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.
The Promotion Ladder That Only Goes One Way
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/
