Every leader has noticed it's easy to lead people who are like you. We’ve all hired these people, enjoyed working with them and the experience has made us feel like we are great leaders. It's great for the ego and the bottom line. It's the other people that challenge us.

Most leaders think ‘developing’ people means giving them feedback. Which explains why most leaders aren’t developing people at all. What they are doing is smoothing off the edges. Why? Because feedback (the primary tool for ‘developing’ people) lives only at the edges of performance.

Most feedback is fundamentally useless. Not because it is wrong, but because it is too “blurry” to do anything with. Let me explain. A 'leader' says, “You need to develop your strategic thinking,” and feels they have given developmental feedback. The person nods, tries to look reflective, maybe even writes it down, but walks away with almost nothing useful.

One of the clearest distinctions between ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ can be diagnosed in what it creates in the people around you. Management creates dependency. Leadership creates autonomy. Every high performer I have ever seen would be described as autonomous. And yet most leaders today are unknowingly creating the opposite.

Unsurprisingly, step foot inside most organisations and you'll hear endless conversations are about the work: the project, the task, the update, the deadline, the result, the problem that needs to be solved before the next meeting. Cool – these conversations need to be had, but it’s generally not what people care about the most.You know what people really want to talk about?

Most leaders assume performance is a straight-up reflection of capability. Someone performs well, so they must be capable. Someone performs poorly, so they must not be. It sounds logical, and it is certainly convenient, because once we decide someone’s performance is simply who they are or what they are capable of, we don’t have to look much further.

For years, I thought endlessly about how to effectively influence and motivate my team. How to speak in a language that would ‘bring them with me’. How to get them to care about the things I cared about, move in the direction I wanted to move, and perform at the level I believed was possible.

Most leadership development is a waste of time. It’s not that it’s wrong – but because it happens in safe spaces where you’re not really tested.

I sit with highly experienced leaders - people who have been leading leaders for decades - and think surely I’m telling them how to suck eggs … but each time it’s a revelation

Culture is one of those things everyone agrees matters but few know definitively how to change. Everything initiative is a test; a hopeful reach for things that look like change and ‘could’ have impact.

If you’ve ever considered life closely you may have noticed that the same ‘problem’ circles around until finally you face what you’d rather ignore … and once you address it life seems to allow you to move on.

I can’t count how many people have cried in my presence. It’s not just women. It’s men too .. in fact it’s more often men. It’s young people, old people, experienced and inexperienced leaders … everyone. Their shame is all but immediate ‘I’m so sorry for crying”. But I’m not sorry.

Every time I post on LinkedIn about how management is only required in the absence of true leadership, someone will pipe up with the same seemingly-smart yet unknowingly-ignorant comment, something like: “You can’t just have one, you always need a combination of both, appropriate for the situation”

When I first started teaching Unmanaged leadership, I saw leaders deny something repeatedly. Even the most experienced CEOs, the most ‘emotionally intelligent’ and the most well-qualified people leaders were in confident denial of this one thing.

I was chatting to my friend Kate (a primary school teacher) recently about parent-teacher interviews - and I was shocked when she told me the conversations with the challenging children’s parents are consistently not about the child. They’re about the parents, and their inability to say no to their children.

Sometimes, a smart-sounding concept goes way too far. 'Psychological safety' is one of those. A convenient label for the most inconvenient aspect of business - emotions.

Leading people has a bad rap. Most people think it's hard. In fact it's become widely accepted that leadership is hard. The reality is, leading people isn't hard - but managing people is, and most CEOs don't even know the difference. Leading people is surprisingly easy.

CEOs repeatedly say they value emotional intelligence.

But the moment emotion might actually show up, they shut it down.

I don’t think I'd ever tell any of my old bosses this. But my lack of confidence affected the results I generated, more than anyone would know. My surprising superpower was hiding my deeply seated lack of self-belief.

At the tender yet still very-much-an-adult age of 37 I was broken. Severely burnt out, newly separated, two young kids, wondering how I would ever work again.