The Leadership Room

If your team isn't disagreeing with you, it's not because they agree. You can feel it in a meeting within a couple of minutes. In some rooms people lean in, talk over each other, and someone says "I don't think that's right" and the conversation gets better for it. In others, everyone nods, the leader does most of the talking, and the real meeting happens in the parking lot afterward. Same organization, same values on the wall, completely different results. What it is? Psycho

What you accept becomes acceptable. Most leaders don't sit somewhere sensible in the middle on accountability. They sit at one end or the other. At one end is the leader who checks in constantly. Wants to see the draft before it goes out. Asks for an update on the thing they asked about yesterday. They'd tell you they're just staying close to the work. Their team would tell you something else. At the other end is the leader who hands things over and disappears. They call it t

Purpose statements are easy. Every organisation has one, usually printed somewhere near reception, usually written by a committee. Ask the person at the desk underneath it what it means for the thing they're doing right now and you'll get a polite shrug. That's the gap. Purpose isn't a wording problem. It's a line-of-sight problem: whether each person can trace what they do today to something that matters. Here's what that looks like in practice. Take a hospital's cleaning te