Blog posts of '2026' 'May'

I’ve lost count of the number of teams who tell me they’ve got a “problem-solving issue”, when what they really have is a problem-rushing issue. You’ll recognise the pattern. Something goes wrong. A customer complains. A deadline slips. A system breaks. The team gets in a room (or on Teams), and within ten minutes someone has a solution. Everyone nods. Actions get scribbled down. And then… nothing really changes. The same issue pops up again in a slightly different outfit three weeks later.

I’ve been working with leadership teams for years, and one question comes up regularly: “Which tool should we use – the Leadership Style assessment or the Communication Style one?” It’s a fair question, because they sound similar, and frankly, they are related. But they solve different problems, and picking the wrong one can waste time and miss the real issue your team is facing. Let me walk you through how I think about it, because getting this right makes all the difference.

If you’ve ever facilitated a Senior Management Team with low self-awareness, you’ll know the pattern: everyone is communicating (loudly, confidently, and often at speed), yet somehow the message lands like a paper aeroplane in a hurricane. The tricky bit isn’t intelligence. It’s style. Senior teams don’t usually fall out because they don’t care. They fall out because they’re interpreting each other through their own default lens, then acting as if that interpretation is a fact. The result is predictable: Directs think everyone’s dithering, Systematics think nobody’s thinking, Spiriteds think the room has no energy, and Considerates quietly wonder why we’re all being so sharp with each other.

It started with a Slack message at 6:47pm on a Tuesday. Our Product Manager had sent a two-line decision to the team: “We’re pivoting the roadmap. New priorities attached.” No context. No reasoning. No space for questions. Within minutes, our Head of Design had replied with a terse “Thanks for the heads-up” (which, if you know Design, means I’m furious). Our Operations person had gone quiet. And our most junior engineer had asked me directly, “Is everything okay?” That was the moment I realised something was broken.