Practical guidance for tackling common leadership challenges
Over the years, in my businesses, as an executive coach, and in leadership development, I have seen the same challenges recur repeatedly. How do you keep a team engaged? How do you raise performance? How can we help people navigate change? How do you balance results with relationships? and so on.
These questions rarely have a single answer. What matters most is the way a leader chooses to respond. Each choice not only drives performance, it also shapes the climate and culture that others experience.
I aim to offer you practical guidance and a fresh perspective, blending science and stewardship, not as fixed solutions, but as insights and steps you can apply immediately. Think of each post as both reflection and practice: useful now, and part of a longer journey of growth.
You’ll find new questions added regularly. If there’s one you’re wrestling with, I invite you to share it with me.
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How can I spot the early signs that a change is going off track?
How can leaders spot the early signs that an organisational change is going off track when the project dashboard still looks healthy? Milestones and performance measures rarely reveal the whole picture. This article explores how changes in everyday events, relationships, attention, workarounds and informal conversations can reveal what is emerging. Using a practical Notice, Explore and Respond approach, it shows how leaders can investigate competing explanations, identify bright spots and test small, recoverable interventions before difficulties become entrenched.
How can I get organisational change back on track?
What do you do when an organisational change programme is progressing on paper but not in practice? More communication, tighter controls and renewed commitment may not solve the problem. Using AIMS, a complexity-informed framework associated with Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co., this article explores how leaders can examine the conditions influencing behaviour, change interactions, test small interventions and recognise emerging patterns. A practical approach to getting organisational change moving again without assuming the original plan must be preserved.
How can I understand what is really causing conflict in my team?
Conflict between colleagues is not always what it appears to be. What looks like a personality clash or communication problem may reflect unclear responsibilities, competing interests, damaged trust or different values. Drawing on Christopher Moore's Circle of Conflict, Gary Furlong's six-source adaptation and Adam Grant's work on workplace disagreement, this article helps leaders diagnose what is really happening. Explore six sources of conflict, recognise when organisational structures or your own leadership may be contributing, and use five practical questions to decide what needs to change.
Why do people adapt to change at different speeds?
Why do some people embrace organisational change while others struggle to move forward? William Bridges' Transition Model helps explain why people adapt at different speeds and what leaders can do to support them. Explore the three phases of psychological transition, practical leadership actions and the difference between resistance and legitimate concerns.
How can I learn from stressful experiences and build resilience? (Executive Stress)
Can stressful experiences make you more resilient? Learn how to reflect on, test and apply the lessons from difficult events, and prepare for the pressure points ahead.
How can I stop stress from making me negative or defensive? (Executive Stress)
Does stress make you negative, impatient or defensive? Explore how anger and fear shape leadership behaviour, and practical ways to respond to pressure with more openness.
How can I eat well when my work is demanding and stressful? (Executive Stress)
Does stress change how and what you eat? Discover practical ways to create dependable eating habits for busy days, travel and client dinners, without relying on willpower alone.
How can I use exercise to manage stress and sustain my performance? (Executive Stress)
How can exercise help you manage executive stress? Explore a realistic, balanced approach to physical activity that you can sustain through busy periods and demanding weeks.
How can I deal with the loneliness and isolation of senior leadership? (Executive Stress)
Leadership can feel isolating, especially under pressure. Learn why senior roles narrow honest conversation, and how to build confidential, practical support that fits your responsibilities.
How can I recover from sustained stress and avoid exhaustion? (Executive Stress)
Struggling to recover from sustained pressure? Discover why rest and sleep matter for leadership performance, and ten practical ways to build recovery into a demanding working week.
How can I recognise when stress is affecting my judgement? (Executive Stress)
Is pressure quietly changing how you think and decide? Pressure rarely announces itself, and by the time a decision goes wrong, the warning signs have often been there for weeks. This article shows you how to spot the early signs in your judgement, urgency and relationships, then gives you ten everyday habits that build awareness over time. Use the quick self-check to see where you are starting from.
How can I help my team regain a sense of agency?
When people stop believing their actions make a difference, initiative and motivation can decline. Drawing on Martin Seligman's research into psychological agency, this article explores five practical ways leaders can help teams regain confidence, challenge limiting beliefs and imagine new possibilities. It introduces techniques for managing pessimistic thinking, creating meaningful progress and restoring a sense of influence. Importantly, it also examines how organisational constraints, unclear authority and conflicting priorities can undermine agency, and what leaders can do to address them.
How Do I Lead People Who Don’t Report to Me?
How do you lead a seconded or matrix team when its members report to other managers? Drawing on six ideas from Adam Grant, this article explores how to build commitment, use different perspectives, manage disagreement, encourage candour and create accountability without relying on formal authority.
How can I improve collaboration at work? 6Cs Framework
How can you improve collaboration at work when people have different priorities, responsibilities and levels of authority? This practical guide helps you diagnose how people are currently working together, understand what a particular task or relationship requires and identify what may be preventing progress. It introduces the 6 Cs of collaboration: coercion, confrontation, coexistence, cooperation, collaboration and co-ownership. You will learn how to recognise each way of working, decide how much collaboration is actually needed and address the behavioural, relational and organisational conditions affecting the relationship. Rather than assuming every situation needs greater shared ownership, the framework helps leaders make deliberate changes that strengthen cooperation, joint problem-solving, decision-making and accountability across teams and organisational boundaries.
When should I give feedback privately rather than in the moment?
When should you give feedback immediately, and when is it better to wait for a private conversation? The familiar advice to praise publicly and criticise privately is useful, but real leadership situations are rarely that straightforward. Sometimes immediate feedback reinforces good performance, corrects a small mistake or prevents a problem from escalating. At other times, giving feedback in front of colleagues can create embarrassment, defensiveness or unnecessary tension. In this article, I explore how to decide when and where to give feedback, taking account of timing, privacy, emotional readiness, the seriousness of the issue and the evidence available. Drawing on feedback research and practical leadership experience, I explain the difference between intervening in the moment and arranging a fuller conversation afterwards. A practical decision table helps you choose an approach that supports learning, maintains accountability and respects the people involved.
How do I prepare for a difficult feedback conversation?
When you need to give someone difficult feedback, it is tempting to spend most of your preparation rehearsing what you intend to say. However, an effective feedback conversation begins long before you open your mouth. Good preparation involves clarifying the real issue, gathering reliable evidence, challenging your assumptions and deciding what genuinely needs to change. In this practical guide, I explore how to use the BOOST feedback model to check the quality of your evidence, distinguish between facts and interpretations, choose an appropriate structure using AID or CEDAR, and prepare yourself for possible reactions. I also share a practical 10-minute preparation checklist to help you approach difficult feedback conversations with greater clarity, curiosity and confidence. The aim is not to eliminate discomfort or control how someone responds, but to prepare for a constructive discussion that addresses what matters while leaving room for perspectives you may not have considered.
How do I give negative feedback without damaging the relationship?
Most leaders worry that negative feedback will damage a working relationship, so they either soften it until it disappears or deliver it too bluntly to be heard. In this article, I explain why trust is more often lost in the weeks after a difficult conversation than in the conversation itself, and how to protect it. You will find a way to tell whether you are drifting towards too much warmth or too little, practical steps for keeping feedback specific and honest, and ways to follow up that show you still value the person. Drawing on research into feedback and psychological safety, the article sets out five practical ways to give negative feedback without losing the trust that makes it work.
How do I protect the quality of my thinking when I’m mentally depleted?
When you are mentally depleted, your thinking doesn't simply switch off, but it can quietly shift what you choose. Learn to spot the early signs, match tasks to your capacity and add structure to protect the quality of your judgement.
How do I give feedback to someone who thinks they are performing well?
When someone believes they're performing well and you see evidence otherwise, you're facing a perception gap, not defensiveness. This is one of the most common feedback conversations in leadership. The person isn't wilfully ignoring reality. They're navigating by different evidence than yours. The approach that works is to diagnose first, surface your evidence with precision, invite them to make sense of it, and then decide together what needs to shift. This reframes the conversation from "you are wrong about yourself" to "here is what I am seeing, what do you make of it?"
How can I actually switch off once I’ve left work?
Leaving the office is not the same as leaving work. Many leaders close the laptop and carry on replaying meetings, drafting replies and sorting tomorrow into priorities long after the working day has ended. This article draws on recent research on psychological detachment, unfinished tasks, rumination and boundary management to explain why it is so hard to switch off after work, and what tends to help. You will find five practical practices, from writing a specific plan for open loops and building a shutdown sequence to sorting useful thinking from replaying, giving your attention somewhere to go and making your boundaries visible, together with micro practices and reflection questions to try this week.
What should I do when someone disagrees with my feedback?
When an employee disagrees with feedback, treat it as information before you treat it as resistance. Learn how to find out what is really being disputed, test the evidence, separate perspective from fact and decide what actually needs agreement.
How do I give feedback about someone’s behaviour rather than their personality?
When feedback targets a person’s character or personality, it inevitably triggers defensiveness, inflames conflict, and shifts the conversation away from work outcomes. To drive genuine performance improvement, leaders must master the discipline of shifting from subjective inferences to objective behavioural feedback. In this article, Andi Roberts breaks down the crucial distinction between observation and inference using the Video Camera Test, showing you how to translate emotional shorthand like "bad attitude" or "unprofessional" into concrete, verifiable facts. Discover how to structure your conversations using proven leadership frameworks like AID, BOOST, and CEDAR so you can address performance gaps directly while preserving dignity, trust, and psychological safety.
How do I make a new habit survive a busy week?
New habits often work well until the week gets busy and the context they depend on disappears. This guide explores how habits actually form, why disruption weakens them, and how to design routines that survive pressure. It covers stable cues, minimum viable versions, implementation intentions, friction, recovery after missed days and five practical exercises for building habits that work in real life, not just during ideal weeks.
How can I manage my energy, not just my diary?
Time is fixed, but your capacity to use it well is not. Managing your diary alone rarely protects the energy you bring to it. This article explores the research on recovery, work demands and four sources of energy, then turns it into five practical exercises for leaders: a limiting source check, a recovery floor, an effort and recovery rhythm, a relational energy map and a meaning link.