by Julia Felton | Oct 20, 2026
Somewhere in your inbox this morning there was probably an email thanking you for a payment you never made. You spotted it, checked the sender’s address and deleted it without a second thought, which is exactly what I did with the one that arrived in mine thanking me for $700. Yet your other team mates who receives dozens of these a week may not be quite so lucky at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon.
Most leadership teams I meet still file cybersecurity under IT and treat its budget as a cost to be contained. My guest on this week’s Impactful Teamwork, Robbie Tyrie, has spent more than 25 years in the field, and his view is refreshingly blunt. In his words, it is never a technology issue, because technology simply does what people tell it to do.
Cybersecurity Is A Trust Asset Hiding In Your Cost Base
Robbie started in cybersecurity in 1999, working on the Year 2000 problem, and went on to build security functions at JP Morgan and Virgin Money before becoming global head of cyber at FNZ Group, where he grew the team from virtually nothing to more than 100 people. He now runs Torridon Cyber, providing fractional Chief Information Security Officer support to scale-ups.
His central argument is that security is a business enabler rather than a defensive overhead. If you are taking a product to market, your clients need to trust you with their data and your investors need to trust you enough to keep investing. That trust has to be evidenced, usually through a security questionnaire which, in one recent case for the NHS, ran to 20 pages and took Robbie an entire day to complete. A business that cannot answer those questions with confidence rarely gets a second chance, because the contract simply goes to a competitor who can.
The Attackers Have Moved Down The Food Chain
Five years ago, Robbie explained, criminal groups researched individual organisations and targeted them carefully, because one bank might be worth a million pounds. AI has changed those economics completely. Attackers now write a script that hunts for weaknesses at scale, and ten businesses paying £100,000 each are just as attractive as one paying a million, which has made scale-ups and start-ups the preferred target precisely because they are easier to get into.
The UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026 found that 43% of UK businesses identified a breach or attack in the previous twelve months, while only 31% have a board member with responsibility for cyber security. The risk is widespread, and yet the ownership still sits somewhere other than the board table.
Your Own People Will Always Be The First Way In
Robbie was emphatic that any organisation’s number one cyber threat is its own staff, and that this has always been true. In his view three basics will take most businesses more than halfway to being well protected:
- Multi-factor authentication on every system that supports it.
- An asset register, because you cannot protect what you do not know you own, and he is regularly surprised by how many organisations have no idea.
- A risk register that the leadership team actually reads.
He is equally clear that the annual training module everybody clicks through for their yearly attestation achieves very little. He recommends training people at least quarterly and then testing whether it has landed with a phishing simulation, because knowledge that is never tested is simply assumed.
In the episode Robbie also shares an anonymised AI horror story that he describes as letting the genie out of the bottle, together with the two ways he now advises clients to control what their AI tools can reach. I also tell him what happened when I discovered that one of my own books had been scraped into a large language model.
Culture Is Set At The Top Or Not At All
When I asked Robbie how you get people to follow through rather than simply nod along, his answer was a leadership one. Security has to be part of the culture from a new joiner’s first day, and it has to come from the top down, because trying to build it from the bottom up is, as he put it, like building a house on sand. Until recently, he told me, most boards only cared about security once it had already become a problem.
His most practical idea costs nothing at all. He appoints security champions across departments and brings them together once a month with the security team and a member of the executive, so that everybody can see the leadership taking it seriously. A salesperson who can explain your security position confidently is, after all, winning business with it.
Retrofitting Security Costs Far More Than Building It In
Robbie’s warning for scaling businesses is that most of them leave this far too late. Scrutiny grows with every new client, vendor, board member and investor, and embedding security three years down the line is considerably harder than putting baseline controls in place on day one. When a business heads towards a sale or an IPO, investors will want an accurate picture of its cyber risk, which is why Robbie believes cyber risk belongs on the board scorecard alongside every other KPI.
He closed our conversation with the story of a small business that had to shut its doors entirely after a single attack, and it is the story I would most like every chief executive to hear.
The Question Worth Taking Into Your Next Leadership Meeting
Is your business paying cybersecurity the attention it genuinely deserves, and would every member of your leadership team give you the same answer if you asked them separately?.
Listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork. Then take the Entrenched Leadership Dynamics Diagnostic to see where your leadership team’s blind spots really sit. And if there is one person on your board who still believes cybersecurity is somebody else’s job, please send this episode to them today..
Or join us at our next executive forum, where we work through exactly this question with leaders of scaling businesses and pressure-test what human leadership needs to look like alongside the technology. Register your place here
Show Notes
00:00 Welcome and Why Cyber Matters
00:45 Robbie’s Cybersecurity Journey
02:58 From Corporate to Founding Torridon
04:05 What a Fractional CISO Does
04:53 Cybersecurity as a Trust Builder
07:44 Security Basics and Staff Risk
08:40 Training That Actually Sticks
10:35 AI Governance and New Threats 1
5:36 Building a Security Culture
20:13 Scaling Up and Due Diligence
24:25 Ransomware Reality Check
25:58 Final Takeaways and Where to Find Robbie
You can connect with Robbie at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyrie/
by Julia Felton | Oct 13, 2026
Somebody on your leadership team has spent the last three months irritated by things that should not matter very much: a report that arrives a day late, a process that changed without warning, a colleague who keeps raising the same point. Yet the irritation keeps returning, attached to something different each time, and the decision that ought to have settled the matter keeps reappearing on your agenda under a slightly different name.
What you are looking at is very often a values conflict, and the most uncomfortable thing about values conflicts is that the person carrying one usually describes it as somebody else’s problem. I have just spent several weeks doing exactly that myself.
I Thought It Was About My Horses
This autumn I received notice to leave the home I was renting, and with the home went the large field where my horses could run whenever they chose. They now live at a yard with very little grazing, so every morning somebody has to turn them out and every evening somebody has to bring them in. That routine does not always fit my commitments, which means I now rely on other people to help me keep it.
I told everybody who asked that this was a conflict about my horses, because I value them living as naturally as possible. Then I watched them walking towards the gate on a cold, wet evening because they actually wanted to come in, and I had to admit that they were coping considerably better than I was. The conflict I had been describing as theirs was mine, and it sat between giving them space to move and protecting my own freedom.
Two Values Can Travel Together For Years Without Ever Being Aligned
What took me longest to see was why I had never noticed the conflict before. The field had been satisfying both values at once, giving the horses their freedom to move and giving me the freedom to check on them whenever it suited me. One arrangement quietly served two values, so I assumed they were the same thing.
Leadership teams live inside this pattern constantly. Very often the thing holding two values together is a condition rather than a decision. While revenue climbs quickly, a business can value generosity with headcount and discipline on margin without anybody having to choose between them. When growth slows or the founder steps back, the team discovers that those values were never aligned at all, because they had only ever been subsidised. In the episode I describe watching the most extreme version of this from inside Arthur Andersen, and what happened to one particular values statement when its subsidy disappeared.
Right Versus Right Is Far Harder Than Right Versus Wrong
Rushworth Kidder drew a distinction in How Good People Make Tough Choices that every executive ought to carry with them. A choice between right and wrong is a temptation, and most capable leaders handle temptations well because they know which side they are meant to be on. A choice between right and right is a dilemma, and dilemmas are considerably harder, because whichever way you go you give up something you genuinely believe in.
Four Signs You Are Already Carrying One
- A decision keeps coming back. You believe something is settled, and a fortnight later it returns under a new name because the tension underneath it was postponed rather than resolved.
- Your reaction is out of proportion to the event. That surplus emotion is usually information about a value being squeezed somewhere else.
- You find yourself building a case. Leon Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance in 1957 showed that when our actions and beliefs disagree, we usually adjust the belief rather than the action, so a very good argument for why everything is fine deserves suspicion.
- You describe your conflict as somebody else’s problem. The version I hear most often is a chief executive telling me the team is not ready for more responsibility, when the team is perfectly ready and the leader has not yet decided between holding control and being free of the detail.
The Horse Reads Your State Rather Than Your Story
A horse does not respond to the reason you give yourself for being at the gate. It responds to the state you bring with you, so if you arrive resenting the routine while telling yourself you are doing it for the horse’s sake, the horse reads the resentment and ignores the story. Your team does precisely the same thing, only more slowly and more politely, and the commercial cost shows up as capable people who quietly stop bringing you the decisions you say you want them to take.
Two Places To Start
The first is to name the conflict accurately, including whose it is. Say aloud which two values are pulling against each other and which one is winning this season, because a choice that has been spoken can be reviewed, while a choice that stays unspoken simply hardens into habit.
The second is to separate the value from the arrangement you have welded it to. Steven Hayes, who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, describes values as directions rather than destinations, which means there is almost always more than one way of honouring them. In the episode I add two further approaches, one borrowed from Barry Johnson’s work on polarities and one from Roger Martin’s on integrative thinking, along with a harder question about freedom that I had to put to myself.
So here is the question worth carrying into your week. Which condition in your business is currently holding two of your values together, and what will your leadership team discover about itself on the day that condition disappears?
Listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork to hear the rest of the story and the four ways I am working through my own conflict. Then take the Entrenched Leadership Dynamics Diagnostic and find out which patterns are already shaping decisions in your business.
Or join us at our next executive forum, where we work through exactly this question with leaders of scaling businesses and pressure-test what human leadership needs to look like alongside the technology. Register your place here
Show Notes
00:50 Horse Move Story
03:50 Values Conflict Defined
06:38 Moral Distress vs Dilemma
08:42 When Conditions Change
2:23 Spotting Values Conflicts
15:50 Values vs Goals Clarity
17:42 Herd Lessons on Freedom
18:56 Four Ways to Resolve
22:26 Weekly Leadership Challenge
23:32 Wrap Up and Resources
by Julia Felton | Oct 6, 2026
Look at your diary for this week and go through it one meeting at a time. In almost every one of them there is somebody who signs off your bonus or somebody whose bonus you sign off, and everyone in the room is quietly adjusting what they say to account for that person. You call it a busy week of leadership, although very little of it involves anybody saying what they actually think.
Your senior people are not short of meetings. What they are short of is a single room in which nobody with power over their career is listening.
Ninety-Five Percent Of Your Meetings Come With A Hierarchy Attached
My guest on this week’s episode of Impactful Teamwork is Jay Fairbrother, known as The Mastermind Guy, who has spent around 30 years building and running peer groups and has sat in thousands of their meetings. He estimates that in 95% of the meetings you attend, either your superior or your subordinate is in the room, and that single fact changes how everybody behaves.
People will not ask the question that might make them look naive, and they will not admit they are stuck, because somebody above them is forming a judgement and somebody below them is watching for weakness. I recognised this immediately from my own corporate career, because I had nobody to share anything with. It was my boss or it was my team, and there was very little in between.
Most Of What Gets Called A Mastermind Is Something Else Entirely
Jay takes the idea back to its origin. Napoleon Hill coined the term in Think and Grow Rich roughly 90 years ago, and his concept was simple: put two minds in a room and a third, invisible force appears that neither of them could have produced alone. Most groups now sold under that name are networking clubs or group coaching with a guru at the front of the room, which means the collective wisdom never surfaces because everybody is waiting to be taught.
Jay knows the real version works because he lived it. He grew his first company to a million dollars in revenue and then stalled there, despite hiring coaches and consultants and reading every business book he could find. Twenty-five years ago he joined his first mastermind, and he went on to grow that business to $10 million in annual revenue with a couple of hundred employees before selling it in 2004. What happened to him after the 2008 financial crisis, and the one group he refused to leave, is a story I would rather you heard from him.
Two Things Decide Whether The Room Works
Most organisations assume a hot seat and a few peers in a meeting room will do the job, and Jay names two factors that decide whether a group actually lasts for years.
The first is putting the right people in the room. That means enough commonality of level that nobody feels out of their depth or bored by the basics, and a proper vetting process, because a single bad fit can damage the whole group. The second is the container, meaning the confidentiality, trust and mutual respect that have to be built deliberately and then maintained as the group moves through Tuckman’s stages of forming and storming. His preferred size is eight to 14 people, because below eight a discussion can fall flat and above 14 not everybody gets a voice in every meeting.
The Superman Syndrome Is A Scaling Problem
When Jay looks back at the plateau in his first company, he names the cause as what he calls the Superman Syndrome, which is the leader who will not let go and believes they can do everything better than anybody else. Watching other entrepreneurs struggle with exactly the same pattern is what finally allowed him to start delegating and scaling.
I recognised myself in that. When I was building my business unit at Arthur Andersen I felt I had to do it all, and I remember being told that my real job was to make my own role redundant so that I could move on to more strategic work, which is a difficult instruction to hear when you have built the thing yourself.
A Lone Horse Never Truly Rests
Horses are herd animals, and they can only lie down and sleep deeply when another member of the herd is standing watch. A horse kept on its own stays on alert, because nobody else is holding attention for it, and over time that shows up in its health and its behaviour. Your senior leaders are no different. If they have no peers holding attention alongside them, they carry every risk alone, and tired leaders make narrower decisions than rested ones.
Three Things To Do This Quarter
- Count how many meetings you attended last week without a superior or a subordinate present.
- Bring together leaders at the same level from different sites or divisions, with nobody more senior in the room, and use an external facilitator who can protect the confidentiality of the group.
- Notice whose contributions their peers take most seriously once the group settles, because Jay has watched underestimated people emerge as future leaders in exactly these rooms.
Listen To The Full Conversation
I closed the episode with a challenge, and it is one every leader in a scaling business should answer honestly. In a world where you need to keep adapting and changing, where in your business can your senior people say they are stuck without anybody above or below them hearing it?
Listen to Episode 131 of Impactful Teamwork for Jay’s full story, the eight to ten different types of mastermind he has seen work inside and outside corporations, and the fourth value of ours that he has decided he wants to borrow.
Then join us at our next executive forum, where we work through exactly this question with leaders of scaling businesses and pressure-test what human leadership needs to look like alongside the technology. Register your place here.
If you would rather start with your own team, take the Entrenched Leadership Dynamics Diagnostic and find out which patterns are already shaping decisions in your business.
Show Notes
00:45 Meet Jay Fairbrother
01:23 What Is a Mastermind
04:07 Jay’s 10X Story
08:09 Masterminds in Corporations
11:08 Connection in a Digital Age
13:08 Building the Right Container
16:37 Vetting and Group Fit
17:48 Types of Masterminds
20:46 Results and Ideal Size
25:19 In Person vs Virtual
27:51 Superman Syndrome
31:55 Resources and Wrap Up
You can access Jay’s webinar here – https://6figuremasterminds.com/mm-advisor
Or sign up for his intensive bootcamp here – https://6figuremasterminds.com/built-pricing
by Julia Felton | Sep 29, 2026
It is Thursday morning, and one of your directors has just produced a market analysis in an hour. Not long ago, that work would have taken the best part of a week. You thank them in front of the leadership team. Across the table sits a colleague who spent two days building her report the old way, and she says nothing. She is working out what you have just told the room counts as work. Before the meeting ends, she will have adjusted her behaviour accordingly.
Nobody in that room will ever raise it, which is precisely why it matters. Every boardroom I walk into is asking how AI can help the business move faster. Leaders want to automate more and prove a return on the investment. The bigger question is what AI is quietly doing to the relationships between your people. Almost nobody is asking it, and that is where the real risk is building.
The Debt That Does Not Appear In Your Management Accounts
Most leaders understand financial debt, and anybody who has sat near an IT function understands technical debt. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report names a third kind, which it calls cultural debt. It is the cost an organisation builds up when it neglects the behaviours and unwritten rules developing inside it. Like financial debt, it compounds slowly and quietly until you face a far bigger problem than the one you started with.
AI is accelerating the borrowing. Deloitte found that 42% of workers say their organisation rarely evaluates the impact of AI on people. Meanwhile, the same organisations track adoption in forensic detail. And 80% of leaders, managers and workers worry that colleagues use AI to look more productive than they are. No software update will fix that figure, because it describes a collapse in trust between colleagues.
Culture Lives In What Happens On A Thursday Morning
Every organisation runs two cultures: the one on the wall and the one people actually experience. Culture lives in who gets rewarded and who gets blamed when something goes wrong. It now also lives in how people use AI. If an AI recommendation turns out to be wrong, who owns it? When questions like that go unanswered, people answer them privately, each in their own way. That is exactly how the debt builds up.
Four Places The Interest Is Already Building
I set out five trust risks in the episode, and four of them appear in almost every leadership team I work with.
- Blurry ownership. AI can draft and recommend, but it cannot admit in a meeting that it got the call wrong. It can support a decision without ever owning the consequences. If your people do not know where that boundary sits, neither will your culture.
- Performed productivity. Researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab call polished output with no thinking underneath it workslop. If you reward volume because AI has made volume cheap, your people learn that looking busy is what you value.
- Fairness. One person finishes in two hours what takes a colleague eight, so what exactly are you rewarding? Deloitte found that 65% of respondents believe their culture needs to change significantly because of AI. And 34% say culture is already getting in the way of their AI goals. If your AI strategy is struggling, you may have a cultural problem wearing a technology hat.
- Human connection. This is the risk that worries me most. People now ask a chatbot for help instead of a colleague, and each exchange looks efficient. Yet those small, disappearing conversations are where people build trust and notice when someone is struggling.
What A Horse Herd Knows About Coherence
My horses make that last point better than any report could. A healthy herd is a living social system rather than a group of individuals completing tasks. Every horse is constantly sensing and adjusting to the others, reading signals we would never notice. Take that connection away and you might keep a set of efficient individual horses. What you lose is the coherence that keeps the herd safe, and your leadership team works in exactly the same way.
The fifth risk, the erosion of judgement, is the one I would most like you to hear in full. It includes the moment I caught myself nearly falling into it with my own content.
Technology Magnifies The System It Enters
Put AI into a high-trust culture and it will magnify that trust. Put it into a fearful, siloed culture and it will magnify that just as efficiently. Your team will take their lead from you on this. If you hide your own use of AI, they learn secrecy. If you accept its outputs without question, they learn dependency.
Where To Start This Week
Begin by naming the questions people are already asking privately. Is using AI cheating, and what does good work look like now? Silence does not stop a culture forming; it simply means the culture forms without you.
Next, take one decision your team made with AI’s help last month and ask who owns the outcome. If the honest answer is “the system”, you do not yet have an answer.
Finally, identify the conversations that must stay human and protect them deliberately. If you do not design connection into your organisation, efficiency will gradually design it out.
So here is the question I left listeners with. Imagine I walked into your organisation six months from now and watched your people using AI. What would that tell me about what you truly value?
Listen to Episode 130 of Impactful Teamwork for all five trust risks and the two further actions I recommend. You will also hear why a 48-page AI policy does far less than a handful of principles people actually use.
Then join us at our next executive forum, where we work through exactly this question with leaders of scaling businesses and pressure-test what human leadership needs to look like alongside the technology. Register your place here.
If you would rather start with your own team, take the Entrenched Leadership Dynamics Diagnostic and find out which patterns are already shaping decisions in your business.
Show Notes
00:46 AI Shaping Culture
02:20 Cultural Debt Explained
05:16 Unwritten Rules Shift
06:54 Trust Risk One Ownership
08:59 Trust Risk Two Work Slop
11:05 Trust Risk Three Fairness
13:07 Trust Risk Four Connection
15:35 Trust Risk Five Judgment
18:05 Design Human Machine Partnership
19:39 Five Leader Actions
by Julia Felton | Sep 22, 2026
Something strange happened in artificial intelligence this month. Three men who spend their working lives trying to outpace each other said the same thing out loud. Their companies are locked in the most expensive technology race in history, and yet all three of them want it slowed down. That should tell you something about where human leadership now sits on the risk register.
It also raises a question most boards have not thought to ask.
When The Fiercest Rivals In AI Start Agreeing
Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, published an essay called We Must Pace The Frontier. His argument is blunt. The pace of AI development is now outrunning our ability to understand, govern and safeguard it. Sam Altman of OpenAI supported the principle. Elon Musk, who rarely agrees with either of them about anything, simply wrote that Dario was right.
Billions of pounds ride on who wins this race. Yet some of the people closest to the finish line are quietly asking whether the race itself needs slowing down.
So the question worth sitting with is no longer how fast can we go. It is how fast should we go. For anyone running a leadership team, there is a sharper version still. In the rush to become an AI enabled organisation, are we quietly automating away the very things that make us human?
Human Leadership Is The Scarce Resource Now
AI gives us intelligence. It gives us information, and it can make us extraordinarily productive. What it cannot yet give us is wisdom.
Genuine trust is beyond it. So is empathy, and so is the willingness to stand beside someone when there is no easy answer to offer them. A model does not sense the energy shifting in a room, and it certainly cannot create the particular belonging that comes from one person paying full attention to another.
At first that reads like a technology problem. I think it is a leadership problem, and possibly the biggest one this decade will hand us. Because as artificial intelligence becomes ordinary, human leadership becomes rare. Rare things command a premium.
The King Named It Better Than Most Boards Have
King Charles seems to agree. This month he brought representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Nvidia to Dumfries House in Scotland, a place he describes as a living laboratory for his philosophy of Harmony. That philosophy rests on one deceptively simple idea, which is that we are part of nature rather than apart from it.
Watching the most sophisticated technology humanity has ever built being discussed through a lens that old caught my attention immediately. Then came the line that has stayed with me since. Our humanity must remain sacred.
He also named what he called the emotional excellence which separates man from machine. That is a better description of human leadership than most competency frameworks manage in forty pages.
What A Horse Herd Understands About Human Leadership
This is where my herd comes in. A horse herd has been solving a version of this problem for millions of years.
It survives because its members stay attuned to each other, noticing small shifts in energy, movement and intent long before anything becomes a visible threat. Leadership inside the herd moves depending on what the moment requires, sometimes from the front, sometimes from the side, sometimes from behind. Information travels through trust rather than through hierarchy.
Now compare that with the modern office. Colleagues sitting three feet apart communicate by email. Meeting notes are drafted by AI. Feedback is increasingly written by a machine on behalf of a manager who no longer has time to write it.
None of that is wrong in itself. I use AI in my own business every day and it has made me considerably more productive. Still, the question is worth asking. What happens when we outsource so much of the friction of being human that we accidentally outsource the connection along with it?
The Paradox Sitting Inside Every AI Rollout
Here is the paradox. The more intelligent our technology becomes, the more intentionally human our leadership has to become.
We are never going to out-compete AI at being AI. So the capabilities that decide the next decade are the ones a machine still cannot replicate, and every one of them sits inside human leadership. Asking a genuinely good question. Building trust. Reading a room before the dashboard confirms what you already sensed. Knowing when the right answer is to slow a decision down rather than speed it up.
None of this makes me pessimistic about AI. Quite the opposite. Its potential to improve how we work is extraordinary.
Protect Human Leadership By Design, Not By Accident
What I do not want is a future where the technology grows more sophisticated while the relationships inside our organisations grow steadily more impoverished. I certainly do not want leadership itself to become the next process we quietly hand to a machine.
In our work with scaling businesses, this is where entrenched leadership dynamics do their real damage. A team that already avoids the difficult conversation will use AI to avoid it more efficiently. The technology does not create the pattern. Instead, it accelerates whatever pattern is already running.
So here is the question I would put to your leadership team this week. As AI takes on more of what used to be your job, which distinctly human capabilities need to get stronger inside your organisation, and where are you going to protect human connection by design rather than by accident?
Take This Further
Listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork for the rest of the conversation, including the three questions every leadership team should answer before going further with an AI rollout, and the reinvention framework we use with clients working out what to keep human and what to hand to the machine.
Then join us at our next executive forum, where we work through exactly this question with leaders of scaling businesses and pressure-test what human leadership needs to look like alongside the technology. Register your place here.
If you would rather start with your own team, take the Entrenched Leadership Dynamics Diagnostic and find out which patterns are already shaping decisions in your business.
Show Notes
00:55 AI Moving Too Fast
03:10 Wisdom Over Efficiency
06:42 Harmony And Humanity
09:35 Horses And Connection
12:13 The Great AI Paradox
15:07 Reinventing Leadership Teams
18:30 Implementing AI Wisely
21:09 Nature Seasons And Pause
21:59 Three Leadership Questions
23:20 Deliberately Human Future
by Julia Felton | Sep 15, 2026
Somebody on your leadership team knows something you need to know. They have known it for three weeks. They rehearsed how they would say it, chose the meeting where they would say it, then watched that meeting run twelve minutes over and decided today was not the day. You will hear about it in the quarter it becomes expensive.
Here is the part most leaders resist. That person is not lacking courage, and they have not failed a cultural test that a training course would have helped them pass. They read the environment you built, they read it accurately, and they responded correctly. Silence was the rational choice.
The Word In That Sentence Everybody Reads Past
This week’s episode of Impactful Teamwork started with a line from the Leadership Development Group. Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about creating an environment where your team isn’t afraid to bring you the problems.
Everybody nods at the first sentence, because the first sentence costs you nothing. The weight sits in the second one, and specifically in a word we read straight past. The word is creating. Not encouraging, not permitting, not inviting. Creating is a design activity, which means the environment is something you are building whether or not you meant to build it.
We have spent a decade selling psychological safety as something you can purchase, schedule and tick off. It is not a programme. It is a reading your people take of the conditions they are standing in, and they take it continuously and considerably faster than you take yours.
The Ward With The Clean Error Log Was The Dangerous One
There is a piece of thinking from 1936 that has never been improved upon. Kurt Lewin wrote it as an equation: behaviour is a function of the person and their environment. Two variables, and most organisations only ever interrogate one. We assess the person, appraise them, and occasionally replace them. We rarely ask what the environment was rewarding.
Amy Edmondson, the Harvard professor who did more than anyone to define psychological safety, arrived at the idea by getting an answer she did not want. She went into two hospitals expecting to find that better nursing teams made fewer medication errors. The data showed her the opposite, because the better teams appeared to have higher error rates.
What she eventually understood is that those teams were not making more mistakes. They were reporting more of them. Admitting an error was survivable, so errors surfaced early enough to be corrected before they reached a patient.
The unit with the clean error log was the dangerous one. Its data was evidence of suppression rather than performance. When a function in your business reports no problems for three consecutive months, most leaders feel quietly reassured. The correct response is curiosity, because you are either looking at an exceptional operation or at an environment where nobody has calculated that telling you is worth it.
Nokia Did Not Lack Engineers. It Lacked A Route For Bad News.
Timo Vuori and Quy Huy published the best evidence I know of in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2016, examining how Nokia lost the smartphone battle between 2005 and 2010.
They found that fear was distributed unevenly, and that the unevenness was the mechanism. Top managers feared competitors and shareholders. Middle managers feared their own superiors and peers. So the senior team applied enormous pressure without disclosing the external threat driving it, and the middle managers, reading the environment accurately, withheld the information that would have made them a target.
Senior leadership ended up with an over-optimistic assessment of their own technological capability and invested on the basis of it. Nobody in that story was incompetent. Everybody was rational. The distance between what your organisation knows and what your board hears is a valuation issue.
The Horse Is Not Responding To Your Behaviour
My colleague Jane Hemingway-Mohr, who also works with horses in leadership development, wrote something recently that I have not been able to put down. Horses do not hide the bad news. They do not worry about hierarchy, protect our ego, or wait for a more convenient moment. There is no blame in the response and no judgement. Just information.
Fifteen years of watching this in a field has added one thing to her observation. The horse is not responding to your behaviour. It is responding to the environment that you are.
My mare Bracken teaches boundaries by barging into people. Walk up to her without having decided what you want and she will occupy your space. No amount of firm body language afterwards will correct it. She is reading the absence of a decision, and she reads it before you arrive. Your senior team does the same thing, only slower and more expensively.
Three Things To Change This Week
- Watch the three seconds after bad news rather than the sentence you say next. You will say the right thing. Your face may have already said something else.
- Close the loop publicly on one problem raised with you last quarter, including the reasoning if the answer is no. If information goes up and nothing comes back down, people stop bothering.
- Name the last person who told you something you did not want to hear, and ask whether they were better or worse off for it. Everybody else already knows the answer.
Listen To The Full Episode
So here is my challenge. Think about the last time somebody brought you a problem. Not what you said, because I am confident you said the right thing. What did they experience from you in the three seconds before you said it, and what did that teach everybody else in the room about whether it is safe to come to you next time?
Listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork for the four things your environment is actually made of, what happened when a chief executive walked away from a horse in front of his own leadership team, and the phrase that team still uses on him months later.
Show Notes
00:46 Why Leaders Miss Bad News
02:03 Rethinking Psychological Safety
03:05 Leadership Quote And Environment
05:38 How Reactions Shape Silence
07:34 Behavior And Environment Research
08:47 Amy Edmondson Error Reporting
11:26 Horses Tell The Truth
12:53 Horse Lessons For Teams
15:46 Nokia Fear And Failure
18:51 Four Environment Components
22:14 Cultural Zones And Modes
23:41 Steve Cafe Moment Story
25:16 Weekly Challenge Reflection
26:17 Wrap Up And Next Steps
by Julia Felton | Sep 8, 2026
Somebody in your leadership meeting half-raises an idea they have been carrying for a fortnight, watches your face, and talks themselves back down before they have finished the sentence. You tell them it is interesting and ask them to send you a note. The note never arrives. Six months later a competitor launches something remarkably similar and you find yourself asking why nobody in your business saw it coming.
Somebody did see it. They calculated the cost of being wrong in front of you, and decided it was not worth it.
Knowing Failure Is Useful Is Not The Same As Learning From It
My guest on this week’s episode of Impactful Teamwork is Rachel Franco, founder of Fail Smarter, who has spent a career in Fortune 500 healthcare, technology and financial services organisations, and who describes herself as one of those oddballs who loves failure.
Rachel has identified a gap she has not yet found the right name for, and it is the most useful thing in the episode. Intellectually, every leader you know accepts that failure is a learning opportunity. Yet that acceptance almost never translates into a team that emotionally recovers from a setback quickly enough to try again with any conviction. As Rachel puts it, the great innovators are not people who fail less. Their recovery periods are simply shorter.
I was raised not to fail, and when I left corporate life I wore it as a badge of honour that I never had. Business relieved me of that idea rather quickly.
The Numbers Sitting Underneath Your Culture Survey
Psychological safety gets dismissed as a soft, ethereal concern, which is precisely why Rachel keeps the data close to hand. Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor who did more than anyone to define the term, describes it as the belief that it is safe to speak up about ideas, concerns, mistakes or failures without fear of punishment or blame.
The commercial case is not subtle. A Forbes article, The Science of Failing Well, reports that teams with high psychological safety show 27% lower turnover, 76% higher engagement, 50% higher productivity, 26% higher learning agility, and are 67% more likely to apply new skills.
Google reached the same conclusion from the other direction. Project Aristotle studied over 180 internal teams and identified five factors behind team effectiveness. Psychological safety was the first, and without it none of the other four mattered.
You already know what it costs to hire, train and onboard a replacement. Now put that number next to 27%.
Your People Are Reading Your Face, Not Your Values Statement
Most of this starts with the leader, and with two behaviours rather than a programme.
The first is role modelling. When you talk openly about your own failures, and when you bring your team a genuinely half-formed idea and ask what they make of it, you create the permission structure. Nobody else in the room can create it for you.
The second is how you respond in the moment. When someone offers a wild idea, or raises their hand to say that something has gone wrong, your response determines whether they ever do it again. This is not only about the words. People pick up everything, and a leader who says all the right things while pulling a face has communicated the real policy.
The third failure is quieter. If ideas go up and nothing ever comes back down, people stop bothering. You will not pursue every suggestion, but a visible filtering process, an explanation, and recognition for whoever raised it are the difference between a team that keeps contributing and one that has learned there is no point.
The Herd Gives Feedback And Then Lets It Go
Horses correct each other constantly. The correction is immediate, proportionate and specific to the behaviour, and then it is finished. No grudge is carried into the next hour, and nobody is reminded of it a fortnight later in front of everybody else.
That combination of clear standards and short memory is what makes it safe to try again. Punish the try and you will spend the next two years wondering why your capable people have gone quiet. If people are too scared to fail, they will be too scared to try.
Your AI Rollout Is About To Test This
Every organisation is currently asking its people to work in ways none of us have done before. That is a behaviour change, and behaviour change requires a culture of experimentation in which people can test something, get it wrong, and say so out loud.
You cannot buy that in the same quarter you need it. Time has to be protected for it, because a team measured entirely on this month’s KPIs will do exactly what it is measured on.
None of this is an argument for recklessness. Smart risk is not the same as handing someone enough rope to bring down the business, and psychological safety does not lower the performance standard. It means you can finally talk about what happened.
Three Things To Do This Week
- Tell your team about a decision of yours that did not work, what it cost, and what you took from it. Say it out loud in the meeting rather than in a one-to-one.
- Run a proper postmortem on your last initiative that underdelivered, and invite two people from the other teams involved. Teams learn considerably more when they are not reviewing themselves alone.
- Pick one idea that came to you in the last quarter and close the loop on it publicly, including the reasoning if the answer is no.
So my challenge to you this week is this. How do you bolster psychological safety so that your people can genuinely learn from the failure that is already happening in your organisation? And how do you make that a competitive advantage rather than a cost quietly sitting in your P&L?
Listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork for the difference between praiseworthy and blameworthy failure, the seven-question assessment Rachel uses to give a team its baseline, and the toy she uses to let executives fail repeatedly in a room where nothing is at stake.
Show Notes
00:45 Meet Rachel Franco
01:27 Why Fail Smarter
04:59 Fear of Failure Culture
06:43 Psychological Safety Basics
09:00 Measuring Safety and Incentives
12:31 Stats That Prove It
17:06 AI Era Needs Experimentation
18:58 Why Projects Fail
21:05 Everyone Can Innovate
23:39 Ideas Need Follow Through
26:20 Failure Toy Workshop
29:34 Accountability and Smart Risk
31:03 Where to Find Rachel – https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelfranco/
by Julia Felton | Sep 1, 2026
Something unexpected lands in your business — a competitor moves, a client escalates, a transition you promised the board would be smooth begins to wobble — and you notice that your leadership team turns towards you and waits. They are capable people, and any one of them could take the moment. Yet they hold their position, because in your organisation leadership is something attached to a job title rather than something a person steps into when the situation calls for it.
The problem is not that you have too much hierarchy. It is that you have only one kind of leadership available in the room, and it is permanently occupied by you.
Roles Are Not Ranks
I have just come back from studying in America with June Gunter, founder of Teaching Horse and the author of Chaos to Clarity: The Teaching Horse Field Guide to Finding a Way Forward. We spent the week with the horses, talking about herd dynamics and the Diamond Model of Shared Leadership.
A herd does not organise itself around status. It organises itself around position, and those positions are taken according to what the moment requires. Leadership rotates. It is dynamic, it is shared, and every member of the herd carries part of it. These are roles, not ranks, and that distinction is the whole argument.
The Numbers Underneath Your Last Failed Change Programme
June opens the second chapter of her book with three figures that will be uncomfortably familiar. Between 60 and 70% of change initiatives fail. Only 23% of the workforce is truly engaged. Poor collaboration costs each worker three hours of productivity every week.
Those are not three separate problems requiring three separate interventions. They are symptoms of a leadership model that has run out of road.
The alternative is not softer. It is measurably more commercial. Organisations that embrace collaborative leadership see 21% higher productivity, and when people are genuinely invested in a change, it is 30% more likely to stick.
Three Positions, One Diamond
When a herd moves from where it is to where it has chosen to go, it naturally forms a diamond, and that shape holds three distinct roles.
- The lead mare leads from the front. Her role is direction and focus. She reads the environment and commits to a path, and the herd follows her not because she dominates them but because she has consistently demonstrated focused attention and an unwavering commitment to their welfare.
- The lead stallion leads from behind. His role is protection and unity. He holds the rear so that no member is left behind, watches for what is coming rather than what is already here, and keeps the group moving forward. He does not micromanage the herd. He makes it possible for the herd to move as a collective.
- The sentinels lead from the middle. They hold the horizontal points of the diamond, monitoring for threats and changes in the environment and relaying what they see to the front and the back. They also welcome new members and ensure they are properly integrated.
That third role is the one most organisations have no language for at all. Leading from the middle is not about holding your leaders accountable. It is about holding them capable, and demonstrating your intent to help them be successful. Horses never serve their leaders up as scapegoats; they guide and protect them, because that is what is in the best interest of the herd.
Horses Convene. Organisations Scatter.
June recently took a group of around thirty executives to Return to Freedom, a wild horse conservation area in California. Despite everything they had been asked to do, the group failed to pay attention, and the wild herd began moving towards them assertively. What June did next is the part of the episode I would rather you heard in full.
What happened afterwards is worth sitting with. Faced with uncertainty, the horses came together. They convened. They did not scatter. Now think about what happens in your organisation when something goes wrong. People retreat into their own function, protect their own numbers and wait for the noise to pass. Horses worked out a very long time ago that they are safer together than they are apart, and in a great many organisations the people inside them have not yet made that decision.
One line from that week has stayed with me since. In the horse world, followship is an act of leadership, because without following there is no completion. Watch a herd on the move and you will notice that the lead mare never turns round to check whether anybody is coming. The decision has already been made that they are going together.
Assign The Roles This Week
Working this way does not require you to restructure anything, and that is rather the point.
Take one challenge your organisation is genuinely facing, whether that is a difficult transition, a competitive threat, or a team struggling to collaborate. Gather the people involved and assign the diamond roles out loud. Somebody leads from the front. Somebody leads from behind. Somebody holds each side. Tell your team what you are doing and why you are doing it, and then give them explicit permission to lead from the position they are holding.
Do not wait for the perfect moment or the perfect team. Wild horses do not have the luxury of perfect conditions, and what they have instead are tested principles that hold up under pressure. Your people are already capable of leading this way. They are simply waiting for somebody to show them how.
So the question worth carrying into your week is this. When do you need to lead from the front, when do you need to lead from the side, and when do you need to lead from behind? And are you brave enough to let one of your team take the lead without first convening a discussion about whether they are permitted to?
Listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork for the four capabilities that sit underneath all three positions, and for what June actually did when a wild stallion walked towards her. Then take the Turbocharge Your Team assessment to find out which pillar of the Unbridled Teamship Roadmap is holding your leadership team back, so that you know exactly where to start.
Show Notes
01:19 The Diamond Model
01:47 Shared Leadership
03:40 Three Positions of Leadership
05:06 The Lead Mare
05:54 The Lead Stallion
07:13 The Sentinels
08:41 Return to Freedom
11:51 Followship
14:29 The Business Case
15:21 This Week’s Challenge
by Julia Felton | Aug 25, 2026
You promoted your strongest technical person eight months ago. They had earned it. Besides, there was no other way to pay them more. Yet they are still fixing things. The strategy work sits untouched. The team waits on decisions that never arrive. Meanwhile the work they once did brilliantly now happens badly at eleven at night.
The problem is not the person you promoted. Rather, leadership has become the only pay rise your organisation knows how to give.
This week on Impactful Teamwork I talk to Craig Bromage. Craig heads Infrastructure and Platforms at National Highways, and he writes The Everyday Leader. He also spent nine years in the RAF as an electronics engineer on air defence radar.
Promotion there depended on whichever training course happened to be running. After a certain rank, it depended on time served. So the RAF handed people more staff to manage without the skill set to match. Because no HR function existed, nobody ever corrected the course. ‘I took a lot of how not to do it from the RAF with me,’ he says.
Twenty-five years on, the civilian version is simply more polite. Craig points to Simon Sinek’s framing. Everyone wants to be the CEO, because they see it as number one on the pedestal. In fact the CFO and the CIO are 1A alongside them. Nobody needs to move into someone else’s swim lane.
What follows is predictable. Twenty hours a week go on strategy. Twenty go on tinkering under the bonnet of systems that move faster than anyone can follow. As a result, the expert falls behind as an engineer and never arrives as a leader. Craig says plainly, ‘I know I’m not the most technical person in the room.’ So he leans on his architects instead. Most do not. Instead they retreat to the part of the job that feels safe, and the organisation starts routing around them.
You Can Do It To People Or You Can Do It With People
Craig frames leadership as a choice. You either do it to people, or you do it with people. Doing it with people takes longer. However, it is the only version that endures.
Leaders from a technical background default to doing it to. After all, they still carry the certification. They still believe that being right entitles them to prescribe. Craig’s counter is simple. Psychological safety produces honesty, and honesty moves the work. Prescription only produces compliance. In short, compliance is not commitment.
Leadership Is Not The Title You Are Waiting For
The Everyday Leader exists because Craig realised something. Most people wait for permission they already hold. You lead in the scout group. You lead in the community meeting. Above all, you lead at the dining table, where the thing nobody says has been escalating for months.
Craig remembers the feedback at home: ‘Stop talking to your mother like you’re managing her.’ He remembers another line too: ‘I wish you could manage the children as well as you manage your team.’ Both landed.
There is also a story in the episode about his daughter and a set of SMART objectives. It ends with a conversation across a school playground with her headteacher. I will not spoil it. Indeed, it is the best illustration of everyday leadership I have heard this year.
We Are Paid For Outcomes, Not Outputs
Craig’s phrase, and one worth stealing. He does not want a hundred emails, fifty Word documents and a PowerPoint. He wants the outcome. Anyone on his team can leave the desk mid-day, because they come back with clarity. Clarity accelerates delivery.
‘Everyone knows you’ve got to sleep eight hours a day if you want to be healthy,’ he says. ‘I think you’ve got to reflect if you want to be a good leader.’
My horses read the environment, respond, and rest. Likewise, a team with no time to think simply solves the wrong problem faster.
The Eighty-One Or Two Thousand Test
Craig learned maths longhand. So he still knows instinctively when an answer should read 81 rather than 2,005. His children grew up with calculators, and they do not. Something goes into the machine, an answer comes out, and they accept it.
He wonders whether we will repeat that at scale with AI. Prompts in, output out, brilliant, move on. Nobody notices that the answer is wrong. In fact we both see the sloppy end of this already, with AI fingerprints all over work that nobody reviewed. Therefore his rule is simple. A human always sits at the end of the decision.
He also describes autonomous drones on a riverbed, behaving like a sleeping guard dog. That is the most interesting argument I have heard against the idea that AI only removes jobs. And I tell the story of my own AI assistant going rogue and emailing my database.
Horses Do Not Negotiate With Bravado
Craig asked how horses handle anxious people. Very well, is the answer. However, they cannot tolerate someone anxious who pretends otherwise. They read the dissonance instantly, because congruence means everything to them.
Your team is no different, although they take longer to say so. While I led my division through the Enron collapse, I spent months insisting everything would be fine. Nobody believed me, because I did not believe me. Then I said I did not know how this would end. I named what might happen, and I named their choices. Things improved from that day.
The Institute of Leadership and Management attributes 86% of business failures to silo mentality and poor collaboration. Generally, bad intentions do not build silos. Leaders who never quite say the true thing build them instead.
Listen To The Full Conversation
Craig and I also covered psychological safety and AI guardrails. We discussed remote joiners who have never met a colleague in the flesh, too. Then there is the man who delivers my hay. He is about to move my horses for nothing.
Here is the question I left listeners with. Where this week are you asking your team to believe something you do not believe yourself?
Listen to Episode 125 of Impactful Teamwork with Craig Bromage wherever you get your podcasts. Then follow Craig on LinkedIn for The Everyday Leader.
Show Notes
01:26 RAF Leadership Lessons
04:19 Promotion Pitfalls
09:43 Everyday Leader Mindset
13:43 SMART Clarity Story
16:44 Outcomes Reflection
18:25 AI Adoption Risks
30:50 Remote Work Relationships
34:47 Horses Authentic Leadership
39:14 Closing Takeaways
You can connect with Craig and read more about The Everyday Leader at https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-bromage-0721192/
by Julia Felton | Aug 18, 2026
You have sat in that meeting. The strategy goes up on the screen, heads move up and down around the table, and somebody confirms they are fully behind it. Nobody objects, and everyone leaves believing the matter settled. Two weeks later nothing has changed, and nobody can pinpoint the moment at which it stopped working.
Most of the executive teams I work with are not misaligned at all. They are in almost perfect agreement, and it is that agreement which is quietly preventing alignment.
Agreement Happens In The Room. Alignment Happens In The Diary.
Agreement is a verbal event. It takes place in front of other people and it costs the person giving it absolutely nothing at the moment they give it, because there is no accountability attached to a nod.
Alignment is a behavioural state, and it only proves itself when conditions change, when two agreed priorities collide, or when a client escalates on a Friday afternoon and somebody has to decide which priority gets sacrificed. Agreement is what you get in the room. Alignment is what you get in the diary.
Amy Yip, who works with senior leadership teams across technology, aerospace and healthcare in the United States, builds her whole practice around one line: misalignment is the culprit. She traces delays, errors, communication breakdowns and resistance to change straight back to it. Pulling together when everything is going swimmingly is the easy part.
The Numbers Behind The Confusion
Gallup’s data for the first half of 2026 shows that 49% of team members strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work, still a long way behind the 2015 peak of 61%. Global engagement, meanwhile, fell to 20% in 2025, a second consecutive year of decline. The cause is rarely motivation. It is clarity, because it is genuinely difficult to commit to something you cannot see.
The Institute of Leadership and Management attributes 86% of business failure to silo mentality and poor collaboration, leaving only 14% of teams with genuine cross-functional unity. Almost all of them had agreed on what needed to happen. The problem begins at the top, where everybody signs up to the strategy and each person then cascades a slightly different version of it downwards. Every department head is confident and working hard, and no two departments are working towards the same end game.
Four Reasons Agreement Keeps Winning
- Silence is recorded as consent. Saying nothing costs no political capital, yet it is minuted as support, and no set of minutes distinguishes the director who argued for the decision from the one who merely failed to object.
- Seniority distorts the signal. If you are the chief executive and you speak first, you have not opened the discussion, you have closed it, because your team is rationally calibrating against the person who shapes their budget.
- The offsite flatters everybody. Agreement comes easily somewhere pleasant with no interruptions and a facilitator holding the space. Deployment happens somewhere else entirely.
- Nobody names the trade-off. It costs nothing to agree to customer experience, cost reduction, velocity and culture at once, and alignment only begins when somebody says aloud which of them gets dropped when they collide.
Left unattended, these four patterns deliver a team into what I call the tolerable zone, where nothing is broken, meetings are civil, results are adequate, and a toxic culture is quietly assembling itself underneath.
Your AI Rollout Is About To Find Out Which One You Have
The KPMG Global AI Pulse Survey found that only 7% of organisations have established a measurable return on their AI investment, and the instinctive explanation is immature technology or badly chosen use cases. The evidence points somewhere less comfortable. Gallup is specific that access to the tools alone changes nothing, and that engagement only moves when leaders introduce AI with clear expectations, a considered plan and active manager support.
A technology rollout does not create clarity. It consumes it. It lands on top of whatever alignment already exists and tests it immediately, because every team is being asked to change how it works while still hitting its numbers.
What The Herd Knows That The Boardroom Does Not
A horse herd is one of the most aligned systems in nature, moving as one and responding to threat as one, and it has done so for millions of years without a single moment of agreement. There is no vote and no consensus-building session, only a direction every member reads from the environment and a distributed attention that lets leadership rotate as the moment requires.
Alignment in the herd travels through energy and state rather than announcement, and your team reads you the same way. When your words and your state disagree, they believe your state every time. Announce that you are delegating authority while holding on to the decision that matters, and they already know you do not trust them.
Three Tests To Run This Week
The first is the independent list test. Ask each member of your leadership team separately, without conferring, to write down the top three to five priorities for this quarter, then compare the answers. The second is the fortnight test. Look at the last decision your team made, then look at the diaries, because if that decision was real, somebody’s calendar changed within two weeks. The third is the dissent audit. Ask when a member of your team last disagreed with you in front of the others, and if you have to think for more than a moment, you are making decisions on incomplete data.
So here is the question worth sitting with. When your team agrees with you, do you actually know whether they are aligned, or have they simply never had a reason to find out?
Listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork for the patterns in detail, and for the story of the chief executive whose team now tells him he is having a “Cafe moment”. Then take the Turbocharge Your Team quiz, which will show you which pillar of the Unbridled Teamship Roadmap is out of alignment so that you know exactly where to start.
Show Notes
00:49 Agreement Isn’t Alignment
01:14 Why Nothing Changes After Meetings
02:33 Defining Alignment Under Pressure
05:26 The Data Behind Misalignment
09:10 Four Signs You’re Only Agreeing
13:35 Tolerable Culture Warning
14:46 AI Rollouts Expose Alignment Gaps
18:21 Horse Herds and True Alignment
20:33 Energy Beats Words in Leadership
22:50 Cafe Moment Shared Language
24:56 Three Tests to Build Alignment
27:29 Wrap Up and Call to Action
