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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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