The meeting before the meeting
The meeting before the meeting isn't a political manoeuvre. It's where credibility compounds, or stalls.
Ideas that challenge how leaders think.
A collection of ideas on leadership, credibility, transformation, AI, and the future of work, written for leaders, high performers, and those who aspire to carry greater responsibility.
Featured Thought
The Credibility Brief
Introducing The Credibility Brief
Authenticity and capability - combined, visible, and legible to the people who matter - outperforms performance every time. Not performance as in results. Performance as in the managed version of yourself you put on for rooms that make you feel like you have to earn your place in them.
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There Is No Should in Career Planning
We look at successful careers and assume the sequence was obvious all along. The promotion appears inevitable. The move looks strategic. The risk seems intelligent.
Credibility doesn't travel by itself
The question isn't whether your work is excellent. The question is: when someone who matters is in a room without you and your name comes up, what do they say?
The First Six Weeks Without a Map
We have built whole systems around the destination and not left enough space for what the journey, and the people we meet along it, have to tell us.
The words that are eroding your authority
Tentative language, including hedges, qualifiers, excessive apologies, and diminutives like "just" and "quickly," consistently reduces observer assessments of capability and authority, independent of the quality of the idea being expressed.
Leaders Think They Know Their People.
The longer you have led, the more certain you tend to be that you know your organisation. New research across 300,000 people in 20 countries suggests that certainty is one of the least reliable things about seniority.
The visibility trap: why excellent work isn't enough
Good work doesn't speak for itself. Credibility is assigned based on what decision-makers know you've done, not what you've done. This week: why visibility is a structural problem, not a character compromise, and what to do about it.
The Leadership Gap We Created
41% of technology leaders are considered unable to keep pace with change by their own boards. They are calling it a capability gap. When nearly half the C-suite lands in the same place, that is a pattern. Patterns live in systems, not people.
Why being over-prepared is making you less credible
The most prepared person in the room is often the least credible one. It isn't that they don't know their material. They usually know it better than anyone else in there. They don't realise that over-preparation reads as anxiety, not capability.
I Chose to Fail
There is a difference between resilience and self-punishment, and a lot of high achievers were taught to treat them as one and the same. Replacing the pursuit of perfection with the pursuit of what is actually possible is not giving up on standards.
