Dear Reader, Every leader has conversations happening inside their own mind long before they speak to anyone else. These conversations shape: How they make decisions, How they communicate, How they respond under pressure, How safe people feel around them, and ultimately The culture they create Yet, most leadership development focuses almost entirely on external skills, that is, strategy, communication, execution, and influence, while paying very little attention to the internal voices that...
about 2 months agoย โขย 10 min read
Dear Reader, Most of the strategy execution failures I have worked with are, at their root, Translation Failures. The leadership team may have a clear and shared understanding of the direction, but that understanding has not been translated into something the different teams can actually follow. But solving it requires something different from a better implementation framework. It requires the leadership team to do the work of genuinely inhabiting the strategy, to be able to speak to it, live...
4 months agoย โขย 5 min read
Dear Reader, There is a line I return to often in my work with senior leadership teams: What leadership cannot hold does not disappear. It gets carried by the people below the leadership line. Always. You may already feel this in your organisation, not in the performance numbers, which are broadly fine, but in something harder to name. A heaviness. A tiredness in capable people that the results do not explain. A sense that the organisation is working harder than it should have to, to produce...
4 months agoย โขย 2 min read
Dear Reader, When I tell people I am a medical anthropologist who works with executive leaders and organisations, the response is usually one of two things. The first is curiosity, a sense that these things should not go together, but something in the combination is intriguing. The second is polite confusion. What does anthropology have to do with leadership? The Answer is: Everything. And the gap between what anthropological training sees in an organization and what standard leadership...
4 months agoย โขย 3 min read
Dear Reader, There is a particular kind of leader this article is for. From the outside, your life may look functional - even successful. Youโve built capability, insight, and a level of awareness that others often come to you for. You understand complexity. You think deeply. You hold nuance. And yet, internally, something does not match. There is a quiet, persistent tension: A sense that who you are and how you are living, leading, and earning are not fully aligned. Not because you lack...
5 months agoย โขย 4 min read
Dear Reader, I was once punished when I didn't perform by fawning over visitors we had at a past workplace, like everyone else did. Let me start by prefacing this... In twenty-five years of working with organisations across four continents, I have watched the following same pattern repeat with remarkable consistency: January: the initiative launches. A new set of values. A culture transformation program. A commitment to psychological safety, innovation, or inclusive leadership. There is...
5 months agoย โขย 4 min read
Dear Reader, Most leadership presence training focuses on the external. That is, the Voice, Posture, Eye contact. Executive presence is taken to be a set of behaviors to be acquired and performed. I get that, and it works. But it is not sustainable. It takes effort and energy, especially if you are following a set of rules and regulations that you were taught or told. This is where my coaching, teaching and guiding is different. The leaders who I work with, the ones who want to and who are...
5 months agoย โขย 4 min read
Dear Reader, There is a particular kind of leader who never seems rattled. Who responds to every crisis with composure. Who, when asked how they are doing, says: fine. Busy, but fine. Organisations tend to reward this leader. They are promoted. They are held up as models of strength. Their capacity to absorb pressure without visible distress is read as capability. But in my experience, the leader who is always okay is often the most significant source of cultural damage in an organisation,...
5 months agoย โขย 2 min read
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 wasnโt 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...
5 months agoย โขย 5 min read