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

The biggest barrier to leadership development isn't budget. It's time — and the quiet cost of never finding any is that, bit by bit, mediocre becomes normal. The comment that stayed with me Last week we attended Peter Berry Consulting's Thought Leadership Forum, Leading in an AI World — as always, a valuable chance to hear different perspectives on leadership and the future of work. But the comment that stayed with me had nothing to do with AI. Peter noted that many of their

Developing individual leaders makes each person more effective. Team coaching makes a leadership team more than the sum of its parts. That's why the strongest leadership teams don't choose between the two — they invest in both. Why great teams need more than great individuals Every elite sporting team has a coach. Not because they're failing, and not because they're inexperienced — because talent alone doesn't create a great team. Yet in organisations we invest heavily in dev

The simplest way to lift your energy as a leader isn't a new routine or more discipline. It's one small experiment you can run this week — try it, watch what happens, and keep it only if it works. Energy is the resource leaders most want to protect Energy is one of the things leaders raise with us most often. It's what they're trying to protect, restore and sustain — across long days, back-to-back meetings and the constant pull on their attention. When energy runs low, everyt

As leaders, we consume a lot of information — books, podcasts, articles, keynotes. Yet many teams keep having the same conversations and making the same decisions. Ideas don’t change teams. The conversations they create do.