Written by Nick Roud, Auckland October 5th 2026.
Leadership is one of those words that has been polished, packaged, laminated and placed in reception areas beside bowls of expensive mints. It appears in corporate values statements, conference lanyards and LinkedIn posts written by people who have never led anything more combustible than a discussion about font choice. In a recent delve into Nigel Latta’s book ‘Lessons on Living‘ (well worth the read if you have time to actually get away from your busy work…….he wrote, nothing in leadership is new! It all stems back to the Stone Age. In my view nothing is new, in fact the opposite its just been wrapped up differently by marketing folk who go onto make gazillions…….
Yet leadership is not mysterious. It is not a mystical aura that descends upon someone after they have completed a two-day course at an airport hotel. It is also not a job title. Plenty of people with “Chief” in front of their name are merely senior passengers, gripping the armrests while the organisation drifts towards a hedge. When I was a kid growing up I loved losing myself to cowboys and Indian movies there was always a great Chief to be found. Being dyslexic I still get Chief and Chef mixed up so as you read today’s article please rest assured that all the knifes have been put away and we are talking about Chief in the leadership capacity. Buckle up cowboy!
Leadership is the ability to help people make progress through uncertainty. It means setting direction, creating the conditions for good work, making decisions when the evidence is incomplete, and taking responsibility for what happens next.
That sounds simple. It is not. Leadership is bloody hard and one of my go to questions I ask all CEOs, senior executives and emerging leaders is why do you want to lead? Because people are complicated. Organisations are complicated. Markets have the manners of a badly trained dog. And most leadership problems arrive without labels. Nobody walks into your office and says, “Good morning, I am a conflict-avoidance issue combined with unclear accountability and a disappointing revenue forecast.” They come in saying, “Have you got five minutes?” which is universally understood to mean your afternoon has just been detonated.
This is a definitive guide not because it contains every answer, but because it focuses on the things that make the greatest difference when the PowerPoint slides have ended and real work begins.
Leadership begins with direction (follow me for a minute I need to get this off my chest).
The first responsibility of a leader is to make it clear where the organisation is going and why that destination matters.
This is not the same as producing a slogan. Yes Nike does it super well and yes they also follow thru with leadership!
“Be the best” is not a strategy. It is something shouted by a sports coach immediately before a team loses 6–0. “Customer-centric” is not a strategy either. It is a reminder that customers exist, which is helpful, but not revolutionary. “Transforming tomorrow” sounds like a company that manufactures either renewable energy systems or disappointingly priced moisturiser. This year I have sat in far to many Team Workshops to realise we have a great deal of work to do if we are going to actually ‘Lead’ but I will save that for another article.
A useful direction answers several practical questions:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- For whom are we creating value?
- What will success look like in concrete terms?
- What will we deliberately stop doing?
- What trade-offs are we prepared to make?
Ok I don’t want to be one of those smart marketing folk who re package things in a so call new way so the above is my take from a man who I would have loved to have shared tea with Peter Drucker his The Five Most Important Questions are just want any leader needs right now and so for full disclosure here they are, please use them
- What Is Our Mission?
- Who Is Our Customer?
- What Does the Customer Value?
- What Are Our Results?
- What Is Our Plan?
Without clear direction, intelligent people will create their own interpretations. Each one will sound entirely reasonable. They will also conflict magnificently. Then we see great leadership teams falling into a state of silo v what’s best for the company. Another reason we are called into companies to help.
One team will pursue growth. Another will pursue quality. Finance will pursue cost control. Operations will pursue stability. Sales will promise a customer something that engineering would rather swallow a live wasp than build. Everyone will work very hard. And somehow, despite the activity, the organisation will achieve the corporate equivalent of driving in circles in a supermarket car park. Are we there yet, comes the cry again.
A leader’s job is to reduce this confusion.
That requires repetition. Not once at the annual strategy day, accompanied by flat coffee and a pastry with the structural integrity of insulation foam. Repetition in meetings, decisions, priorities, rewards and conversations. Repeat after me I must ensure to repeat myself at least 1million times today! Welcome to leadership my friend.
People understand what leaders really value by watching what gets attention, resources, recognition and promotion. They do not infer it from the poster in the corridor.
Clarity is kinder than comfort
Many leaders avoid clarity because it can feel harsh.
They soften messages. They hedge. They “socialise” decisions until the decision itself becomes a misty rumour. They tell someone they are “not quite meeting expectations” when what they mean is, “This role is beyond your current capability, and everyone knows it except you because nobody has been honest enough to say so.”
This is not kindness. It is discomfort postponed. Lead my friend – step forwards and name it.
Clear leadership means saying what needs to be said with respect and precision. It means distinguishing between a person’s worth and their performance. It means giving feedback early enough for it to be useful. Don’t wait for the annual workplace performance survey to be fired up again to give feedback, take my friends over in sports land, you get feedback even if you are not wanting it straight away, in the moment and you must get on and do something with it or find another team. Lead my friend – step forwards and give the feedback.
Consider the alternatives.
The first is a difficult conversation now specific, calm, fair and perhaps uncomfortable.
The second is six months of polite vagueness, mounting resentment, underperformance, gossip, defensive behaviour and eventually a much uglier conversation involving HR, a document titled “Without Prejudice,” and someone asking whether the meeting can be recorded or this is my support person.
Only one of these is genuinely humane.
The best leaders do not confuse empathy with evasion. They can understand that feedback is difficult to hear while still believing the person deserves the truth. They do not use bluntness as a substitute for courage, either. “I’m just being honest” is often said by people who are being careless and enjoying it.
Clarity should be direct, evidence-based and future-focused. As said future-focused, I have never ever met a penguin who can change the past so why try to, move forwards, not backwards, let go forwards with feedback. Try it I can say hand on heart it works. A certain mega coach in the US invested Feed-forward, again no he didn’t it was from my mate Mr Drucker……forward focus on feedback (even my brain is hurting on that one why call it feedback……..back…………STOP
Instead of saying, “You need to be more strategic,” describe the behaviour: “In the last three leadership meetings, you reported operational activity well, but you did not identify the commercial implications, key risks or choices we need to make.” Then make the expectation clear: “For the next meeting, bring a one-page view of the decisions required, the options and your recommendation.”
That is leadership. It gives someone something they can act on. Bingo, full house, am…….az…….ing now the person has a clue what you need. Feedforward my friend.
Decision-making is the job
There is no leadership without decisions.
This does not mean leaders must decide everything. That is not decisiveness; it is bottleneck manufacture. The leader who insists on approving every modest expenditure, every customer exception and every minor staffing adjustment soon becomes the human equivalent of a broken traffic light everyone queues around them, nobody moves, and patience evaporates. OMG come on let it go. Breathe please and let the person do their job they have been hired to do.
Good leaders are clear about which decisions belong where.
Some decisions need to be made close to the customer or the work. Some require expert knowledge. Some carry enough risk that they need executive or board-level scrutiny. The trick is to make the boundaries visible.
When people do not know what they can decide, they tend to choose one of two unhelpful options. They either make decisions they should have escalated, producing exciting consequences. Or they escalate decisions they should have made themselves, producing a leader whose calendar resembles a flooded basement. Ah ha I hear you cry time management. No the in ability for you to say No, not me, not interested, never going to happen…..No is a powerful leadership tool and should be polished regularly. Try it now
No. No. No. Come on No. No
A sensible decision culture includes five things:
- A clear owner for each meaningful decision.
- Agreement about who provides input and who has final authority.
- A timeframe for deciding. (non negotiable as well)
- The criteria that matter.
- A commitment to act once the decision is made.
This last point is important. Organisations often behave as though every decision must be perfect. It cannot be. The future is not a multiple-choice exam with the answers printed upside down at the bottom of the page.
Many decisions are reversible. Make them carefully, but make them. Learn. Adjust. Move.
For decisions that are difficult to reverse major acquisitions, senior appointments, large capital commitments, irreversible reputational risks slow down. Seek disconfirming evidence. Invite challenge. Am I missing anything here. Ask what would have to be true for the plan to fail spectacularly.
A leader must know the difference between speed and haste. Speed is useful. Haste is speed wearing a blindfold. Don’t lead wearing a blindfold unless you are at ‘that party’.
Trust is built in small moments
Trust is frequently discussed as though it were an annual event. Something you unveil at a town hall, perhaps with moody music and a photograph of people rowing in the rain.
In reality, trust is built through hundreds of small interactions. This one takes enormous effort and collective time. A great starting point for team coaching here.
It is built when a leader does what they said they would do. (tick)
It is built when bad news is shared promptly rather than buried beneath a mound of optimistic adjectives. (tick)
It is built when someone can disagree without being quietly erased from the next important meeting. (tick tick)
It is built when a leader gives credit generously and takes responsibility publicly. (tick)
It is built when people believe that standards apply upwards as well as downwards.(get in a big tick here)
And it is destroyed, with impressive efficiency, when leaders preach one thing and reward another. (more common than a sneeze)
You cannot tell people that wellbeing matters, then praise those who reply to emails at 1.12 am. You cannot claim to value innovation, then punish every experiment that fails. You cannot announce that people are your greatest asset, then treat them as a regrettable cost line whenever the quarterly numbers become tense. Only last week I had six outplacement coaching engagements from companies, yep six!
Employees are not idiots. They watch. They compare words with actions. They notice who gets promoted, who gets protected and who gets blamed. Please don’t promote a person who is crap but hey he/she looks good! Or hey they know so and so and will bring us gazillion of dollars to the company………Stop this right now……….people can see what is really going on
This does not mean leaders must be flawless. In fact, pretending to be flawless is exhausting and generally unconvincing. Leaders build credibility when they acknowledge mistakes quickly: “I made that call. It did not work. Here is what I missed, what we are changing and what happens next.”
That is not weakness. It is the behaviour of an adult. Another cry ‘are we there yet’?
Culture is what happens when you are not there
Culture is not the list of values on the website. It is the pattern of behaviour people believe is normal, safe and rewarded. I asked a group of men and women recently at a workshop so can you bring me up to speed (code for I didn’t look at your website…but) can you tell me what the company values are? Heads bowed down trying to find their phones but part of my workshop is to leave the phones at the door policy so the room when very quiet! Ah ha we have some work to do today folks don’t we.
If people regularly withhold concerns because the senior team becomes defensive, then the culture is defensive no matter how many times “speak up” appears in a presentation.
If meetings end with apparent agreement but colleagues complain privately afterwards, then the culture is conflict-avoidant. (bad cross here)
If talented people leave because decisions take months and nobody owns them, then the culture is bureaucratic.
If teams collaborate across boundaries even when it is inconvenient, then the culture is cooperative.
Culture is shaped most strongly by what leaders tolerate.
Every time poor behaviour goes unchallenged because the person “gets results,” a message is sent. It says results excuse damage. It says the rules are flexible for the powerful. It says everyone else should either put up with it or leave.
And then leaders are mysteriously surprised when they have a toxic culture. Very common indeed.
The remedy is not a values workshop with coloured sticky notes. It is consistent leadership action. Set behavioural expectations. Deal with breaches. Reward the people who strengthen the environment around them, not merely the people who make the biggest noise about their own contribution. We must stop short of walking past behaviour that sucks, name it, call it out and if things don’t change then my friend it’s time to move on. Leaders who allow shit behaviour must be sacked period.
High standards and humanity are not opposites. The best organisations have both. They expect excellent work and decent conduct. They understand that people can be challenged without being diminished.
The best leaders grow other leaders. This is massively important to each engagement I take on. Grow others.
If every important matter ends up with one person, the organisation does not have leadership capacity. It has a dependency problem.
Leadership is therefore partly the work of making yourself less central. Not irrelevant that would be overdoing it but less involved in the decisions and activities that competent others can handle.
This means delegating outcomes, not merely tasks.
Task delegation sounds like this: “Prepare the slides, arrange the meeting and send the follow-up.”
Outcome delegation sounds like this: “You own the customer renewal. The outcome is a signed agreement that preserves the relationship and protects our margin. Here are the boundaries. Here is the support available. Come back to me when you need a decision beyond those boundaries.”
The first creates an assistant. The second creates capability. You have a choice.
Of course, delegation contains risk. People may make decisions differently from you. They may make mistakes. They may even choose a font you consider criminal. But if leaders cannot tolerate someone else doing something at 85 percent of their preferred standard while developing into someone stronger, they will remain trapped in operational detail forever. It happens a lot.
Coaching matters here. Rather than immediately supplying the answer, a leader can ask:
- What outcome are you trying to achieve?
- What options have you considered?
- What are the risks in each option?
- What recommendation would you make?
- What support do you need from me?
These questions are not a management trick. They force thinking. Over time, people develop judgement, confidence and ownership.
That is how a leadership bench is built: one useful conversation at a time.
Courage matters most under pressure
Leadership is easiest when the numbers are good, the strategy is working and the weather outside is agreeable and you can put your tomato plants into the veggie garden knowing its them again the slug time punk.
The real test comes when pressure arrives.
Perhaps revenue has fallen. Perhaps a key executive has left. Perhaps a customer has made a threat, a regulator has asked a pointed question, or the business has discovered that an expensive initiative has all the promise of a chocolate teapot.
In those moments, people look upwards. Not because leaders are expected to possess supernatural powers, but because people want signals about reality.
A good leader does three things. Get a pen and paper ready for these.
First, they tell the truth. Not every detail, necessarily. There may be legal, commercial or personal reasons for confidentiality. But they do not manufacture false certainty or issue cheery nonsense that collapses the moment someone checks the data.
Second, they create focus. In uncertainty, people can waste enormous energy on speculation. The leader identifies what matters now: protect customers, preserve cash, secure the critical operation, support affected people, make the next decision.
Third, they regulate themselves. This does not mean being emotionless. It means not spraying anxiety over everyone else like a malfunctioning garden hose trying to water the tomato plants that went out four weeks ago but you have forgotten to water cause yes you are busy being busy being busy……. Leaders have emotions they simply need places to process them that are not the entire organisation.
Composure is contagious. So is panic.
Leadership is a practice. No you were not born to lead you have shown up got on with it and picked yourself up from set backs, this is called learning to lead!
Nobody graduates into finished leadership. Well unless you head away for a week residential or a prestigious university that gives you a shining certificate to place (somewhere everyone will see 🙂 oh and don’t forget to post about it on LinkedIn…………
The work changes as responsibility grows. Early leadership is often about organising work, setting expectations and building credibility. Senior leadership is more about creating context, choosing priorities, shaping culture, developing successors and making difficult calls with incomplete information.
At every level, improvement begins with self-awareness.
What is your default response under stress? Do you become controlling, distant, impatient, overly optimistic, conflict avoidant or obsessed with detail? What feedback do you receive repeatedly, even if it arrives in softened language? What is the gap between the leader you intend to be and the experience people actually have of you?
These are uncomfortable questions. Which is precisely why they are useful.
Leadership development is not about collecting models like fridge magnets. You might need a bigger fridge. It is about practising different behaviour until it becomes available when pressure is high. Ask for feedback. Review decisions. Notice patterns. Seek people who will tell you the truth, preferably before the truth is delivered by customers, competitors or an unexpectedly direct employee survey.
The standard is not perfection. The standard is responsibility.
Leadership means having the nerve to provide direction when others are confused, the discipline to make decisions without becoming reckless, the humility to learn, and the character to treat people properly while demanding strong performance.
Everything else is decoration. And we all know you have to prepare the room exceptionally well to avoid paint peeling off in two weeks time.
Nick
