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Lead Like a Human
Leadership makes perfect sense on paper.
Listen. Build trust. Give honest feedback. Make good decisions. Have the difficult conversation. Repair things when they go wrong.
Then another human being turns up.
With history. Ego. Fear. Ambition. A bad day. So do you.
And there’s a job to do.
Targets to hit. Decisions to make. Problems to solve. Something that needs to be achieved, usually with other people and increasingly under pressure.
Lead Like a Human is where I write and speak about what happens when those realities meet.
The inner work of outer leadership: trust, judgement, relationships, repair, power, emotion, performance, and the often considerable gap between what you meant and what landed.
I’m interested in the things that don’t fit neatly into a leadership framework. The conversation you know you need to have but keep finding reasons to postpone. The frustration sitting underneath a perfectly reasonable response. How you stay kind while still holding someone to account, or remain part of something without losing yourself in it.
Because none of this happens separately from the work. The human stuff can consume extraordinary amounts of energy, or free people up to put that energy into doing good work.
Whether you’re leading a team, running an organisation or building something of your own, you don’t graduate from this.
Knowing what good leadership looks like doesn’t necessarily make us good at it.
That’s what interests me.
The more clearly we can see what’s happening, in ourselves, between people and around us, the more choice we have about what happens next.
Leadership makes perfect sense on paper.
Listen. Build trust. Give honest feedback. Make good decisions. Have the difficult conversation. Repair things when they go wrong.
Then another human being turns up.
With history. Ego. Fear. Ambition. A bad day. So do you.
And there’s a job to do.
Targets to hit. Decisions to make. Problems to solve. Something that needs to be achieved, usually with other people and increasingly under pressure.
Lead Like a Human is where I write and speak about what happens when those realities meet.
The inner work of outer leadership: trust, judgement, relationships, repair, power, emotion, performance, and the often considerable gap between what you meant and what landed.
I’m interested in the things that don’t fit neatly into a leadership framework. The conversation you know you need to have but keep finding reasons to postpone. The frustration sitting underneath a perfectly reasonable response. How you stay kind while still holding someone to account, or remain part of something without losing yourself in it.
Because none of this happens separately from the work. The human stuff can consume extraordinary amounts of energy, or free people up to put that energy into doing good work.
Whether you’re leading a team, running an organisation or building something of your own, you don’t graduate from this.
Knowing what good leadership looks like doesn’t necessarily make us good at it.
That’s what interests me.
The more clearly we can see what’s happening, in ourselves, between people and around us, the more choice we have about what happens next.
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