Blog

If you work in L&D or HR, you’ll recognise the pattern. Someone senior says, “We need the teams collaborating better.” Someone else says, “Let’s do something engaging.” A calendar invite appears. People turn up politely. Everyone has a decent time. Then Monday arrives and the organisation resumes its favourite hobby: behaving exactly as it did before. That’s why the new wave of online simulations is worth paying attention to. Done well, they don’t just entertain. They create a safe, controlled environment where teams can see the impact of their decisions, communication habits, and assumptions in real time - and then do the one thing most training forgets: stop and reflect.

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.

I know what you’re thinking! “Please, not another motivational speech, harping back to Covid 19!”. Maybe that’s not what you thought at all. It could be that you were one of those fortunate people who were ahead of the curve and constantly reviewing your offering against the backdrop of where the world of work was heading.

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.”

Being nice to your team is not the same as being kind to them and the difference is quietly damaging their growth. True kindness means being kind to someone's potential, not their comfort.