When your role suddenly expands — a bigger team, more reporting lines, accountability across functions, often after others have left — you can't lead 15 or 20 people the way you led six or eight. Not because they need less leadership, but because you can no longer be the source of all of it. The shift is from leading everyone to building more leadership around you. Your remit grew, but your time and pay didn't Has your leadership remit expanded in the last 12 months? A larger

If you want to lead differently, your calendar has to make it possible. Treated well, your calendar isn't just a record of what needs to get done — it's a design for how you want to lead, with protected space to think, prepare and set direction. Have we changed how we lead, but not our calendars? I've been doing a lot of work with leaders navigating change lately: new structures, new teams, new expectations, new ways of working. We spend a lot of time talking about how we nee

Leadership doesn't stop when life gets hard — but your expectations of yourself may need to change. Leading when life needs more of you isn't about fitting everything in. It's about being deliberate about what you hold onto, what you let go of, and what you let others carry for a while. The 'sandwich generation' is changing how leaders work In conversations with leaders lately, I've noticed how many are juggling work around ageing parents. A parent has become seriously unwell

Complexity might be unavoidable, but confusion isn't. A big part of leadership is learning to make the complex simple — not by passing on everything you know, but by making sense of it first, so the people around you can actually act on it. The eight-year-old who explained my job I've spent years trying to explain to my mother what I do. Then recently, someone asked my eight-year-old son what I do for work. His answer: "My mum's a leader, who works with leaders, to be better

If your team's most honest conversation happens in the corridor after the meeting, the problem isn't that people have more to say. It's that they didn't say it when it mattered. The meeting after the meeting is a signal worth paying attention to. We've all been in the meeting after the meeting A team meeting finishes. Everyone nods; the decision has been made. Then people walk back to their desks together. "What did you really think?" "I'm not sure that'll work." "Neither am

A little tension in a team isn't a warning sign. Handled well, team tension is one of the clearest signs that smart people are thinking hard together — the goal isn't to remove it, but to make it productive. Why a harmonious team isn't always a high-performing one When a team works well together, we tend to expect things to feel harmonious. I'm not so sure. Put a group of smart people around a table with different experiences, responsibilities and perspectives, and disagreeme