Blog posts of '2026' 'April'

A growing SME business should feel fast...Close enough to the customer to move quickly, small enough to stay aligned and agile, big enough to have real management depth. But in plenty of growing UK firms, the opposite happens: the senior team becomes the system. Everything routes upward. Decisions queue. The Director becomes the default answer. This is the experience of one Senior Manager (let’s call her Sarah, obviously not her real name) in a fast-growing business where she and most of the Directors had become the bottleneck, and what changed when the leadership team used the Jonico Window–Self assessment to make their habits visible.

Most senior managers don’t wake up thinking, Today I’ll accidentally reduce my team’s confidence. They wake up thinking, We’ve got targets, customers, and a small fire in Operations. Then they do what high performers do under pressure: they step in, fix it, and keep the wheels on. The problem is that, over time, that “stepping in” becomes a leadership style. And leadership styles are like accents - you don’t notice yours until you hear it played back.

You know the moment.... You’re in with a Senior Management Team, the coffee is strong, the titles are stronger, and the self-awareness is… let’s call it in beta. People are bright, experienced, and well-intentioned - yet the room is full of invisible tripwires: over-control, under-trust, heroic rescuing, and the occasional “I’m empowering you by telling you exactly what to do.”