust, then, is not just a nice to have. It is the bridge between overwork and effective leadership, whether at home, in the office or anywhere in between.

Subscribe now

The Easter holidays are upon us, at least for those of us living in the UK. I’m about to have my children at home for a couple of weeks, and I’m planning to switch off from my writing and spend some proper quality time with them. I say planning, because I know my brain, and I know myself. Switching off sounds dreamy, but for some of us, it’s surprisingly hard to pull off.

So today, I want to focus on why switching off really matters, even when it doesn’t come naturally, and share a few practical ways to make it easier. This article is as much a note to self as it is something I’m sharing with others.

The Impact of Switching Off on Brain Health

Let’s start with a bit of science. When we’re constantly “on”, our brain stays in task-execution mode. That’s useful for getting things done, but it’s also mentally expensive. Prolonged periods of being “on” increase stress hormones, narrow our attention and drain our energy.

Switching off properly, not just half-scrolling through emails, allows our nervous system to settle, reduces cognitive load and restores emotional balance. It helps us reset.

We should think of it as maintenance, not absence. Consider it an MOT for your brain.

Switching off from work isn’t self-indulgence; it’s an act of care that allows our brain to do its job properly. And it shouldn’t be reserved for holidays alone. It’s something we need to practise in the evenings, at weekends and in the small gaps between everything else.

It’s also not just about protecting our brains. It’s about having quality time with our families, our friends and ourselves. It’s about hobbies, exercise, rest and keeping stress levels in check. In short, it’s about wellbeing.

Why Mental Space Fuels Creativity

Mental space gives the brain time to process, not just perform. When you pause, the brain shifts from focused effort to what neuroscientists call the default mode network. This is where reflection, sense-making and emotional regulation happen.

Without this reset, we become reactive rather than thoughtful; more likely to rush decisions, miss detail and feel overwhelmed by relatively small things.

This has a direct impact on creativity.

Creativity thrives in the gaps. Many of our best ideas don’t arrive while staring at a screen; they turn up in the shower, on a walk or while doing something entirely unrelated. That’s because creativity depends on making unexpected connections, and those connections form more easily when the mind is relaxed and wandering.

A few ideas worth sitting with:

• Burnout reduces creative capacity; recovery restores it.

• Overworked brains favour safe, familiar ideas; rested brains take smarter risks.

• Space allows ideas to combine, not just accumulate.

Re-read those points if you need to, it’s worth it.

They’re a solid reminder that your brain needs downtime.

So now the question becomes: how do we actually do it?

Five Practical Tips to Help You Switch Off

Maybe you’re busy and there’s always one more thing to do. Maybe you feel a quiet sense of guilt when you’re not being productive. Or maybe you’ve got used to being always on, available, responsive, and just a message away.

Over time, that constant background noise of activity becomes the norm. And even when you do step away, your mind doesn’t always get the memo.

The good news is that switching off is a skill, and like any skill, it can be practised. Here are a few simple ways to start:

1. Leave yourself a handover
   Before you stop work, write a short note to your future self: priorities, updates or a simple to-do list. It reassures your brain that everything is safely parked (in case your break is so good you forget it all).

   Think of it as closing the loop, so your mind doesn’t keep trying to do it for you later.

2. Create physical distance from work tech
   If your laptop is within reach, it’s far too easy to quickly check one thing. Put devices away and remove the temptation altogether.

   Out of sight doesn’t mean out of mind, but it does make switching off a lot easier.

3. Change your state
   Signal to your nervous system that work is over. Go for a walk, step outside, shower, cook; anything that helps you switch gears.

   And mentally, try a reframe: you’re not stepping away from something important, you’re stepping into something that matters too. Your time off isn’t a gap between work, it’s part of what makes work sustainable.

4. Let yourself be unreachable (and protect it)
   Set an out-of-office or whatever communication you need to make your boundaries clear. Treat this time with the same respect you give meetings and deadlines.

   If you wouldn’t casually cancel a meeting, don’t casually give this time away either.

5. Get thoughts out of your head
   If your mind keeps replaying tasks, write them down. Once they’re safely captured, choose something that gently holds your attention: reading, a podcast or in my case, playing with my children (not exactly gentle, but very effective).

   Your brain is less interested in solving everything than it is in knowing it won’t be forgotten.

You can use these tips after work, at weekends or during holidays. They work for switching off from work, social media or anything else that’s taking over your headspace. They’re simple, but not always easy. Start small. Even 30 minutes of proper switching off each day adds up.

The Paradox

Stepping away from work often makes you better at it. Rest isn’t time lost, it’s where insight, originality and sustainable performance come from.

And as leaders, there’s something more to it. The way we rest (or don’t) quietly sets the standard for our teams. When we properly switch off, we give others permission to do the same, without guilt, without second-guessing.

Holidays give us permission to switch off because they come with a different purpose. That might be visiting family, travelling somewhere new or finally catching up with friends.

Mine is simple: being present with my kids and playing like I’m five again.

What’s yours?

P.S. I’m pausing the Monday articles for the next couple of weeks, but I’ll still be here sharing thoughts and ideas as they come. Enjoy the time off if you have it, and best of luck if you’re juggling work and childcare.

Subscribe now