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...
16 days 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...
23 days 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...
27 days 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...
30 days 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...
about 1 month 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,...
about 1 month 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...
about 2 months agoย โขย 5 min read
Dear Reader, When I begin working with a new organisation, there are things I am watching for before I have had a single formal conversation. Not the strategy documents. Not the org chart. Not the culture survey results or the engagement scores. I am watching how people move. Who waits for whom. What happens in the moment before a senior leader enters the room. Whether people finish their sentences when they are speaking to someone above them in the hierarchy, or whether they watch the senior...
about 2 months agoย โขย 2 min read
Dear Reader, I have worked with organizations and institutions across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Eswatini, Indonesia, the UK, the United States, and across the regional networks of international development, finance, health, and social enterprise. I have sat with CEOs in glass-walled boardrooms and with community health workers in rural clinics. I have coached leaders at the beginning of their careers and in the last years before retirement. And across all of it, all the cultural variation, all...
2 months agoย โขย 3 min read