This week I found myself having an unusual coaching conversation with an entrepreneur.
Nothing was going wrong.
Quite the opposite.
If things unfold as expected, his business could experience significant growth over the next period. It is the kind of opportunity many entrepreneurs spend years working towards.
We spoke about the opportunity, of course. But our conversation gradually moved somewhere else.
If the business changes significantly over the next few months, what might change for him as its leader?
More customers may mean more people. More people may mean more managers. More revenue can bring more complexity, greater financial exposure and decisions carrying considerably greater consequences.
The business may look very different.
And so might his job.
There is a temptation to think of scaling as simply doing more.
More customers. More sales. More staff. More capacity.
But organisational growth research suggests something more complicated happens.
Larry Greiner’s classic work on organisational growth argued that management practices that work effectively during one phase of an organisation’s development can create difficulties as it enters another. Growth doesn’t merely make the existing organisation bigger; it introduces different challenges around leadership, delegation, coordination and control.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s recent work on scaling SMEs makes a similar point from a different perspective. Scaling businesses commonly undergo significant changes in capabilities, structures and the way they operate. Growth and organisational transformation are often intertwined rather than separate events.
Which raises an interesting question for the entrepreneur:
If your business is becoming something different, can you continue leading it in exactly the same way?
That isn’t criticism of what got you here. The way you have led may be precisely why the opportunity now exists. But success can change the context in which that leadership takes place.
Noam Wasserman’s research into founder-CEOs gives this idea an uncomfortable edge.
Studying the succession histories of 202 entrepreneurial firms, Wasserman identified what he called the “paradox of entrepreneurial success”. Reaching important business milestones could actually increase the likelihood of the founder being replaced as CEO.
That does not mean successful founders are destined to lose their businesses. It does, however, expose something important.
Creating a successful business and leading the organisation that success creates are not necessarily the same job.
The entrepreneur who once had to be involved in almost everything may find that involvement increasingly difficult to sustain. The person who could personally make most of the important decisions may now have to develop others capable of making them. Informal conversations that once kept everybody aligned may no longer reach everyone. Relationships may become teams. Teams may develop leaders. Decisions may require systems. Culture, previously transmitted simply through proximity to the founder, may have to become far more intentional.
And perhaps hardest of all, the entrepreneur who built their success partly by becoming indispensable may discover that successful scaling asks them to become less indispensable.
We can easily turn conversations about founder growth into another deficit narrative:
You don’t delegate enough. You’re too operational. You haven’t built enough systems. You need to become more strategic.
Perhaps, but this perspective could also miss something important.
Those behaviours may once have been entirely appropriate. Knowing everything that happened in the business may have been possible when there were eight employees. Personally approving expenditure may have been sensible when cash was scarce. Being involved in every major customer relationship may have helped establish the reputation upon which the business was built. Moving quickly on instinct may have been one of the entrepreneur’s greatest competitive advantages.
The question isn’t necessarily whether those behaviours were wrong. It is whether the context in which they developed is changing.
And, if it is, which behaviours remain valuable, which might require adaptation, and which might eventually have to be released.
This is where executive coaching can offer something particularly valuable to an entrepreneur approaching rapid growth.
Not because there is a problem to fix. And not because the coach knows how the entrepreneur should run the business.
Rather, coaching creates a confidential space away from the velocity of the business in which the entrepreneur can examine what the emerging reality may ask of them. What might become different if the business doubles? Where could decisions start accumulating? What is the entrepreneur currently carrying that others may have to learn to carry? Where might greater structure protect the business — and where could too much structure destroy something valuable? Which relationships will change? What might their leadership team require from them that the current team doesn’t? What parts of their identity are tied to being the person who knows, fixes, decides or rescues?
And perhaps most importantly:
How might they preserve what made the business successful while allowing both the organisation and themselves to evolve?
These aren’t questions that have a correct answer. They are questions worth exploring before growth answers them on the entrepreneur’s behalf.
There is growing evidence that coaching has value as a developmental intervention rather than merely a remedial one.
A 2024 pilot study of entrepreneurs who received 5 coaching sessions showed significant improvements in solution-focused thinking, psychological well-being, and progress towards personally chosen coaching objectives..
Perhaps this is where we have historically misunderstood executive coaching.
We often imagine the coach arriving when something has gone wrong. Coaching can certainly support leaders in those circumstances. But why wait?
The conversation I had this week was exciting precisely because we weren’t carrying the weight of issues, we could look ahead with clear, uncluttered minds.
We were looking ahead.
There was an opportunity to ask, while things were still going well:
“If the opportunity in front of you becomes reality, who might you be called to become as the leader of that business?”
Not a different person. Not a corporate version of the entrepreneur who originally created it. And certainly not someone following another person’s formula for what a CEO is supposed to look like.
Perhaps simply a more consciously adapted version of the same leader — able to retain the entrepreneurial courage, instinct and energy that created the business while developing the leadership capacity the emerging organisation calls for.
Because sometimes the most valuable time to work with a coach isn’t when everything is falling apart.
Sometimes it is when so much is going right that the world around the leader is about to change.
Success doesn’t always call for the leader to be fixed. Sometimes it calls for the leader to evolve.
References
Cannon-Bowers, J.A. et al. (2023). Workplace coaching: a meta-analysis and recommendations for advancing the science of coaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1204166.
Chatterji, A., Delecourt, S., Hasan, S. & Koning, R. (2019). When Does Advice Impact Startup Performance? Strategic Management Journal, 40(3), 331–356.
Greiner, L.E. (1998). Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow. Harvard Business Review.
Hinkelmann, H., O’Connor, S. & Passmore, J. (2024). Coaching entrepreneurs towards growth: an experimental design study of coaching effectiveness for business leaders’ psychological capabilities. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 17(2), 283–300.
OECD (2025). Unleashing SME Potential to Scale Up: Helping SMEs Scale Up. OECD Publishing.
Wasserman, N. (2003). Founder-CEO Succession and the Paradox of Entrepreneurial Success. Organization Science, 14(2), 149–172.
On 9 August 1956, more than 20,000 South African women marched to the Union Buildings to protest against the Apartheid pass laws. Seventy years later, we remember that courage during Women’s Month.
These women were not waiting for men to rescue them.
They organised. They led. They found their voice. And they acted.
Perhaps there is something important in that for us men.
Women’s Month quite rightly celebrates women: their contribution, courage, resilience, leadership and place in our society. But perhaps it also offers us men an opportunity to look at ourselves.
Not because Women’s Month is about us, but because the flourishing of women is impacted by who we are.
Who we are as husbands and partners; fathers and sons; brothers and friends; leaders and colleagues; coaches and teachers; members of churches, sports clubs, friendship groups and communities.
If we want our homes, workplaces and communities to flourish, what kind of men do these environments call us to be?
Much has been said about toxic masculinity, and there are certainly expressions of masculinity that wound rather than restore: domination, violence, control, intimidation and the use of power primarily for oneself.
And on the opposite end of the scale, there is passive masculinity. Stand back. Say nothing. Don’t offend. Don’t exert strength. Don’t take responsibility. Don’t get involved.
Neither seems particularly redemptive.
Redemptive masculinity offers another possibility. It asks what happens when a man takes responsibility for the strength, influence and agency he has and places these in the service of something beyond himself.
Strength without domination.
Courage without intimidation.
Protection without possession.
Leadership without silencing.
Care without embarrassment.
Responsibility without control.
It doesn’t ask men to become less masculine so that women can flourish.
Nor does it ask women to become more like men.
It asks something more interesting:
How might men and women bring the fullness of who they are into relationship with one another, without either having to diminish the other?
For many of us, this begins with the women closest to us.
What is it actually like to be our wife, partner, daughter, sister or mother in relationship with us?
Not what do we intend it to be like. What is it actually like?
Does our presence make it easier for the women around us to speak honestly? Can they disagree with us?
Do the women closest to us experience our strength as something that creates security — or something they occasionally have to manage?
Perhaps one expression of redemptive masculinity is simply being fully present. Not merely providing for a family, but participating in it.
And even our instinct to protect deserves reflection. Protection can be beautiful. But protection becomes something else when it takes away another person’s agency.
The question is therefore not simply:
“Am I protecting the women I love?”
Perhaps it is:
“Does the way I love and protect them support them in becoming more fully themselves?”
We don’t leave our masculinity at home when we walk into a boardroom, workshop, office or team meeting. We take it with us.
And this is where the conversation can become uncomfortable.
Women currently hold only 29.3% of South Africa’s top-management positions, despite representing 45.7% of the economically active population. In the private sector, the proportion at top-management level is even lower, at 27.6%. (Commission for Employment Equity)
Statistics cannot tell us the whole story. But they can invite questions.
Who do we instinctively picture in our mind’s eye when somebody says “CEO”?
Who gets heard most quickly in the meeting?
Whose idea receives attention first or most often?
Who gets the stretch assignment?
Who gets sponsored for the next opportunity?
Whose confidence do we admire — and whose do we experience as abrasive?
Research has described a leadership “double bind” in which women can be judged against traditionally masculine expectations of leadership, while simultaneously being judged negatively when their behaviour does not fit expectations of how women are supposed to behave. (Catalyst)
Redemptive masculinity asks us to notice this. Not so that we favour a woman because she is a woman. But so that we can become curious about whether we are limiting what we see in somebody because she is one.
There is an equally important counterpart.
Men can also become trapped by gender stereotypes: expected always to be decisive rather than uncertain, strong rather than vulnerable, competitive rather than nurturing, rational rather than emotional.
Perhaps breaking down unhelpful gender stereotypes is therefore not something men reluctantly do for women.
Perhaps it creates greater freedom for both.
A woman can be assertive without being considered unfeminine.
A man can be empathetic without being considered weak.
A woman can drive performance.
A man can nurture relationships.
And either may bring courage, creativity, commercial instinct, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, decisiveness, compassion or wisdom into the room.
None of this requires us to pretend that men and women are the same.
They are not. Nor are men and women simply interchangeable.
At home, perhaps we see this most clearly in motherhood and fatherhood. Circumstances may require a father to carry responsibilities usually associated with motherhood, or a mother those associated with fatherhood. But doing our best to fulfil what is absent does not make the two roles interchangeable. There is something meaningful in both.
But doing our best to fulfil what is absent does not make the two roles identical.
There is something meaningful in both motherhood and fatherhood.
Acknowledging difference, however, is not the same as turning difference into hierarchy.
And it is not the same as stereotyping.
Problems arise when we take something we believe to be broadly true about men or women and use it to determine the capability, character or contribution of the individual standing in front of us.
A woman does not become less feminine because she is commercially ambitious, decisive or strategically gifted.
A man does not become less masculine because he is emotionally perceptive, compassionate or relationally skilled.
Redemptive masculinity does not erase difference. It honours difference without using it to establish superiority or prescribe the limits of another person.
That matters enormously in teams.
Successful teams do not benefit from men and women competing to prove whose contribution matters more. They benefit when people bring their strengths into relationship with one another in service of something larger than themselves.
We don’t have to become the same to become equal contributors.
Perhaps our invitation is to become curious enough to discover the person before us rather than assuming we already understand them because of their gender.
Redemptive masculinity is not threatened by a capable woman.
It has no requirement to be the cleverest voice in the room.
It can champion another person’s contribution without experiencing their success as its own loss.
That is not weaker masculinity.
I would suggest it is more secure masculinity.
And then there is community.
Our friendship circles. Churches. Clubs. Teams. WhatsApp groups. Braais. Schools. Organisations.
Here another question emerges:
Who are we as men when women aren’t in the room?
What gets laughed at?
What gets challenged?
What gets ignored?
What behaviour do we quietly excuse because “that’s just how he is”?
South Africa’s first national gender-based violence prevalence study found that 35.5% of women reported having experienced physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime. (South African National GBV Prevalence Study)
That reality cannot be addressed only by asking violent men to stop being violent. It also invites the rest of us to consider the cultures we participate in creating. Redemptive masculinity therefore isn’t demonstrated only by how respectfully I treat the women I know. It is also demonstrated in the behaviour I help make acceptable — or unacceptable — amongst other men.
Sometimes courage looks like stepping forward.
Sometimes it is speaking up.
Sometimes it is refusing to laugh.
Sometimes it is asking another man, privately, whether he is okay.
Sometimes it is challenging behaviour without rejecting the human being behind it.
And sometimes it is simply demonstrating through our own lives that there is another way of being a man.
This, for me, is essential.
The conversation about women flourishing cannot become another battleground between men and women.
If women flourish while men disintegrate, we have not created flourishing communities.
If men reclaim their identity by pushing women backwards, we haven’t restored masculinity either.
Richard Reeves makes a similar argument in Of Boys and Men: taking the challenges facing boys and men seriously does not require abandoning the pursuit of equality between men and women.
It is not one or the other.
We can create environments in which men and women flourish alongside one another.
Perhaps that is part of what makes masculinity redemptive. It doesn’t have to defeat somebody in order to know its worth. It doesn’t require women to become smaller. And it doesn’t ask men to disappear.
Instead, it invites us to bring whatever strength, courage, influence, compassion and capacity we have into the environments entrusted to us — and to use them in ways that restore rather than diminish the people around us.
Women’s Month celebrates extraordinary women.
Perhaps it can also offer ordinary men like me a mirror.
A chance to consider the environments in which we have influence.
My home.
My workplace.
My community.
What happens to women in those spaces because I am there?
Are they heard?
Are they respected?
Are they able to contribute fully?
Do they experience greater freedom to become who they are?
And what happens to the men around me?
Am I helping create a masculinity in which strength and kindness can coexist?
Where courage and vulnerability are not enemies?
Where a man’s worth is not established through his ability to dominate somebody else?
Seventy years after thousands of courageous South African women marched together, perhaps their legacy still asks something of us.
Not to rescue women.
Not to retreat from them.
But to stand alongside them.
And to ask:
If we want our homes, workplaces and communities to flourish, what kind of men do these environments call us to be?
Further Reading
Kopano Ratele, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity — a particularly relevant South African exploration of love, violence and masculinity.
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.
Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men.
Earlier this week, I was speaking with the CEO of an organisation facing the very real possibility of closure.
As we discussed what had brought the organisation to this point, the CEO identified two existential threats: technology and legislation.
Neither was new.
Both had been known, discussed and documented for many years—possibly decades.
That was what alarmed me most.
The organisation had not been struck by an unexpected event that nobody could reasonably have foreseen. The world had been changing around it for a very long time. What had not changed sufficiently was the organisation itself.
It would be easy to say that technology or legislation had pulled the rug out from under the business.
But the rug had not been pulled suddenly.
It had been moving, centimetre by centimetre, for years.
External forces can undoubtedly threaten the survival of a business. Leaders cannot control technological development, new legislation, economic conditions, changing customer behaviour or the arrival of new competitors.
But the external change is not always the whole explanation for an organisation’s decline.
Sometimes the greater threat is the organisation’s failure to respond to a change it can already see.
The technology may have been emerging for years.
The legislation may have been moving slowly through consultation, debate and implementation.
Customers may have been gradually changing their expectations.
Competitors may have been experimenting with different business models.
The signals were present. But recognising that something is happening is not the same as confronting what it could mean for your organisation.
A business can know about a change without truly anticipating it.
Most businesses do not consciously choose to ignore the future.
They become consumed by the present.
Customers need attention. Staff need leadership. Suppliers must be paid. Problems must be resolved. Revenue targets must be reached. The pressures of today are immediate, visible and often unforgiving.
By comparison, preparing for a future threat can feel less urgent.
The consequences may still be several years away. The existing business model may still be generating revenue. Customers may still be arriving. The organisation may still appear stable.
Leaders reassure themselves that there is time.
The difficult decisions are postponed until the next strategy session, the next financial year or the next leadership meeting.
Then one day the consequences are no longer distant.
Revenue has declined. Costs can no longer be absorbed. Capabilities are outdated. The skills required for the future are missing. Competitors have moved ahead. The organisation’s available options have narrowed.
What could once have been managed through thoughtful reinvention must now be addressed through emergency intervention.
The important has finally become urgent—but possibly too late.
This does not mean organisations should abandon annual strategic planning.
It means that strategy cannot live only in an annual planning session.
A leadership team cannot look outward once a year, agree on a plan and then spend the next 12 months looking predominantly inward. The environment continues to change after the strategy document has been approved.
Strategic awareness must therefore become part of the ongoing rhythm of leadership.
Recent Deloitte research found that 67% of leaders believe their primary competitive advantage over the next three years will come from being fast and nimble, while only 28% believe scale will be their main differentiator. Yet although 88% regarded the ability to dynamically organise people, skills and resources as extremely or very important, only 7% believed their organisations were making significant progress in doing so.
The gap is not necessarily a lack of awareness.
Many leaders already know adaptability matters.
The gap is between recognising the need to adapt and building an organisation capable of doing it.
In workshops presented by reinvention strategist Dr Nadya Zhexembayeva, I have heard her share research indicating that the required cycle of business reinvention varies significantly by industry—from approximately six years in some sectors to as little as 18 months in others.
This does not mean that an entire business must be dismantled and rebuilt every 18 months.
It does mean that leaders need to understand the reinvention rhythm of their particular industry.
How long can the current business model reasonably remain relevant?
How quickly is technology changing how value is created and delivered?
What changes are taking place in regulation, customer expectations, skills, distribution or competition?
Which parts of the organisation are becoming less effective, even though they may still appear to be working?
An organisation operating in an 18-month reinvention environment cannot afford to revisit its deepest assumptions only once every three or five years.
Even an organisation in a slower-moving industry cannot assume that what worked historically will continue working indefinitely.
The foundational elements of reinvention process can be understood through three interconnected disciplines:
Anticipate
Leadership (and ideally the rest of the organisation) must intentionally look beyond the daily operations of the business.
This involves watching for changes in technology, regulation, customer behaviour, social expectations, economic conditions and competition—and then asking what those changes could mean for the organisation.
Anticipation is not about predicting the future perfectly.
It is about noticing what is already changing and being willing to confront its possible implications.
Design
Once a meaningful threat or opportunity has been identified, the organisation must design a appropriate responses, being weary of placing all their eggs in one basket.
This may involve changing the business model, developing new capabilities, investing in technology, reskilling employees, entering different markets, changing how value is delivered or deciding what the organisation must stop doing.
Awareness without design produces concern, but not movement.
Implement
A well-designed response still creates no value until it is implemented.
Resources must be committed. Responsibilities must be clear. Decisions must be made. Experiments must be run. Progress must be reviewed, discard what is not working and progress what is - the organisation must be willing to adjust as it learns.
Implementation is where reinvention stops being an interesting leadership conversation and becomes organisational reality.
This closely reflects what strategy scholar David Teece describes as the capabilities to sense changes, seize opportunities and transform the organisation. These activities must happen continuously or semi-continuously as customers, competitors and technologies change.
Leaders cannot give meaningful attention to the future when every available moment is consumed by operational pressure.
Time for anticipation must be deliberately protected.
Leadership teams need regular space to lift their heads, look beyond current performance and ask uncomfortable questions:
What changes in our environment are we aware of but have not properly responded to?
Which assumptions about our organisation or industry may no longer be reliable?
What could make our current business model significantly less relevant?
What are we postponing because the consequences have not yet become painful enough?
What should we begin testing now, while we still have the resources and freedom to experiment?
These conversations may not produce the same immediate sense of achievement as solving today’s operational problem.
But they may prevent tomorrow’s existential crisis.
I have compassion for any CEO carrying the possibility that an organisation—and the livelihoods connected to it—may not survive.
Leadership in those circumstances is extraordinarily difficult.
This is not about standing outside the situation and assigning blame. Decisions are made within complex systems, often under pressure and with limited resources. Leaders may also inherit years of postponed decisions and deeply embedded organisational habits.
But compassion should not prevent us from learning from what happened.
Businesses are not always destroyed by changes they could never have anticipated.
Sometimes they decline because the organisation remained focused on operating yesterday’s model while the foundations beneath it were slowly changing.
The time to reinvent is not when every other option has disappeared.
It is while the organisation still has customers, resources, credibility and choices.
Because the rug is rarely pulled out in one sudden movement.
More often, it shifts slowly beneath our feet—and the greatest danger is becoming so accustomed to the movement that we stop noticing it.
As a trained Reinvention Practitioner, I work with leaders and leadership teams to anticipate what is changing, design an appropriate response, and turn that response into action—before circumstances remove their ability to choose.
If this article has raised an uncomfortable question about your own organisation, perhaps now is the time to begin the conversation, while you still have customers, resources, credibility and choices.
At the meeting table, the silence becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the leader. He is thinking surely they are waiting for him to say something. Surely this is the moment in which he is expected to lead.
So he gives them an answer.
His discomfort subsides, at least temporarily. But the response around the table is underwhelming - at best a few polite comments. The meeting continues, but something has been lost.
Maybe the team was not waiting for his answer, but rather his permission.
Permission to question what they had always done. Permission to offer an incomplete thought. Permission to disagree. Permission to bring their collective experience and intelligence into the room.
The leader interpreted their gaze as a demand for certainty. They may have been looking for an invitation to contribute.
Some leaders feel they need to have all the answers because they have come to associate leadership with certainty, competence and usefulness. What appears to be confidence or decisiveness may sometimes be a fear-driven response to the discomfort of not knowing.
It would be easy to dismiss this leader as controlling, insecure or convinced that he is the cleverest person in the room.
Sometimes that may be true.
But many leaders who feel compelled to provide the answer are not consciously trying to dominate their teams. They are trying to be useful.
They have come to believe that leadership means knowing what to do.
When the team brings a problem, the leader solves it. When there is uncertainty, the leader provides direction. When the room becomes uncomfortable, the leader breaks the silence.
This may be particularly familiar to male leaders.
Research does not support the popular idea that men are biologically “wired” to solve every problem. What it does show is that many men are socialised into identities built around competence, self-reliance, usefulness and provision.
From an early age, many boys learn that their value lies in what they can do, fix, carry or provide. Asking for help may feel like weakness. Admitting uncertainty may feel like failure. Not knowing may feel like becoming unnecessary.
These expectations are learned rather than hardwired. They also vary significantly between cultures, families and individuals. Nor are they exclusively male. Women in leadership can experience the same pressure, particularly when they believe their credibility is already being scrutinised.
The male expression of the problem, however, can carry a particular weight. The belief beneath the behaviour may sound something like:
If I am the leader, I should know what to do.
When that belief is threatened, fear may enter the room long before anyone recognises it as fear.
The leader’s answer may sound decisive, but its first purpose may not be to solve the team’s problem.
It may be solving the leader’s discomfort.
Uncertainty creates tension. Silence creates exposure. The longer the team looks towards the leader, the more he may feel that his competence is being evaluated.
Giving an answer restores a sense of control.
The difficulty is that what relieves the leader in the moment may weaken the team over time.
The team begins to learn that there is little value in thinking beyond the leader’s position. They wait for him to speak before deciding what they think. They test their contributions against what they believe he wants to hear. Their ideas become safer, smaller and less challenging.
Eventually the leader looks around and sees a team that appears unable to think independently.
This confirms what he already feared:
Nothing moves unless I make it move.
He answers more quickly. The team contributes less freely. The leader becomes more burdened, and the team becomes more dependent.
A self-reinforcing cycle has formed.
Research led by Anita Woolley at Carnegie Mellon and MIT studied 699 people working in 192 small groups.
The researchers were looking for what they called collective intelligence: the ability of a group to perform well across a range of different tasks.
One of their most relevant findings was that groups performed better when speaking time was distributed more evenly. When one person dominated the conversation, the group’s collective intelligence tended to be lower.
The study did not prove that one dominant voice directly caused the poorer performance. But the association was clear: the most intelligent team was not necessarily the one with the cleverest individual. It was the one better able to use the intelligence available across the group.
This is the hidden cost of the leader who always speaks first.
Once the leader states a firm position, everyone else must respond within the boundaries of that position. Even those who disagree may begin editing themselves.
The question is no longer:
What do we think?
It becomes:
How do I respond to what the leader thinks?
The leader’s answer may not end the discussion, but it changes the discussion.
Amy Edmondson’s early research into hospital teams produced a surprising result.
Higher-performing nursing teams appeared to report more medication errors than lower-performing teams.
Edmondson did not conclude that the stronger teams were necessarily making more mistakes. Her interpretation was that they were more willing to identify and discuss the mistakes that occurred.
In her later research, Edmondson described psychological safety as a shared belief that people can take interpersonal risks within a team. They can ask questions, admit errors, challenge assumptions and offer uncertain ideas without expecting humiliation or punishment.
In a psychologically unsafe team, the leader may hear very little bad news.
That can look reassuring.
There are few disagreements. Problems seem manageable. Meetings run smoothly. People nod when decisions are made.
But the absence of challenge does not necessarily indicate the presence of trust.
Sometimes the team is not agreeing.
They are calculating.
They are deciding whether it is safe to say what they really think. They are waiting to see which view will be rewarded. They are having the honest conversation in the corridor after the meeting rather than around the table.
Small concerns remain unspoken until they become large problems that can no longer be hidden.
The leader then wonders why nobody warned him.
A leader may never describe himself as someone who needs to have all the answers.
The pattern is more likely to become visible through its consequences.
He may notice that he does most of the talking in meetings. People contribute more readily after he has left the room. Delegated work repeatedly returns to him for approval, correction or rescue. Employees raise problems only once those problems have become urgent.
He may also notice that his team brings him questions they should be capable of answering themselves.
This can be frustrating.
Yet it is worth asking whether the team has learned that independent thinking carries a cost.
Have people experienced the leader improving every suggestion, correcting every attempt or replacing their decision with his own?
Has consultation become a performance in which everyone is invited to contribute, but the leader’s answer ultimately prevails?
Has the leader unintentionally trained the team to wait?
These are not necessarily signs of a bad leader.
They may be signs of a capable leader whose strength has become overused.
The alternative is not for the leader to become passive, indecisive or absent.
Leadership does not mean responding to every difficult question with a shrug and asking the team to work it out.
The leader remains responsible for creating the space in which problem-solving, creativity and clarity can emerge. He must still protect standards and ensure that decisions are made.
Intellectual humility is not the denial of competence. It is the ability to recognise the limits of one’s knowledge while remaining engaged and accountable.
Research by Erlend Løhre and Karl Halvor Teigen offers an important distinction. Their experimental studies found that leaders were perceived as more competent when they framed uncertainty as a feature of the situation rather than only as a personal deficiency.
There is a difference between saying:
I have no idea. You decide.
and saying:
This is a genuinely uncertain situation. We do not yet have enough information, and I want us to use the experience in this room before we decide.
Both acknowledge uncertainty.
Only one abandons leadership.
The intellectually humble leader does not pretend to know what he does not know. But neither does he surrender responsibility for how the answer will be found.
One of the simplest experiments a leader can conduct is to change the order in which he contributes.
Instead of beginning with his answer, he can begin with questions:
· “What are you seeing that I may not be seeing?”
· “Who is closest to this problem?”
· “What are we assuming?”
· “What would you recommend if the decision were yours?”
· “What are we not saying because it may be uncomfortable?”
Then he waits.
Not with the impatient silence of someone who already knows the answer, but with genuine curiosity.
Speaking last does not mean having no point of view. It means resisting the urge to make your point of view the boundary around everyone else’s thinking.
This may feel uncomfortable at first.
That discomfort may be the work.
For the male leader who has learned that strength means certainty, holding the uncertainty can feel like weakness. Yet there may be a more mature expression of strength available to him.
The strength to remain present without taking over.
The strength to allow another person to know more.
The strength to create space without disappearing from it.
The strength to say:
I am still responsible, but I do not have to be the only source of wisdom in this room.
Perhaps your team does not need you to become less capable.
Perhaps they need you to use your capability differently.
Not to prove that you are the smartest person in the room, but to help the room become smarter.
Not to rescue people from every difficult question, but to create the conditions in which they can think, contribute and grow.
Not to remove uncertainty prematurely, but to help the team work through it responsibly.
The next time the room becomes quiet and everyone looks towards you, notice what happens inside you.
Notice the urge to fill the silence.
Then ask yourself:
Are they waiting for my answer—or my permission?
If you recognise this pattern in your own leadership, executive coaching can help you explore the fear, identity and beliefs beneath the need to provide every answer.
If you work with a leader whose need to provide every answer is silencing the team, leadership coaching may help them recognise a pattern they cannot yet see for themselves.
This is not simply about communication. It may be a deeper question about fear, identity, trust and what the leader believes leadership requires of them.
And those patterns can change.
Research informing this article
Atir, S., Rosenzweig, E., & Dunning, D. (2015). “When Knowledge Knows No Bounds: Self-Perceived Expertise Predicts Claims of Impossible Knowledge.” Psychological Science, 26(8), 1295–1303.
Edmondson, A. C. (1996). “Learning from Mistakes Is Easier Said Than Done: Group and Organizational Influences on the Detection and Correction of Human Error.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32(1), 5–28.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Gao, C., Niu, A., & Yu, C. (2025). “The Role of Intellectual Humility Leadership on Thriving at Work and Performance of New Generation Employees.” Frontiers in Psychology, 16.
Løhre, E., & Teigen, K. H. (2023). “When Leaders Disclose Uncertainty: Effects of Expressing Internal and External Uncertainty About a Decision.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Pleck, J. H. (1995). “The Gender Role Strain Paradigm: An Update.” In A New Psychology of Men.
Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.” Science, 330(6004), 686–688.
“We know what needs to happen, we just don’t seem capable of moving fast enough.”
This is a familiar frustration for CEOs and leadership teams who are not short of ambition, ideas or strategic intent..
The direction has been agreed. The priorities are understood. There may even be a detailed implementation plan.
Yet somewhere between the decision and delivery, momentum begins to fade.
Decisions take longer than expected. Priorities become diluted. Resources remain committed elsewhere. Different functions interpret the strategy through their own realities. Technology may not support what is being asked of it. People may hesitate, resist or wait for greater clarity.
By the time coordinated action begins, the environment may already have changed.
Bain & Company’s 2026 CEO Agenda found that fewer than half of the CEOs surveyed believed their organisations could adapt and execute at the speed the market now requires. Confidence was particularly low in their organisations’ ability to course-correct quickly, invest in resilience and sense market changes early enough to respond effectively. (Bain)
Bain describes a gap between where strategy is set and how it is delivered. Middle layers may remain bureaucratic, decision processes may slow action and accountability may become unclear. Its research suggests that execution needs to be treated as a repeatable organisational system rather than merely a management aspiration. (Bain)
McKinsey’s Global Tech Agenda 2026 reinforces this from a technology and operating-model perspective. Its survey of 632 technology and business leaders found that only 29% said their business and technology teams co-created strategic plans throughout the year. Among top-performing organisations, the figure rose to nearly half. (McKinsey & Company)
McKinsey also found that cross-functional product and platform models can reduce handovers, improve the flow of information and allow decisions to happen within days rather than months. This was not simply the result of introducing better technology. It reflected changes in how people, information, technology and decision-making were brought together. (McKinsey & Company)
The issue, therefore, is seldom simply a lack of strategy.
It may lie in the organisation’s capacity to interpret, coordinate, decide, learn and adjust while acting.
When progress stalls, there is a natural temptation to identify the culprit.
· It must be the people.
· It must be the process.
· It must be the technology.
· It must be middle management.
· It must be the market.
Any of these may be contributing. Persistent execution challenges, however, seldom sit neatly within only one dimension.
A slow decision may initially appear to be a process problem. Beneath it may sit unclear authority, competing incentives, inadequate information, political tension, risk aversion, insufficient capability or a technology constraint.
What appears to be resistance from employees may reflect reluctance to support yet another priority that is likely to be replaced. It may arise from poor communication, previous experiences of unsuccessful change, fear of losing influence or a culture that encourages initiative in theory but punishes mistakes in practice.
Factors outside the organisation may also alter the conditions under which the strategy was created. Customer behaviour, regulation, economic pressure, geopolitical instability and technological disruption may all affect what is possible—or what is now required.
The execution gap is therefore better understood as systemic and multidimensional.
Leadership, people, culture, governance, processes, technology, capabilities, incentives, resources and the external environment may all play a role. These are not an exhaustive list, nor do they contribute equally in every organisation. More importantly, they interact.
The useful question is seldom simply:
Which one is the problem?
It is more often:
How might these different dimensions be interacting to slow our response?
When leaders feel execution falling behind, the instinctive response is often to increase urgency.
More meetings are scheduled. Deadlines are shortened. Reporting becomes more frequent. Decisions are escalated. People are reminded how important the strategy is.
This may create movement, but movement should not be mistaken for momentum.
If decision rights remain unclear, greater urgency may create more escalation.
If priorities remain unresolved, additional activity may intensify competition for the same resources.
If people do not understand the reasoning behind a decision, pressure may produce compliance without commitment.
If the organisation has little tolerance for learning or experimentation, people may become more cautious precisely when greater adaptability is required.
Nor should speed become the objective at any cost. A rushed decision made without sufficient understanding may create more work than the delay it was intended to prevent.
The goal is not merely to move faster.
It is to develop the capacity to act at the speed the environment demands, while retaining sound judgement and organisational coherence.
Traditional strategy is often treated as a sequence:
First analyse. Then decide. Then execute. Review later.
That sequence may remain useful in certain circumstances. But when conditions change during implementation, strategy and execution cannot remain entirely separate activities.
Execution itself produces information.
Customers respond. Employees encounter obstacles that were not visible in the boardroom. Technology reveals new possibilities and limitations. Competitors react. Regulation shifts. Assumptions that appeared sound six months ago become less certain.
The organisation must therefore be able to sense, interpret and respond while continuing to deliver.
This does not mean abandoning the strategy every time something changes. Constantly shifting direction can create its own paralysis.
It means developing the judgement to recognise what should remain steady, what may need to change and how the organisation will distinguish between the two.
That capacity—to keep sensing, deciding, learning and adapting without discarding what still works—is at the heart of Reinvention.
The Reinvention methodology developed by Dr Nadya Zhexembayeva and taught through the Reinvention Academy does not treat change as an occasional project between long periods of stability. It supports organisations in developing an ongoing capacity to anticipate, design and implement change repeatedly. (learn2reinvent.com)
In The Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook: How to Thrive in Chaos, Reinvention is described as a systematic approach involving continuous sense-making, learning and the integration of knowledge across functions, disciplines and organisational boundaries. It also seeks to balance continuity and change—building on the past to protect present and future viability.
That balance matters.
Reinvention is not about discarding the organisation’s identity, experience or accumulated strengths each time the environment changes. Nor does it assume that everything new is automatically better.
It is about preserving what remains valuable while being willing to renew what no longer serves the organisation’s present reality.
In plain language, it is not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It is about innovating towards what is needed in the present.
Applied to the strategy-execution gap, Reinvention moves the conversation beyond:
“How do we implement this strategy faster?”
It invites leaders to ask:
What has changed since this decision was made?
Which assumptions remain valid, and which may need to be reconsidered?
Where does information become delayed, distorted or trapped?
What in the organisation supports the strategy—and what may unintentionally work against it?
What should be preserved as we adapt?
These questions help leaders look beyond the most visible symptom.
A process may need to change, but the process cannot be separated from the people expected to use it.
Technology may need to be introduced, but technology cannot be separated from capability, behaviour, data quality and decision-making.
A structure may need to be redesigned, but structure cannot be separated from accountability, relationships, power and identity.
A strategic priority may require more resources, but that cannot be separated from what the organisation is willing to stop doing.
The methodology does not assume that there is one universal intervention. It offers a way of examining the wider organisational system, identifying where renewal may be required and building the capacity to respond repeatedly rather than waiting for the next crisis.
The pressure on organisations to execute faster is unlikely to disappear.
But demanding more speed from people working within the same assumptions, routines and constraints may simply produce more activity, frustration and exhaustion.
A better starting point is an honest examination of what happens after a strategic decision has been made: where decisions slow, priorities become diluted, people struggle to act, systems fail to support the work, and changes outside the organisation challenge the assumptions behind the strategy.
I work with CEOs and leadership teams, as a Certified Reinvention Practitioner, to understand where execution is losing momentum, how the contributing factors may be interacting, and what may need to be preserved, adapted or renewed.
The work is not about imposing another generic transformation programme. It is about strengthening the organisation’s capacity to anticipate, adapt and act at the speed its environment demands of it.
When the strategy is clear but coordinated action remains too slow, pushing harder may not be enough.
It may be time to reinvent how the organisation moves.
There are few things more admirable than a man who takes responsibility seriously.
The man who gets up early, stays late when he needs to, carries the weight of a business, provides for his family and quietly shoulders burdens that few people ever see deserves our respect. The world needs men who are willing to work hard.
The thing is … this article isn’t really about hard work.
It’s about what can happen, almost without us noticing, when work quietly becomes more than something we do.
I’ve never met a man who deliberately set out to make his job his identity.
It doesn’t happen like that.
It happens one decision at a time.
One more project.
One more promotion.
One more opportunity.
One more season where life is unusually demanding.
You tell yourself that things will settle down once this deadline passes, once the business is stable, once the new team is in place, once the children are older. But life has a habit of turning temporary seasons into permanent lifestyles. And because the change happens so gradually, it simply becomes normal.
Like the old story of the frog in slowly warming water, we rarely notice the temperature changing while we’re living in it.
The first thing that often drifts isn’t your work.
It’s your presence.
You arrive home, but part of you is still in the office. Dinner is interrupted by emails that “will only take a minute”. Family conversations compete with tomorrow’s presentation. Even on holiday, your phone never quite leaves your hand. The people you love still get your time, but they no longer feel as though they have all of you.
Researchers who study work addiction have observed that one of its defining characteristics is not simply working long hours, but finding it increasingly difficult to mentally disengage from work. Long before burnout appears, the mind has forgotten how to rest (Andreassen, Griffiths, Hetland, & Pallesen, 2012).
At first, it all feels justified.
You’re doing it for your family.
You’re building something that will benefit them.
You’re carrying responsibilities that someone has to carry.
And all of that may be true.
But good intentions don’t always protect us from unintended consequences.
One of the quietest drifts happens inside our closest relationships.
Your spouse probably isn’t hoping for a larger house, another promotion or a more impressive title. More often than not, they’re simply hoping for you. Your attention. Your curiosity. Your laughter. Your presence. Over time, they may begin to wonder whether work has become the place where the best parts of you now live. The distance that grows between husband and wife is rarely created by a single event. It’s created by thousands of moments where work quietly gets the first conversation, the best energy and the deepest emotional investment.
Children experience it differently.
They don’t measure your love by how well you provide. They measure it by whether they can still find you.
Children have an extraordinary ability to interrupt what we believe is urgent with what is actually important. If your thoughts are permanently occupied elsewhere, their questions can begin to feel like interruptions instead of invitations. Your patience becomes shorter. You hear yourself saying, “Not now,” more often than you ever imagined you would. They don’t understand the pressure you’re carrying. They simply know that Dad seems harder to reach than he used to be.
Then something else begins to drift.
The culture around you.
Whether you’re the CEO of a multinational company or the owner of a small business, people learn more from what you model than from what you say. If you answer emails late into the night, never truly switch off and quietly celebrate exhaustion as commitment, don’t be surprised if your team concludes that’s simply what leadership looks like. Before long, people begin carrying a second-hand version of your stress. Some will try to keep up. Others will quietly burn out. Some will eventually leave because they cannot sustain the pace that has become normal.
Organisational researchers have long recognised what many leaders discover too late: cultures are shaped less by the values written on the wall than by the behaviours leaders repeatedly model (Williams, 2014).
Perhaps none of this sounds dramatic.
That’s because drift rarely does.
It simply becomes the new normal.
Until one day someone asks how you’re doing and, without thinking, you answer with your workload.
Or you discover that your mood rises and falls almost entirely on what happened at work that day.
A difficult client follows you home. A disappointing quarter feels strangely personal.
Success brings relief, but never quite satisfaction.
The next target is already waiting.
Psychologists have a name for this. They describe it as contingent self-worth—when our value gradually becomes attached to achievement, performance or success (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001). Work itself isn’t the problem. The problem is that our identity slowly begins drawing its security from something that was never designed to carry that weight.
If that has happened, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’ve drifted. And drift is something that happens to good men.
Men who genuinely wanted to provide. Men who wanted to build something meaningful. Men who never imagined that the very strengths which helped them succeed might one day begin costing them the people they were working so hard for.
Research into men’s gender role conflict has consistently shown that when a man’s identity becomes overly dependent on success, competition and providing, the cost is often borne in his relationships, emotional wellbeing and willingness to seek support (O’Neil, 2008).
So perhaps the question isn’t whether you’ve been working too hard.
Perhaps the better question is this:
When was the last time you found harmony between all the roles you play as a man?
Not just the worker.
But the husband.
The father.
The friend.
The leader.
The son.
The man.
Because no one role was ever meant to consume all the others.
If some of this feels uncomfortably familiar, don’t respond with guilt. Respond with curiosity.
Take a walk somewhere that reminds you there’s a world beyond your inbox.
Ask your spouse, “Have I been truly present?”
Ask your children, “What do you miss most about me?”
Ask someone you trust, “Have you noticed me changing?”
And when they answer, resist the temptation to defend yourself.
Listen.
The people who love us often notice our drift long before we do.
The encouraging news is that drift is never the end of the story. Once we can see it, we can begin to change direction. Because you were always meant to be more than your job.
And perhaps that’s the real question hidden behind the title of this article.
Who are you without your job?
If this article resonated with you...
If something you’ve read has touched a nerve, perhaps don’t let it end here.
Many of the leaders, business owners and professionals I work with have spent years building successful careers and organisations, only to discover that somewhere along the way they’ve lost harmony between the many roles they carry as men.
If you’d value a confidential conversation about restoring that harmony—for yourself, your family or your leadership—I would be honoured to walk that journey with you.
Sometimes the first step towards restoration is simply an honest conversation.
If you’d like to explore that further, I’d love to hear from you.
References
Andreassen, C. S., Griffiths, M. D., Hetland, J., & Pallesen, S. (2012). Development of a work addiction scale. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 53(3), 265–272. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2012.00947.x
Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.593
O’Neil, J. M. (2008). Summarizing 25 years of research on men’s gender role conflict using the Gender Role Conflict Scale. The Counseling Psychologist, 36(3), 358–445. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000008317057
Williams, M. B. (2014). Is the Ideal Worker Still Real? Sources and Consequences of Men’s Professional Identities (Doctoral dissertation). Harvard Business School.
Yes, YOU … every leader has one.
A conversation they’ve rehearsed dozens of times in their head, but never had.
It may be addressing poor performance. Challenging the behaviour of a high performer. Confronting a colleague whose attitude has changed. Or naming the issue everyone else can already see, but no one is willing to say out loud.
The conversation itself may be short, but living with it can take months.
Research suggests that avoiding difficult workplace conversations comes at a cost. Leaders experience increasing stress and mental load. Teams lose trust, clarity and momentum. The person being avoided is often left confused, unaware of the issue, or uncertain how to improve. Conversely, leaders who address conflict constructively help reduce workplace stress and restore a greater sense of control for everyone involved.¹²
Avoiding the conversation doesn’t remove the cost. It simply delays it—and usually asks everyone to pay something, even the leader.
There are excellent books that teach leaders how to have these conversations. Crucial Conversations, Radical Candor and Candid Conversations all offer practical frameworks for speaking with greater skill and confidence.
But before asking how to have the conversation, I wonder if we should first ask something else.
What is stopping us from having it? When waiting is wisdom... and when it isn’t
Research suggests leaders often postpone difficult conversations for reasons that sound entirely reasonable.
· “It will sort itself out.”
· “I don’t want to damage the relationship.”
· “Now isn’t the right time.”
· “They’ll realise it themselves.”
· “I need a little more time to think.”
Sometimes those reasons are valid.
An emotionally charged conversation rarely ends well. There are moments when more information is needed, emotions need to settle, or the other person simply isn’t in a position to hear what needs to be said.
Good leaders don’t rush difficult conversations. But neither do they hide behind good reasons indefinitely. The difference lies in the purpose of the delay. Waiting creates the conditions for a better conversation. Avoidance protects us from having one.
One of the privileges of coaching leaders is that I get to sit with them beneath the surface of the problem. Interestingly, the conversation they think they’re avoiding is often not the real issue. As we explore what’s happening, something more personal frequently emerges.
Sometimes the conversation we keep postponing isn’t exposing the weakness of the employee. It’s exposing the fear of the leader.
Perhaps they’re afraid of damaging a relationship they’ve worked hard to build. Perhaps they don’t want to be seen as harsh or unfair. Perhaps they’re worried they’ll handle the conversation badly. Perhaps they’re wrestling with the uncomfortable reality that the issue should have been addressed months ago.
Notice what has happened. The focus has quietly shifted. The conversation is no longer just about the employee. It’s about the leader.
That’s why one question has become increasingly important in my own coaching.
Not: “What should you say?”
But: “What is your silence protecting?”
Because every avoided conversation serves something.
· Comfort
· Approval
· Certainty
· Control
None of those make us weak. They make us human. But they can also quietly undermine our leadership.
The difficulty with avoidance is that it doesn’t even really protect the leader. While we experience temporary relief, everyone else begins carrying the consequences. The team wonders why obvious issues are left untouched.
Standards become blurred. Trust weakens because people no longer know what will—or won’t—be addressed. The individual who most needs feedback loses the opportunity to grow.
Meanwhile, the leader continues carrying the emotional weight of a conversation that becomes heavier with every passing week.
The silence that once felt protective gradually becomes exhausting.
One of the biggest myths in leadership is that courageous leaders are fearless. I don’t believe they are. I think courageous leaders become curious. Curious about the stories they are living from.
· The story that conflict damages relationships.
· The story that kindness means avoiding discomfort.
· The story that good leaders shouldn’t upset people.
· The story that every difficult conversation has to be handled perfectly.
Those stories often begin with good intentions. But there comes a point where they cost more than they protect. When leaders begin letting go of those old assumptions, something remarkable happens. Conversations become clearer because they are no longer carrying weeks of anxiety. Accountability becomes more consistent because expectations are spoken instead of assumed. Trust grows because people know where they stand. Teams spend less energy navigating uncertainty and more energy achieving meaningful results. And leaders often discover that the very stress they were trying to avoid begins to disappear.
The difficult conversation hasn’t changed. The leader has.
If this article has caused you to reflect on conversations you postpone, perhaps the next step isn’t simply learning another communication technique. Perhaps it’s understanding what your avoidance has been protecting—and whether it’s still serving you.
If you’re ready to explore that journey, I’d love to support you on it. Together we can uncover the assumptions that may be keeping you stuck, restore the confidence and clarity to lead difficult conversations well, and create a team characterised by greater trust, healthier accountability, stronger performance, and a leader who no longer carries unnecessary stress alone.
References
National Centre for Social Research. (2025, November 19). How do UK workers experience, respond to, and resolve conflict in the workplace?
MIT Press Journals. (2012). A helping hand? The moderating role of leaders’ conflict management behavior on the conflict-stress relationship of employees. Negotiation Journal, 28(3), 253–279.
Own Your Leadership. (2026, April 5). Why leaders avoid difficult conversations
Not a statement, but a memory of the future. A clear sense of where the business is going; what it wants to become.
Time is set aside.
The right people are in the room.
There is clarity. Alignment. Energy.
It is all documented and agreed,
… and then business resumes.
Most strategies don’t fail.
They’re quietly abandoned—by the very people who created them.
Not because they were wrong.
But because nothing meaningful changed in how the business actually operates.
The strategy looks good on paper.
But it doesn’t survive the reality of how the business actually operates.
Priorities shift under pressure.
People fall back to what they know.
Processes reinforce old patterns.
Systems track the wrong things.
And external conditions rarely cooperate.
The strategy exists.
But the business does not move towards the strategy.
It ends up where many strategies do—
not in the day-to-day rhythm of the business,
but as a dusty, abandoned strategy document.
Well-crafted. Well-intended.
And completely disconnected from how the realities of the business.
In a typical business, the strategy is clear.
Grow a key product line. Focus the team. Increase market share.
But within weeks, the pressure of day-to-day operations took over.
Sales continued pushing legacy products because that’s what they knew would close.
Operations prioritised efficiency over change because targets still needed to be met.
Leadership meetings tracked performance—but not progress against the strategy.
The systems hadn’t changed.
The incentives hadn’t changed.
The conversations hadn’t changed.
So the strategy didn’t stand a chance.
The strategy didn’t fail.
The system rejected it.
Vision sets direction.
Strategy defines choices.
The operating system determines what actually happens.
Most businesses spend their time in the first two.
Very few redesign the third.
The operating system is not what the business says it does.
It’s what actually happens every day—especially when pressure hits.
It’s how decisions are made.
How work actually flows.
Who owns what—and is held to it.
What systems enable or block execution.
And what gets prioritised when everything feels urgent.
Part of the problem sits in how strategy is still taught and understood.
Much of it follows the thinking of Michael Porter—structured, deliberate, built on positioning and long-term advantage.
But most businesses today operate closer to Henry Mintzberg’s thinking—where strategy emerges through action, learning, and adaptation.
This shift—from fixed strategy to adaptive, evolving execution—is also central to the work of the Reinvention Academy, which recognises that strategy must continuously respond to a changing environment, rather than attempt to control it.
Businesses design strategy in one world…
and try to execute it in another.
It’s translation.
Aspiration alone does not change a business.
For a strategy to work, it must move into the system of the business itself—
where people, process, and technology align under pressure.
Vision → Strategy → Operating System → Behaviour
At Aruka, our work is where strategy meets the system.
Strategy must be translated into ownership, cadence, decision-making, and measurement.
But more importantly, it must evolve.
Strategy lives and breathes with the system.
If the system cannot respond, the strategy becomes rigid.
If the system has no direction, the strategy becomes noise.
Leaders move from driving direction to designing conditions for execution.
From managing people to creating space for performance.
Is your strategy being executed… or quietly ignored?
If your strategy is clear but not lived—
You don’t have a strategy problem.
You have a translation problem.
If you’re entering your next strategic cycle—
Focus not just on direction,
but on whether your business can carry it.
If you need support unlocking this, let’s chat.
📷 StockCake
“I just need my people to take more accountability.”
It sounds reasonable.
It’s also where many leadership problems begin.
It’s one of the most common frustrations I hear from leaders.
And yet, more often than not, what they’re describing isn’t a lack of accountability.
It’s a misunderstanding of what it is.
Accountability and responsibility are not the same thing.
Responsibility sits with the leader.
It doesn’t transfer.
Accountability, on the other hand, is something different entirely.
It is not assigned.
It is not imposed.
And despite what many believe - it is not automatically accepted when a request is made.
Accountability is the personal ownership of an outcome once it has been consciously accepted.
That last part matters.
Consciously accepted.
And this is where many leaders get it wrong.
Because accountability is not created when a request is made.
It is created when ownership is truly taken on.
You can recognise this moment. It shows up when the employee begins to:
ask clarifying questions without being prompted
restate the outcome in their own words
surface risks or constraints early
take initiative beyond the instruction given
Until then, you don’t have accountability. You have agreement - or, at times, compliance.
It is almost like the quote from George Bernard Shaw:
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
Leaders often believe that when they communicate a task, they have “transferred accountability.”
They haven’t.
What they’ve done is extend an invitation:
to own an outcome
to carry something forward
to be answerable for what is produced
But an invitation is not the same as acceptance.
And in most organisational systems, that distinction is lost.
Instead, accountability is often assumed - or worse, forced.
A request is made.
A deadline is set.
And without verifying real clarity, alignment, or space for challenge, the expectation is quietly imposed.
What gets called accountability is often something else entirely:
Compliance under pressure, disguised as ownership.
When leaders say, “My people aren’t accountable,” it’s worth asking a harder question:
What are they avoiding?
Because in many cases, what looks like a people problem is often an abdication problem.
Leaders:
hand over work without full clarity
assume understanding without checking
disappear into busyness
and reappear at the end to evaluate the outcome
As you can see, this is not simply an issue of effective delegation - it is deeper than that.
There is no ongoing engagement.
No course correction.
No shared ownership of the process.
And then, when the result misses the mark, the conclusion is predictable:
“They’re not taking accountability.”
But often what has really happened is this:
The leader has stepped away from their responsibility for the process… while still expecting ownership of the outcome from their employee.
That is not accountability.
That smacks of abdication.
As Brené Brown writes in Dare to Lead, “clear is kind, unclear is unkind.”
But clarity is not just about communication - it requires courage.
It forces leaders to be precise, to think deeply about what they actually want, and to say it clearly. It also requires vulnerability - because precision exposes gaps, both in thinking and in leadership.
And for many, that is exactly what gets avoided.
In many cases, accountability is not absent - it has simply never been properly established.
And without that foundation, both leaders and employees default to what feels safest:
leaders step back too early, and employees focus on effort rather than ownership.
In the absence of clarity, a safe space for enquiry, and ongoing support, employees default to something safer:
Effort.
“I did the work.”
“I followed the instructions.”
“I ticked the boxes.”
“I delivered what I thought was required.”
And from their perspective, they have shown accountability.
But more often than not, leaders aren’t looking for effort. They’re looking for outcomes.
This creates a silent misalignment:
The employee believes they’ve done their job.
The leader believes they haven’t.
And neither side is fully satisfied - nor do they understand why.
And in that gap, frustration grows - on both sides - while performance quietly declines.
In reality, clarity is rarely perfect.
In dynamic environments, direction evolves, priorities shift, and new information emerges.
As Nadya Zhexembayeva’s Reinvention thinking highlights, accountability cannot be static in a dynamic system—it must be continuously realigned through conversation, not assumed through instruction.
In affected organisations, this can be compounded by structural gaps:
unclear role definitions
inconsistent performance frameworks
and a lack of rhythm in check-ins and feedback
Without these, accountability relies too heavily on individual interpretation - rather than shared understanding.
In many teams, there are individuals who compensate for this gap.
They step in.
They figure it out.
They take ownership - even when clarity is poor.
These are your high performers. Your “go-to team.” They are valuable - but this is a double-edged sword.
When mature individuals consistently compensate for unclear leadership, they don’t fix the system - they mask the problem.
Over time:
they become the stabilisers
the leader becomes dependent on them
and the system becomes fragile
And eventually, something shifts. Because even the most capable individuals were once developing employees - needing guidance, clarity, and support to grow.
Accountability is as much about performance as it is about people.
When accountability is assumed but never truly agreed, employees begin to feel:
abandoned
set up to fail
unsure of what success actually looks like
Self-doubt creeps in:
“Am I actually capable?”
“Why can’t I seem to get this right?”
Over time, something more subtle happens:
They stop putting themselves forward.
They stop taking risks.
They stop engaging fully.
They retreat into safety.
Not because they don’t care - but because they’ve learned that ownership without support is costly.
And for your strongest people?
They don’t retreat. They leave.
People don’t leave because they were challenged. They leave because they were repeatedly set up to fail.
While leadership plays a significant role, accountability breakdowns are rarely one-dimensional.
There are also moments where the challenge sits within the system itself - through the individuals who make it up.
This is where discernment matters.
Because while many accountability challenges are systemic, the system itself is made up of individuals - and how each person shows up within that system matters.
As Patrick Lencioni highlights in The Ideal Team Player, high-functioning team members demonstrate three key traits:
Humble
Hungry
Smart
When one or more of these are absent or underdeveloped, accountability doesn’t just drift—it becomes difficult to sustain, even in well-led environments.
This is not about separating the individual from the system, but recognising that accountability is shaped by both.
And understanding where the breakdown sits is critical - because not every challenge requires the same response.
At its core, accountability is not a process.
It is not a management tool.
It is a relational act.
It is the moment where a leader entrusts something meaningful to another person - and remains present in that process.
Larry Julian, in God Is My CEO, speaks to this idea of stewardship - what is entrusted must be cared for, not offloaded.
And this reframes everything.
Accountability is not about getting work done.
It is about how we carry what has been entrusted to us.
Done well, it says:
I trust you
I will support you
And I remain responsible for the outcome we are creating together
Done poorly, it says:
Figure it out
Don’t get it wrong
And I’ll see you at the end
One builds people.
The other breaks them.
If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. Most organisations don’t have a simple accountability problem.
They have a combination of:
unclear expectations
inconsistent leadership engagement
and varying levels of individual readiness to take ownership
And when these interact, accountability doesn’t disappear—it becomes distorted.
Because most accountability problems don’t start with behaviour.
They start with assumptions.
If you’re finding yourself frustrated by a lack of accountability in your team, pause before looking outward.
Ask yourself:
Was the outcome truly clear?
Was there space for challenge and alignment?
Did I remain engaged—or did I disappear?
Did I invite ownership… or assume it?
Because accountability doesn’t begin with your team.
It begins with how you lead.
We work with leaders and teams who are experiencing exactly this tension.
When accountability is inconsistent, performance doesn’t match expectations, and the underlying cause isn’t immediately clear.
Through structured assessments and facilitated engagement, we help organisations:
identify where breakdowns are across leadership, systems, or individuals
surface the constraints behind performance gaps
and support the implementation of practical, sustainable solutions that restore alignment and trust
Because accountability is not fixed through pressure.
It is restored through clarity, structure, and relationship.
📷 StockCake
There comes a point where the success and circumstance of the life you’ve built no longer answer the questions you’re asking.
Not because it’s broken.
But because something underneath it has shifted.
What once felt like progress now feels like maintenance. What once felt like identity now feels like habit.
And the question is no longer - “How do I succeed?” But rather - “Who am I, when this changes?”
In the first article, we explored how easily identity can become entangled with circumstance - how what happens around us begins to define who we believe we are.
In the second, we moved into a more seductive space - success - and questioned whether it is not just failure, but achievement itself, that quietly anchors identity in ways we seldom interrogate.
Now, in this final piece, the question becomes more personal - and perhaps more confronting. If identity is shaped by both circumstance and success - what is left when we choose neither?
Because at some point, whether through disruption or awareness, life will ask us to stand apart from both.
Identity rarely collapses overnight.
It drifts.
• A role becomes a label.
• A season becomes a definition.
• A result becomes a reflection of worth.
Circumstance tells us: This is who you are because of what has happened to you.
Success tells us: This is who you are because of what you have achieved.
Both feel true. Both carry evidence. Both are reinforced by the world around us. And yet, both are still incomplete. This is not a philosophical nuance - it is a lived tension.
Because when circumstance shifts, or success fades - and both inevitably do - the identity built on them begins to feel unstable. Not wrong. Just fragile.
There is a subtle cost to allowing identity to be borrowed from external anchors.
It limits freedom.
If my identity is tied to circumstance, I become reactive - shaped by events rather than grounded within them.
If my identity is tied to success, I become protective - needing to maintain, defend, or replicate what once validated me.
In both cases, identity becomes something to manage rather than something to live from.
This is where many leaders - and many men, in particular - find themselves in midlife.
Capable. Proven. Respected.
And yet, carrying an undercurrent of unease:
• What happens if this changes?
• What if I am no longer this successful?
• What if I have outgrown this environment?
• What, then, remains of me?
These are not questions of failure. They are questions of identity maturity.
If circumstance and success are not sufficient foundations, then what is? This is where the conversation shifts - from what has shaped you and what you have achieved to something far more foundational:
What you choose.
Not in the sense of decision-making alone, but in the deeper sense of orientation.
• What do you stand for when conditions are unstable?
• Who are you becoming when no one is watching?
• What do you practice when there is no external reward?
This is where identity begins to detach from environment and outcome, and root itself in something more enduring.
In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown speaks about living from values rather than performing for approval. This distinction, though subtle, has a significant effect, shifting the focus of identity from external validation to internal consistency.
Similarly, in Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies, Mourkogiannis suggests that a true sense of purpose becomes a guiding principle, going beyond market conditions and short-term goals. This idea also applies to individuals.
When a person’s identity is based on their chosen values and the purpose they pursue, it becomes less vulnerable to the ups and downs of life and the temptations of success.
Not immune - but more stable.
It would be easy, at this point, to dismiss circumstance and success altogether. But that would be a mistake. They matter.
Our circumstances shapes us, often in ways that build resilience, perspective, and empathy. Success affirms our capability, it creates more opportunity, influence, and momentum.
The goal is not to reject them but to relate to them differently.
To allow circumstance to inform, but not define. To allow success to enable, but not determine. This is a tension, not a resolution. And it requires awareness.
Because the pull back into old patterns is strong. It is easier to be the person shaped by events. It is easier to be the person validated by results.
It is harder - but far more powerful - to be the person who chooses who they are, independent of both.
So what does this look like, practically?
It is less dramatic than one might expect. It is not a reinvention. It is not a declaration.
It is a series of small, consistent shifts:
• Noticing when your sense of worth rises and falls with outcomes.
• Catching the moments where you default to “this is just how things are” rather than “this is how I choose to respond.”
• Reconnecting with practices that reflect who you want to be, not just what you want to achieve.
It is choosing presence over performance. Integrity over impression. Alignment over approval.
And perhaps most importantly, it is allowing your definition of success to evolve without experiencing it as a threat to your identity.
Because as we touched on previously:
Our individual definition of success can change without threatening our identity.
Status often cannot.
That line exposes the difference between living from identity, and living for validation.
There is a different kind of confidence that emerges when identity is no longer outsourced.
It is grounded - less performative, less reactive, less dependent on being seen.
It does not need constant reinforcement and does not collapse under pressure, it holds.
Not because circumstances are favourable. Not because success is guaranteed.
But because it is rooted in something chosen, not assigned.
Across these three articles, we have moved through three layers:
1. Identity and Circumstance - how the world shapes us
2. Identity and Success - how outcomes define us
3. Identity and Choice - how we ultimately anchor ourselves
This is not a linear journey. It is a continual one. At different points in life, one layer will feel more dominant than the others. But the invitation remains the same - to become aware of where your identity is currently anchored - and to decide, consciously, whether that is where you want it to be.
Not just a reflective question, but a directional one.
If circumstance changes…
If success shifts…
Who are you choosing to be?
Because in the end, that choice - however understated it may be - is the one thing that remains consistently yours.
#Midlife #Leadership #Identity #Purpose #Burnout #PersonalGrowth
📷 StockCake
