The Leadership Practice: Issue 01 | Q4 2026
(Reading time: 5 minutes)
Hello and welcome. This quarterly dispatch, designed as a short but impactful read, is for a select group of former colleagues, clients, and trusted peers that I’ve had the privilege of working with. Four times a year, I’ll share practical frameworks and observations from my coaching practice focused on leadership development, team dynamics, and actionable prompts for reflection. (And if you stick around until the very bottom of this inaugural edition, there’s a bonus section for the hardcore fans.) Here we go:
The Framework: High performance vs psychological safety
As the macroeconomic climate has tightened, the scale-up narrative has shifted sharply from ‘growth at all costs’ to sustainable paths to profitability. In response, many SME leadership teams have been sounding less concerned about engagement and being a brilliant employer of choice, and more focused on driving high-performance cultures. The problem is how this gets enacted. I frequently see SMEs oscillate between leniency and sudden strictness based purely on short-term results or something a particular stakeholder said at the last board meeting.
Underpinning this lack of consistency is often a false choice: the belief that you have to trade off psychological safety for high standards. When leaders ask me questions about building a high-performance culture, they are often bracing themselves as if it’s time to get mean (no more free kombucha and ping pong for you, Nathaniel). There is an assumption that creating safety dilutes accountability, or conversely, that hitting ambitious goals requires high pressure. Harvard’s Amy Edmondson dispels this myth by mapping team culture across two clear axes, standards and psychological safety:
High standards + low safety = the anxiety zone: teams default to self-preservation, hide mistakes, lots of fight / flight / freeze behaviours, relationships between team members and managers become tense, creative risk-taking can evaporate.
Low standards + high safety = the comfort zone: Morale can be artificially high, but momentum can stall, pet or vanity projects are rife, lots of back patting for output despite lack of outcomes, commercial imperatives may be seen as unimportant.
High standards + high safety = the learning zone: the sweet spot for SMEs. Executives who model this well set clear expectations and are firm on boundaries and accountability when it comes to outcomes, but are deeply curious during setbacks, conduct blameless post-mortems, enable candid feedback, welcome constructive challenge and encourage innovation. They do this whilst demonstrating care and respect towards individuals as well as the organisation.
Beyond psychological safety and high standards, the basics still apply: team members need to know what they need to do (clarity, direction, focus), have the ability to do it (skills, resources, time) and must want to do it (motivation, engagement, aligned incentives). Pressure cookers do not generate sustainable performance. Ensuring your team is in the learning zone takes deliberate and thoughtful action, and should help teams to effectively deliver without the need for punitive or high-pressure atmospheres.
Field Notes: The underconfident overachiever
A common archetype in scaling SMEs is the underconfident overachiever. (This is often labelled ‘imposter syndrome’ - a term I’m not particularly fond of, which I’ll unpack in a future edition). These are typically exceptionally capable people in their first or second leadership roles on the back of a faster-than-usual career trajectory. It’s very rewarding working with these clients because it involves a deeper exploration of the inner game, and as we examine the driving forces behind their career progression, it is often fueled by an intense inner critic, rigorous preparation and a perfectionist work ethic. There is also sometimes a deep drive to prove themselves, though it is not always clear to whom.
Whilst these drives can lead to high output and performance in individual contributor or functional roles, transitioning into the executive level can be challenging as leadership roles demand delegating control, sitting with ambiguity, enabling others and having difficult debates with peers. When faced with critical feedback, for example, these leaders can become defensive or begin self-flagellation rather than being open and intellectually curious. And when external validation is achieved, it rarely satisfies because the internal self-talk doesn’t change, and the cycle continues.
Real leadership growth doesn’t come from building performative self-confidence or ego (a quick scroll on LinkedIn will show you plenty of this). It comes from shifting the internal narrative away from ‘I need to be flawless to be safe’ to ‘I am a work in progress, like everyone else, and I also have value to offer’. Developing this perspective has to be a practice in order to be effective, rather than a shot in the arm in the form of praise or recognition. Once an executive manages to unhook their self-worth from perfection or even performance in role, suddenly their impact naturally multiplies, as it’s much easier to summit a mountain without a heavy burden on your shoulders.
Recommended Read
Getting better at difficult conversations is a topic I end up working with almost all clients on, and when it comes to conflict resolution a quick and effective read is Non Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Despite being written in the 1960’s it remains highly relevant today and can be as helpful in your marriage as it is in leadership team dynamics. It’s worth reading this book in detail rather than looking at the high-level model (it’s a 4 hour read).
Quoted
Rita Levi-Montalcini, Neurobiologist and Nobel Prize winner, reminds us that good judgment requires logic and warmth: "Rare are those people who use the mind; few use the heart; and really unique are those who use both."
Client Spotlight
COO Alice Galsworthy recently shared some kind words about our work together: “Having a coach with genuine people leadership experience meant I could bring live, complex problems to our sessions and get practical, grounded support. I’d recommend Chris to any leader who wants both the reflective space to grow and the practical tools to handle what’s right in front of them.”
And that’s it! See you next quarter. In the meantime, I offer individual leadership coaching, as well as team coaching and workshop facilitation - if you or a colleague could benefit from support, you can reply to this email to book in time to speak.
Thank you,
Chris
Executive Coach and Facilitator
A bonus thought
This newsletter will usually be a safe haven from the important but slightly unavoidable topic of the threats posed by machine learning development, but here are some interesting quotes:
‘I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano…’
‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present…’
‘We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude…’
What these quotes have in common is that they are not from this century (respectively 1848, 1862 and 1938). It seems fashionable nowadays to talk about living in the darkest of times, as if optimism is unintellectual, when actually given the trajectory of human progress, anyone at any point saying that is (on average) living in the brightest era to date.
Maybe all former doomsayers were wrong and this moment genuinely is different, but it’s hard to shake the fact that the end times repeatedly foretold in our civilisation over centuries have yet to materialise, and it seems an itch we like to scratch to predict our collective downfall. There is of course always struggle, pain, risk, and disasters, but there is also always resilience, progress, joy, and hope.