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11 September 2026

Why the work keeps coming back

Four minutes of my time would have saved them a day. I said nothing.

I handed over a piece of work I was doing myself the month before. I had recently become their leader, which made it worse.I knew the work. I knew which parts were fiddly and which ones only looked hard.So I sat on my hands.The discipline I set myself was to give them what the outcome needed to be and why it mattered. Nothing about how.That is harder than it sounds when you were doing the work yourself, because every instinct you have is telling you that you are being unhelpful.The moment I tell someone how, the work stops being theirs.They are not doing their work any more. They are running my method, and when something goes wrong, and it often does, they bring it back to me.It has nothing to do with their confidence or skill. When I told them how to do it, I made that decision for them, and I kept hold of it. So when it goes wrong, fixing it falls to me. They know that, and so do I.This is usually what is going on when someone says delegating does not work for them. You show them how because you want them to succeed, the decision comes back to you anyway, and you conclude they were not ready.Then you hand the next thing to someone else and do exactly the same.The person was probably fine. They were never given room to do the work their own way, and without that room there is only your method with someone else's hands on it.They need one more thing besides room, and it is the one left out most often. They have to know what they can spend, what they can use, and whose time they can call on without asking you first.Leave that out and they have to come back to you. It looks like they cannot make a decision. They were never given one to make.How it gets done belongs to whoever is doing it. That is what makes the work theirs.It feels like helping, and in the moment it is. The four minutes really would have saved them a day. It also teaches them to bring it to you. Answer the question once and it comes back every time.Try it this week. Not on everything. Just one piece of work.

When they come back, ask whether the outcome was met. Not whether they got there the way you would have.For me, not jumping in and doing it myself was the hard part. Once I let it go I got on with work that was actually mine, and they did theirs well, with skills that are different to mine. We got the outcome, and they kept doing it after that.What comes back will not look like your version. That is the point.

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5 August 2026

What a culture problem usually is

The problem has gone on too long, and the instinct is to fix the culture.

Workshops. Values exercises. Team days. A new framework on a poster.It almost never holds.Culture is not a programme. It is what two other things produce.How leaders behave every day, especially under pressure. And how the system is designed.A direct report brings a concern to their leader. The leader's first move is to ask why it was not flagged sooner. The next concern does not get raised.A decision lands in the exec meeting. By the end of the week it has quietly come undone in sidebar conversations. Half the team are now out of the loop. They learn the meeting is not where decisions actually get settled.Culture programmes do not fix either of those things. System design does.A decision that holds the shape it was made in. A team walking out of the room knowing what was agreed and being held to it. A leader who hears a raised concern without asking why it was not raised sooner.When those change, the behaviour changes. So does the culture.None of it is mysterious. It is the system design work that does not get scheduled.
What stops this kind of design work from getting scheduled?

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22 July 2026

The same stuff, everywhere

No organisation is uniquely broken.

Years ago my mentors told me the same thing: go anywhere you like, you'll find the same stuff. I didn't doubt them. I needed my own evidence.My work over the last few years gave me plenty. Work handed out with nobody quite sure what the task actually was. Functions sitting side by side, operating like strangers. Trust running thin between people who depend on each other daily.Different organisations, different people. The same stuff.The repetition is the useful part.You're not solving a mystery. You're recognising a pattern.And the three problems are really one. How tasks are set, how functions connect and how trust holds are not separate faults. They rise and fall together. When all three hold, an organisation starts to run like one organisation. That's coherence. When they don't, the place is harder to run than it should be.What problem did you assume was unique to your place, until you saw it somewhere else?

Originally published on LinkedIn, 22 July 2026.

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16 June 2026

Coherence is the absence of visible saves

I have worked in places where, from the outside, almost nothing seemed to go wrong.

At the time I put it down to good people and hard work. Years later, once I had the language of systems leadership, I could look back and see what had really been holding it together.One situation that I've been reflecting on lately was a large-scale event. My part was not the whole operation. Some of what I held was the communication and the relationships between the people running it on the ground and the people they answered to. Things still went wrong, the way they always do on something that size. But because those pathways existed, most of it was caught and settled before it became anything.At the time it simply felt like it all running smoothly. With the language for it, I could finally name what it was: a system quietly designed so that very little ever needed saving.That is what coherence looks like from the outside. Not heroics. The absence of them.Most of us are trained to notice and reward the visible save. The person who pulled the late night, caught the error, held the line. We rarely reward the quieter thing: the design that meant the save was never needed.When your organisation runs calmly, do you read it as a system working, or as a system with nothing left to manage?

Originally published on LinkedIn, 16 June 2026.

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3 June 2026

Four types of change

Most organisations decide how big a change is before they have looked at what the work actually needs.

The size and scale get named early. One person calls it a transformation. Another calls it a small fix. The word lands, expectations form around it, and the work gets shaped to the word instead of the conditions.In my experience there are four types.An adjustment is contained. You change who signs off a decision so it stops bottlenecking, or tighten a handover between two team members that keeps dropping work. The system around it stays as it is.An improvement lifts how the work is done inside a system that still holds. A finance team process redesigned so it runs measurably faster. Month end closes more cleanly.A change means a function runs differently once the work is finished. Customers stop chasing, re-explaining and following up on things that should have worked first time. The extra cost a service creates by failing customers falls away. Decision rights move, roles and teams get clear on how they work together, the behaviour that builds trust is agreed, and the governance rhythm shifts. The service is recognisably not the one you started with.A transformation redesigns several parts at once, so the whole organisation, or a core service, turns its intent into delivery in a different way. Eight functions that used to hand work off to each other, or lose a customer query down a black hole, become one way of working built around the customer rather than the org chart. Or a service rebuilt for a group that barely existed when it was designed, because the people it serves have shifted underneath it.None of this happens on a clear desk.The organisation is still delivering everything it already delivers while the change is underway. The team redesigning the service is often also the one running it. That load is the part most often left out when the size of the change is set from a brief rather than from the conditions.Get the size wrong and it shows within months. Nothing really shifts.The work worth doing before the change starts is discovery. Reading the conditions before the size is set, so the change is matched to what the organisation can carry, and to the demand the service is actually facing.What does the change in front of you actually need, and can the organisation carry it while it keeps delivering everything else?

Originally published on LinkedIn, 3 June 2026.

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26 May 2026

A tool has no coherence of its own

AI won't fix an organisation that's hard to run. It'll just make it hard to run faster.

A tool doesn't bring any coherence with it. It picks up whatever's already going on and speeds it up. Clear authority, decisions that stick, and you get more of that. Blurred ownership, meetings that decide nothing, and you get more of that too. Just quicker.I keep watching leaders reach for the tool first. New platform, new system, now AI.The thing underneath doesn't change, so the tool runs the same mess at volume.It was never going to tell you who owns the call. Or where the work falls over between teams. That part is yours.Faster isn't better if the thing you're speeding up doesn't work.

Originally published on LinkedIn, 26 May 2026.

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21 May 2026

Culture isn't an accountability

I once wrote a healthy, positive culture into a team's shared accountabilities.

It sat there alongside the real deliverables, looking like I had addressed culture.I hadn't. I had written down a wish.You can hold someone accountable for a piece of work they own. You cannot hold a team accountable for a culture by listing it. Culture is not something anyone delivers. It is what the way of working produces.The line changed nothing because it was the wrong instrument.Accountability holds people to outcomes they can act on. A healthy culture is not one of them. That is the result of how the work is designed, and of how the leader behaves. What they do becomes the standard the team reads as real. You cannot hold people to behaviour you will not model yourself.What culture actually needed was a different mechanism. An agreed way of working. The behaviours we expected of each other. And the part most leaders skip: how I would hold you to them when they slipped. That last part I did not decide for the team... I asked each person how they wanted me to do it.The accountability list felt like the place to put it. It was the place it could do the least.What sits in your team's accountabilities that no one could ever actually be held to?

Originally published on LinkedIn, 21 May 2026.

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28 April 2026

Defining work

Two people. Same role. Same task. Done completely differently.

Not because one is skilled and one isn't. Because nobody ever defined what the work actually requires.The function runs on individual interpretation. Whatever each person thinks the job is, that's what they do. Standards drift. Quality varies. Leaders end up managing inconsistency they didn't design and can't easily name.Defining work sounds basic. Sounds like something we all have in place in our teams. It's not. And it's not a job description. It's a shared understanding of what the work is, what good looks like, what the standard is when no one is watching.Without it, you're not leading a team. You're managing five (or six, or 10 or 20) private versions of the same role.A useful place to start: pick one role on your team and ask three team members in that role what good looks like. Compare the answers.If they don't match, you've found something worth designing.Three questions to design it

Two principlesWrite the answers down where the team can see them. If they live only in your head, the work isn't defined.Answer the questions with the people who do the work, not for them.Leadership is a social process.

Originally published on LinkedIn, 28 April 2026.

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21 April 2026

Fragmenting the team

Fragmentation is playing out at the national scale. You can see it from the outside. Someone inside the team is pulling in a different direction, building a quiet constituency for a different version of events.

It has a name. It's not a personality clash or a values problem. It's a documented trap that teams fall into when the conditions allow it.I've been inside one.I was leading a team in a large programme. New to the role, working at the edge of my technical expertise and aware of it. One person in the team started pulling others across. Quietly. Consistently. By the time I could see the full shape of it, it had already been running for a while.A mentor called it out. In a room full of people, both of us at once. That was uncomfortable. It was also the right call.The behaviour has a name: fragmenting the team. It makes the list of team member traps because it happens often enough to document.What I had to do was have the conversation. Name what I could see. State the standard. Make clear it couldn't continue.The person understood. They weren't willing to change.That was also information.Any leader watching fragmentation form isn't really asking whether to name it. They're asking how much longer they can avoid it.Where have you seen this play out … and did someone name it, or did it just run?

Originally published on LinkedIn, 21 April 2026.

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14 April 2026

Foundations come first

An organisation adopts a new platform. Launches an AI initiative. Commits to a major programme of work. The approach is well designed. The people running it are capable. The leader responsible is willing.

Six months in, it has stalled. The diagnosis is familiar: not enough buy-in, wrong timing, cultural resistance.What almost never gets examined is whether the foundations for it to succeed were ever in place. Whether accountabilities were clear. Whether the leader responsible for the change knew what their work actually was. Whether the leaders were operating as an integrated team … or as a collection of individuals each protecting their own area.These are not things you fix alongside the programme. They come first. Get the foundations right, then bring in the new thing. Not the other way around.Most organisations do it in reverse.

Originally published on LinkedIn, 14 April 2026.

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9 April 2026

Dismissed advice and how trust breaks down

I once dismissed a colleague's advice without really engaging with it. I told myself it was my call to make. It was. That wasn't the problem.

They were a specialist in their field. They offered a recommendation about how I should approach something. I had a different view, genuinely held, and I just … didn't take it up. Moved on.What I didn't reckon with was what I'd communicated with my behaviour. Not that I disagreed. That I didn't respect their expertise.I worked it out, went back and named what I'd done. But trust doesn't repair on the spot. What I got was more process. More steps between me and what I needed from their team.They were protecting themselves from someone who'd shown them that their professional judgement didn't land.This is how the relationship between functions breaks down. When a specialist team doesn't trust that their advice is genuinely considered, the relationship stops being the operating mechanism. The rule book takes over. Not because they're obstructive. Because rules are an instrument that doesn't depend on being respected.Most organisations never design this. They assume goodwill will hold the interface together. It doesn't. What holds it is clarity about what kind of relationship exists between functions, and whether the people inside it understand what they owe each other.

Originally published on LinkedIn, 9 April 2026.

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25 March 2026

Showing up

The first Monday I was responsible for a new team, I showed up in their building.

I was now carrying two functions at once. Their previous leader had left, and they missed her. I was yet another leader arriving into their space with my own ideas about how things worked.So I went to them. Every week. I sat in their building, understood their world, learned what the work actually looked and felt like from where they stood.What came back in feedback later wasn't the one-to-ones I protected, or the role clarity we worked through together. Those things mattered. What stood out was the showing up. Consistently. Every week.People are constantly assessing their environment. Can I trust her? Is this place fair? Do I feel respected here? Does anyone here actually care whether I succeed?Those assessments shape how people show up, what they say, and what they hold back.The sum of them is what culture actually is. Not the values on the wall.Your people are answering that question right now, whether you're noticing or not.

Originally published on LinkedIn, 25 March 2026.

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15 March 2026

When collaboration isn't leadership

I used to be a leader who loved collaboration. Still do.

Early in a leadership role, I confused the process of working together with the act of leading. I'd bring highly capable, experienced people into the room. People who knew their domain far better than I knew it. We'd explore the problem. I'd listen, ask questions, turn things over together. And then sometimes I'd leave without making a decision.Not always deliberately. Sometimes we needed more information. Sometimes the discussion felt too alive to close. And sometimes I had actually made a decision in my mind. I just hadn't communicated it.What I didn't see was that people left the room without clarity on what they were meant to be aligning to. So what followed was misalignment, confusion and competing priorities. That was traceable back to me.I wasn't doing my work as a leader. It's a trap many of us fall into, especially those of us who genuinely value the people around us.The decision isn't separate from the collaboration. It's the completion of it. Your people bring their thinking because they trust you to do something with it. When you don't, you leave them in uncertainty. And in complex organisations, uncertainty doesn't stay still. It fragments.The system I built was simple. Set the context. Name the purpose. Invite the contributions. Then make the decision. Not because I had all the answers. Because that's the work of a leader.Collaboration without a decision isn't leadership. It's just a meeting.

Originally published on LinkedIn, 15 March 2026.

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10 March 2026

Worth is not in what you know

I moved into a leadership role once where I wasn't the expert in the room.

Different sector, different knowledge base. I couldn't fall back on knowing the answers because a lot of the time I didn't have them.It was uncomfortable. For the previous ten years, my value had been tied to what I knew and what I could do. Take that away and you're left with a question that's harder than it sounds: if I'm not here for my expertise, what am I actually here for?What I discovered is that my work had changed. Not just my title or my scope. The actual nature of what I was there to do. I wasn't there to solve the problems. I was there to create the conditions so that the people who do have the expertise could do their best work. Clarity. Expectations. Decision-making. How the team works together.It also forced me to get honest about what leadership actually requires versus what management requires. They're not the same thing and they're both necessary. Most of us get promoted for one and have to figure out the other while we're already in the chair.Your worth as a leader isn't in what you know. It's in what you make possible for the people around you.

Originally published on LinkedIn, 10 March 2026.

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