Are you aligned?

Are you aware of the power dynamics in your organisation?

As a leader, you hold a position of power and you can use that power to control, limit and protect your own authority. This may deliver short-term results and enable quick decision-making but in a crisis, a more directive approach can be exactly what is needed. If your ambition as a leader is to foster creativity, innovation, risk-taking, learning and growth, you need a different approach. You will need to be willing to share power, create space for different perspectives and empower others to take ownership.

This requires the courage to step back, the humility to recognise that you don't have all the answers, and the wisdom to understand that your success as a leader is not measured solely by what you achieve yourself. When you create the conditions for people to think independently, challenge assumptions, take considered risks and learn from mistakes, you unlock far more than your own capabilities.

““A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.””
— Anonymous
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Can you see the light?

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What does a leader need to be aware of to foster innovation and empower their team?

I think it starts with understanding that leadership is a never-ending learning journey. If you want to become a more transformational, inclusive or empathetic leader, you must be willing to do the work yourself. That means developing self-awareness, questioning your assumptions and understanding how your behaviour, decisions and use of power influence the people around you. The most effective leaders I have encountered throughout my career are those who actively develop leadership in others. They don't see leadership as something that belongs exclusively to them, instead, they create an environment where leadership becomes collective. Does this resonate? If so, contact me for a complimentary 30-minute discovery session and let’s explore how coaching could support you.

Pain vs. suffering

I have come to think of pain and suffering as two very different experiences. Pain is often what we go through when we choose to move whereas suffering can be what happens when we choose to stay. Sometimes suffering is the regret of the things we would have done if we had been willing to endure the pain required to do them. Leaving a situation can be painful. Having a difficult conversation can be painful. Starting again can be painful. Going to the gym can be painful. Yet, I rarely regret those experiences because I understand why I am experiencing the discomfort and the soreness reminds me that I did something that required effort.

Pain can be an accelerant to better times as sometimes the short-term discomfort is the price we pay for long-term freedom, growth or peace. The danger comes when we try to avoid both pain and suffering and we withdraw, and become numb. We stop taking risks, stop having difficult conversations and stop making the decisions we know we need to make. Avoiding pain does not necessarily mean we avoid suffering. Maybe this is why I walk towards the pain so I can avoid the suffering.

““We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.””
— Jim Rohn
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Public behaviour

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First come, first served is perhaps one of the most fiercely defended fairness norms we have. We instinctively understand that if someone has been waiting longer than us, they should generally go first. Airports provide another interesting example, standing in front of the gate before your group is called does not make the plane leave any sooner. Yet people still stand, often creating congestion where there was none before. Sometimes the most considerate thing you can do is simply remain seated until your group is called. Breaking these rules rarely results in any formal consequence as nobody is going to arrest you for standing in the airport queue too early or trying to board a train before everyone has got off. Yet everyone notices, especially in London.

These small behaviours are tiny votes for the kind of shared world we want to live in. Do we make space for others? Do we respect the flow? Do we understand that public spaces are shared spaces? Do we recognise that our individual behaviour affects everyone around us? And increasingly, I think being good at this stuff is a competitive advantage. Because in a world where technical knowledge is increasingly accessible, the ability to read a room, understand social dynamics and navigate shared spaces with awareness can distinguish the people who simply participate from those who know how to contribute.

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A simple flow state

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There is a difference between the front stage and the backstage of our lives. The front stage is the public domain: the spaces we share with strangers, colleagues and communities. The backstage is more personal, where different rules apply. In public spaces, however, there are a set of largely unwritten rules that help us navigate life together. We may not consciously think about them, yet we rely on them constantly. I think part of this is because the brain is a prediction machine. We are constantly anticipating what is likely to happen next, and when people behave in ways that fit our expectations, the world feels predictable and easier to navigate.

I was recently in London where I was using public transport and it makes sense to allow passengers to get off before attempting to board regardless of it’s the bus, train or underground. It is just a simple flow system, and the same principle applies to queues, doorways, escalators and crowded spaces. When we crowd a stranger or ignore the natural flow of movement, we create unnecessary friction. Understanding these invisible rules is both about having good manners and social intelligence.

The wisdom well

In my opinion value is produced in our minds and not in a factory. And I think there are two fundamental ways of making money: you can either make desirable things, or you can make things desirable. Both can be equally profitable. The difference is not necessarily in what something is, but in the value we attach to it. The same principle applies to how we evaluate people. A big title does not make someone a good person, and not having a title does not make someone less worthy of respect. However both in our personal and professional lives, we often judge people by their position before we take the time to understand their character.

We might assume, for example, that a CEO must be wise, that a wealthy person must be successful, or that someone who graduated from a prestigious university must be intelligent. Psychologists refer to this as the Halo Effect: when one positive or impressive characteristic influences how we perceive everything else about a person.

Throughout my career, I have met people with extraordinary titles who displayed deeply disappointing behaviours. I have also met people with modest titles who demonstrated remarkable wisdom, kindness and integrity. And that experience has taught me to look beyond the title and pay closer attention to the person. How do they treat people who have less power? How do they respond when someone disagrees with them? Do they take responsibility when they make a mistake? Do their actions match their words? These are the things that tell me far more about a person than the title on their business card. Respect should never be automatic simply because of someone's position. A title tells you what position someone holds and their behaviour tells you who they are.

Power, responsibility and character

Who is available to receive your frustration and who actually has the power to change the situation?

Don’t argue with an employee who cannot change the rules. Don’t take your frustration out on the person who happens to be available when the person responsible is somewhere else.  If something has gone wrong, direct your complaint towards the people who have the authority and influence to change the outcome. The person standing in front of you may simply be carrying out a decision they had no part in making. And I think there is something else worth remembering: nothing reveals character faster than how we treat people who cannot fight back, cannot change the situation and cannot give us what we want.

Patience with the person who didn’t cause the problem and cannot fix it is not weakness. It is a choice about who we want to be when we have every opportunity to direct our frustration at the wrong person. A useful question to end on could be: When you are frustrated, do you look for someone to blame, or someone who can actually help?

I see you

Erving Goffman described a small ritual that happens constantly between strangers in public spaces as civil inattention. Where you briefly acknowledge another person with a glance, perhaps a moment of eye contact, and then look away. The message is subtle: I recognise your presence, and I also recognise your right to go about your business without being disturbed.

The glance matters, and so does the release. Hold the gaze for too long and the meaning can change. What initially communicated acknowledgement can begin to feel intrusive, confrontational or like an invitation to engage. You have crossed an unwritten social boundary. It is a remarkably simple interaction: glance, acknowledge, release. I think much of social life depends on rules we rarely discuss, yet most of us learn to understand them intuitively.

Volume versus value

For a long time, when making things was expensive, the scarce skill was the ability to produce them. Time, resources, technology and expertise limited how much we could create. Now, in many industries, the cost of producing something has fallen dramatically. We can generate more content, more ideas, more products and more options than ever before. And that changes where the value sits. I think when generation becomes cheap, judgement becomes priceless. The challenge is no longer simply producing something. It is knowing what is worth producing, what is good, what is useful, what is relevant and what should be ignored.

Look at what happens when a product or service becomes cheap to produce. The market can quickly become flooded with options. The differentiator becomes the person, team or organisation capable of recognising quality and separating what is valuable from what is merely available. And perhaps that is one of the defining skills of the next economy: not our ability to create more, but our ability to recognise what deserves our attention.

Safe spaces

Listen to what someone is saying, not only through their words, but through what may sit beneath them. Pay attention to the whole picture: their body language, facial expressions, tone, pauses and the subtle cues that can reveal what words alone may not communicate. Develop the ability to recognise different possibilities, anticipate potential outcomes and understand what may be driving the situation. Then, rather than reacting to the first interpretation that comes to mind, create enough space to choose the wisest course of action, one that protects your position, preserves the relationship and moves the situation forward. Does this resonate with you? If so, contact me for a complimentary 30-minute discovery session and let’s explore how coaching could support you.

Out of sight

There are two assumptions in business that I think deserve closer examination.
1. Economic logic
We often assume that if we reduce the price, more people will buy the product. Yet price alone has surprisingly limited predictive power when it comes to consumer behaviour. People do not always make decisions according to the rational economic models we apply to them.

2. Conventional market research
We ask customers what they want and assume they will be able to tell us. The challenge is that much of what influences our behaviour happens beneath conscious awareness. We may feel something before we have thought about it, and we may act on something we could never clearly explain.

Consumer behaviour can therefore be meta-rational, in other words, behaviour that may make sense within a person's emotional, social or psychological context, even when it appears irrational from a purely economic perspective. Someone might even say, “I would never pay more for that,” while choosing the more expensive option when the moment comes. We see documented examples of consumers paying premiums for products because of factors such as perceived quality, status, identity, trust, scarcity or emotional connection. Perhaps the things that influence consumer behaviour most are sometimes the things that remain out of sight, even from the consumer themselves.

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Highly conservative

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Godfried Donkor ® c/o 1957 Gallery (London)

The way business bets are structured, as you push responsibility and accountability further down the organisation, people become more risk-averse and more uncertainty-averse. You become more worried about downside avoidance than upside opportunity. As a result, both innovation and marketing are fat-tailed activities, where 10% of what you do is probably more valuable than everything else combined. And you can’t tell in advance which 10% it’s going to be, they are processes of exploration and discovery.

What organisations do, in pursuit of efficiency, is eliminate that discovery layer. In the short term, it looks like a great idea. In the long term, I think it proves fatal, because you lose the ability to adapt, reinvent and reposition in pursuit of the occasional breakthrough. What do you think?

Pay attention to ...

If you focus sharply on one target audience, you’ll often find, as a byproduct of that focus, that incremental audiences discover you too. For example, take a meal-kit service built for busy young professionals who want something quick after work. The company markets to that audience, builds for that audience, and then discovers along the way that retirees are signing up too, drawn by the same thing from a different angle: simple, pre-portioned meals that take the guesswork out of cooking for one or two people.

Marketing is usually eager to show a product or service in the hands of young people. I think new audiences are appearing all the time who simply have not learned yet what people born ten years earlier already know. That’s the opportunity: you don’t need to invent something new to be innovative. Sometimes it’s enough to teach a new audience something the last one already figured out. What do you think?

A sense of fulfilment

Happiness and achievement are independent variables.We treat them as if they move on the same line, as if enough achievement eventually converts into happiness, like currency you can exchange once you hit a certain amount. Remember they are not measuring the same thing, achievement measures distance traveled against a goal whilst happiness measures the quality of your relationship with the present moment, regardless of where you are on that journey. This is why you can hit the milestone and feel nothing. And why you can be in the middle of something unfinished, uncertain, maybe even failing, and still feel genuinely alive.

““Human diversity is a feature, not a bug. In any group of around 150 people, shaped by our evolutionary history, there will always be people who think differently.”
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— Helen Taylor

From strategy to action

There is an interesting paradox in business: we often protect our “secrets” because we assume that if we share what we know, others will simply copy us. Yet, in practice, people rarely replicate a successful approach as easily as we imagine. You can give someone the evidence. You can explain what you do, how you do it and why it works. They can have access to the same information and still struggle to reproduce the results. Part of the reason is cultural. What works in one organisation may depend on behaviours, values, relationships, leadership practices and ways of thinking that cannot simply be copied from a document or presentation. Perhaps the real competitive advantage is not always the information itself. It is the organisational capability to turn that information into consistent action.

Your greatest resource

Happiness and achievement are independent variables. We treat them as if they move on the same line, as if enough achievement eventually converts into happiness, like currency you can exchange once you hit a certain amount. But they are not measuring the same thing as achievement measures distance traveled against a goal, and happiness measures the quality of your relationship with the present moment, regardless of where you are on that journey. This is why you can hit the milestone and feel nothing. And why you can be in the middle of something unfinished, uncertain, maybe even failing, and still feel genuinely alive.

There is a danger is not pursuing achievement and the danger is outsourcing your happiness to it, deciding in advance that joy is conditional on arrival. That bargain rarely pays out the way we expect, because the goalposts move the moment we reach them. The promotion becomes the next promotion. The number becomes a bigger number. I think we should be happy to be happy, achieve to achieve. Let each one stand on its own terms instead of asking one to justify the other. The person who can do this isn't settling for less, they are refusing to make their peace of mind conditional on outcomes they can't fully control.

Every so often

I know many people who are influenced by recency bias which makes allowing the most recent experience, conversation or narrative to shape their perception while losing sight of the bigger picture. When you notice tension in your body, pause. Release it. Ground yourself. Become present. Then choose how you want to show up. This does not mean ignoring or suppressing what you feel. It means recognising that you can influence your emotional state rather than being completely driven by it. Before people hear our words, they often experience our emotional state. Our tone, presence, body language and energy communicate something before we have said very much at all. And sometimes, how we make people feel can have a greater impact than the words we choose.

Homo sapiens

We are all mammals, and our brains carry an evolutionary history that can sometimes make unfamiliar people or situations feel more threatening or uncertain than they actually are. Our brains evolved to help us detect potential danger, navigate social relationships and respond quickly to our environment. Although the human brain has continued to evolve, many of the systems involved in emotion, threat detection and social behaviour have much deeper evolutionary roots than modern societies do. And this matters when we think about difference.

One of the most consequential ideas developed in European intellectual history was the classification of human beings into racial categories. Race was constructed as a way of categorising people, often based on perceived physical differences, and these categories were subsequently used to create hierarchies and justify systems of power and exclusion. The consequences have been profound, including the distortion and marginalisation of African histories and the creation of assumptions about human difference that have persisted across societies. Scientifically, however, we are one species: Homo sapiens. Our species evolved in Africa, with the oldest currently recognised Homo sapiens fossils dating to around 300,000 years ago. All living human beings share this common evolutionary history, and our genomes are more than 99.9% alike.

There is enormous human variation, including differences in skin colour, physical characteristics and genetic ancestry. Yet those differences exist within a single human species, and most genetic variation occurs within populations rather than neatly between socially defined racial groups. Perhaps the more useful question, therefore, is not why humans are different. It is why we have historically attached so much social meaning, hierarchy and value to those differences.

It takes one to know one

Actions give beliefs somewhere to live, and maybe the same is true of kindness. Some of the kindest people I have encountered have experienced extraordinary unkindness themselves. They know what it feels like to be dismissed, excluded, judged or made to feel small. Perhaps that is why they choose differently, as they remember how those experiences felt and consciously choose not to pass that pain on to someone else. Their kindness is not weakness; it is a decision to break the cycle. We are not defined solely by what has happened to us. We are also defined by what we choose to do with what has happened to us.

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Second guessing

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Think about the cognitive load involved in constantly monitoring your body language, your tone of voice, your cultural references and your humour. Running a constant background calculation:
“Is this safe to say?”
“Will this make me stand out?”
“Will this mark me as ‘other’?”

That constant monitoring takes both mental and emotional energy. Energy that could otherwise be used to contribute, collaborate, solve problems, build relationships, be creative or simply do your job. Instead, it is spent managing how you are perceived. You are no longer simply participating in the environment, you are performing belonging. Contact me via this link for a complimentary discovery session.