Dear Reader,

One of the things that fascinated me as a young professional decades ago, was how organizations would spend so much money on taking their leaders out of town, to spend days working on their next 5 to 10 year strategy.

It wasn’t the action of doing so that fascinated me, but the sheer disregard of the time, cost and energy that this collectively bore, only for the strategies to not be put into effect once everyone was back in the office.

This was not to say that the strategies they developed were not excellent. They genuinely were rigorous, clear and ambitious without being delusional to the point. The results of these strategies, when put into action, would be positively exponential for not only the leaders and the organization as a whole, but clients, customers, business partners and all other stakeholders. Leaders leave the sessions energized, and ready for the results.

Here was and is the challenge

• Six months later, nothing moves.
• Not because the strategy was wrong.
• Not because the team lacked capability.

But because the moment they returned to their organisation, they walked back into a culture that the strategy had never accounted for, a culture shaped not by their stated values, but by the unspoken rules of how decisions actually got made, how conflict was actually handled, and what actually happened to people who challenged the status quo.

• The strategy lived in the document.
• The culture lived in the building.
• And as you know, culture always wins.

Culture, which as been unfortunately mis-defined over time, is literally the build-up of How you do what you do, as an organization, as a leader, and as an individual. The consistent accumulation of how you do (or not do) what you do, over time, becomes the culture.

In short, the organizational values, embedded in your everyday actions, activities, behaviors and habits...over time...become what we then see and experience as team or organizational culture.

What is missing in a lot of offsite strategy sessions is that the leaders themselves, are the main proponents of a culture. Not in a dictatorial manner, because that is surface based, and growing evidence is showing us the top down way of leadership is not only archaic, but erodes your bottom line over time. But within their own internal makeup, basically who they really are beneath the facade of titles, roles and outer appearances.

A leader's internal make-up, affects how their team members do (or do not do) what they are supposed to, or not supposed to do. The more a leader knows who they are, not in competition to another person, and not to be an idealized version of themselves as expected of others, but their true self, the better able they are at creating psychologically safe environments for those they lead to step in, flourish and contribute at even higher levels.

The above image is the pattern I encounter most consistently in my work with executive teams. Not absence of vision. Not absence of capability. But a fundamental misalignment between:

1. The high energy of being offsite and having things clear on paper, with no implementation plan that is clear, focused, transferable and translatable to all areas of the business; and
2. The leadership behavior that the strategy requires and the leadership behavior that is actually present in the room / office / boardroom because of the internal makeup of the leaders.

And here is why this matters

You cannot close these gaps with a better planning process. You cannot close them with clearer communication. You cannot close them with more rigorous project management, more frequent check-ins, or a more detailed implementation framework.

You can only close it by addressing the leadership culture itself. Which means addressing how leaders think, how they relate, and how they make decisions when no one is watching, and what they unconsciously model for everyone below them in the organisation.

This is absolutely uncomfortable work, especially for those who heavily rely on the top down way of leadership, and or are not ready for that deeper introspection that goes below what most personal and professional development programs offer. Why?

Because it requires leaders to shift their attention from the external challenge, the market, the competition, the operational complexity (because these can be easily rectified with the right focus and attention) to the more complex internal one. This speaks to the question of what is it that is happening internally, at conscious, sub and superconscious levels, that is affecting and dictating how they are showing up. Not what they are saying. But HOW they are being.

In my experience, the most common reason this inner work does not happen is not resistance. It is that no one has framed the problem correctly. Leaders are told they have a strategy execution problem. They are given more tools, more processes, more frameworks. And the actual source of the blockage, causing a problematic outer culture, goes unexamined.

Socio-cultural and Medical anthropology gave me a way of seeing beneath the surface of organisational life that most leadership consultants do not have. Ethnographic training teaches you to look not at what people say but at what they do, but at the unspoken norms, the rituals of power, the stories that get told and the ones that never do. That lens, applied to an organisation, reveals the gap between stated culture and lived culture with uncomfortable precision. You can read more here on What I Look For When I Walk Into An Organization.​

A quick testimonial for work I did with an organization around wellness:

Summary - What I find, consistently, is this:

Organisations do not have a strategy problem. They have a leadership coherence problem. The strategy reflects what the leadership team aspires to. The culture reflects who they actually are. And the people in the organisation, far more perceptive than their leaders typically give them credit for, are responding to the latter, not the former.

Closing that gap is possible. But it requires something that most leadership development programs are not designed to deliver: genuine inner work. Not skills training. Not competency frameworks. The willingness to examine how you lead, not only what you do.

That is where the real strategy work begins.

The work I do focuses on both the inner and the outer strategy in equal measure. One influences the other intertwined in sometimes unclear ways. I am trained, qualified and have +2 decades of experience seeing and feeling beneath the surface of your titles, roles and actions.

1. Where are you with your outer strategy? Is it clear, focused and actionable from paper to practice? If not, I help you create Actionable Strategies that granularly focuses your strategies with precision; then from there, makes them easily transferable and translatable to all your departments, teams and each team member. Read more here for how I can support your organization with creating strategies that have clear implementation plans, including how values can be used effectively to start the journey of creating a culture aligned to where you need to be.
2. Where are you with your inner architecture / makeup as a Leader? Does it match the level of your goals and visions? Or is acting like a stop gap to your progress? If you are finding that even with a clear, actionable strategy, you are still lagging behind on your team, departmental or organizational goals and visions, let me know. Let's chat. The Conscious Leadership Lead from Within program is something that would be efficiently and effectively conducive for the path you want to go on.

In the meantime, I have three specific offerings available through March, April, and May 2026: If you refer someone who books a paid engagement, I would like to thank you with a complimentary coaching or advisory session:

• 60 minutes if they book in March 2026
• 40 minutes in April 2026
• 20 minutes in May 2026.

Thank you for taking a moment to think of who in your world might need this. It means more than I can say. Click here for the attachment that you can share with your network.

Speak soon!​​

With loving kindness, grace and gratitude,