Thirty years inside and alongside organisations. Boards, teams, restructures, growth, difficult conversations, ambitious targets and everything in between. Seven of those years at operating board level as Global Head of People & Culture for a FTSE 250 company.

I’ve trained and coached thousands of managers around the world, worked with organisations on their people and leadership challenges, and continued that work independently as a coach and adviser.

I’ve helped the manager who’s struggling. I’ve been the boss. I’ve had the boss. And I’ve sat on the board setting the targets that eventually land on a manager’s desk.

It’s the same challenge, viewed from every seat in the building.

That perspective has shaped how I think about leadership.

We put enormous effort into strategy, values, leadership frameworks and culture, as we should. But people don’t experience any of those things as concepts. They experience them through other people — in decisions, conversations, priorities, behaviour and what happens when the pressure is on.

I’ve always been interested in how you free people up to do good work; to make sure they put their energy, commitment, drive and talent into the work at hand because the human stuff around them is working well. That means paying attention to what happens between people, particularly when the pressure is on.

Seniority doesn’t make any of us immune to this. I’ve worked with people from first-time managers to those leading at scale, and the fundamentals are remarkably similar whether you’re managing four people or 14,000. What changes is the scale: your influence reaches further, the dynamics become more complex and more people feel the consequences of how you lead.

I explore this in two different ways.

The Confident Manager is the practical application: an audio programme for managers who are good at their work and want to get better at leading people. Twenty practical lessons designed to be used in the working day — a portable mentor for the moment you need one.

Lead Like a Human is where I take the questions further. I write and speak about the inner work of outer leadership: trust, judgement, relationships, repair, power, emotion, performance, and what happens to all of them when real people meet real organisational pressure.

Different formats, same underlying question:

How do we get difficult things done through and with other human beings, when we’re one of the complicated humans in the room?