Your leadership problem isn't knowledge.
It's courage.

I'm not someone who naturally enjoys this kind of work. I find it a bit awkward, to be honest. I came in with a clear remit from my CEO: be more direct with my team. That was the brief. What I didn't expect was that the work would turn out to be about me first and my team second. A lot of what I'd called being supportive was actually about not wanting to be uncomfortable. That sounds obvious now. It wasn't at the time. I had some difficult conversations I'd been carrying for far too long. They went better than I expected, even when the outcomes weren't easy ones. I'd recommend it, with the caveat that you have to actually be willing to look at yourself, which not everyone is.

This is going to sound a bit dramatic but I had a moment about three months in where I realised I'd been hiding. I'd been promoted onto the exec team eighteen months earlier and I was still operating like a really senior individual contributor. Deferring decisions to my CEO that I should have been making. Avoiding pushing back on engineering when I disagreed. The coaching surfaced a lot of stuff I didn't realise was there, including some specific moments earlier in my career where I'd been criticised pretty badly and it had left more of a mark than I'd admitted. I'm not going to claim I'm a completely different leader. But I'm doing the role I was hired for. Which it turns out is what I needed.

We had a specific problem. We'd grown from around 90 to 240 people in eighteen months and most of our managers had been promoted without any real preparation. I'd looked at three or four programmes before this one. What stood out was the focus on what people would actually do differently, not what they would learn, which sounds obvious but isn't where most providers spend their time. I won't pretend the cohort all loved every session. We had genuine pushback, particularly from one of our senior leaders, and that ended up being a productive part of it.

My initial position was that we didn't need this. We're a leadership team that's worked together for years and frankly I thought we were better than most. The CEO pushed for it, so we did it. About halfway through I changed my mind. There's a level of honesty that emerged in the sessions that we weren't getting in our normal meetings. I don't entirely know why. Some of it was probably that an outside facilitator can ask questions we'd never ask each other. The decisions we've made since have been faster and, I think, better. It was worth it.

I went in slightly cautious. I've sat through enough management training to be wary of the type that's all frameworks and no application. This wasn't that. We covered a lot: SBI for feedback, the parent-adult-child stuff, the wheel of autonomy, how to actually run a 1-2-1. But the bit I keep coming back to is the practice time. We worked the techniques on situations we were already dealing with, not hypothetical case studies, and Joseph was happy to push back when our framing was a bit off. The team performance cycle session landed hardest for me. I've been managing for six years and realised I'd been doing some of it backwards.

We're a small team and I came onto the course with quite specific questions about how to manage people who'd been at the company longer than me. I wasn't really sure how to handle the authority side of it. By the end of the day Joseph had actually answered every one of them, not by giving me a script, but by working through the situations I'd brought into the room. The SBI structure for feedback was the most useful thing for me personally. I used it that week on a piece of feedback I'd been sitting on for about a month. It went well and I realised I'd been overthinking it. I'd send anyone on the course.