Knowing Self-Aware Leadership: Knowing Self-Aware Leadership

Founder's Syndrome No. 2: The Cost of Leaving and the Danger of Staying

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:00:47 GMT

Hello KSKOers

When I was researching Founder’s Syndrome, I came across an article by Dean Steele, which made me think that there was far more to say than what could be said in one article. So, this is the second in a series about Founder’s Syndrome. In this article, we’ll explore what happens when a Founder leaves an organisation unexpectedly and at short notice. We explore organisational readiness and set out some ideas for business continuity.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Check out our podcast discussing Founder’s Syndrome: The Cost of Leaving and the Danger of Staying:

In the first article, we explored Founder’s Syndrome as a developmental challenge; what happens when the very strengths that built an organisation begin to constrain it. This time, I want to explore a question that feels a little more uncomfortable. Not what happens when a founder stays too long, but what happens when they disappear, and the question that follows on its coat tails…. ‘what happens when they still hang around?’. It sounds a bit Machiavellian, but from what I’ve read, it makes sense to consider your organisation’s answer to both.

A Norwegian Study

Dean Steele, a governance writer whose work I came across recently explored an interesting piece of research. He explored a large-scale study that tracked more than 70,000 Norwegian startups and observed what happened to firms when their founders died unexpectedly. The findings were stark: sales fell significantly on average, profitability dropped and survival rates decreased. Notably, the effects persisted; there was no automatic bounce back after a period and the impact if the loss hit organisations hard.

The study found that where the founder was still actively employed in the business in roles like CEO, the impact was significantly worse. Sudden departures were harder than anticipated ones. And most tellingly of all, the death of a founder chief executive had much greater effects than the death of a non-founder chief executive. It wasn’t about transition turbulence, it was directly linked to the founder’s specific knowledge and relationships being cut off, in an instant.

The study wasn’t about charities, which I appreciate, but the challenge is the same, and in some ways the stakes in the charitable sector are higher.

Why charities are especially exposed

In commercial firms, the damage was evident in sales figures and profit margins. In charities, the equivalent is trust; with commissioners, with philanthropists, with the communities being served. As we know, trust is not easily transferred from one person to another by way of an organisational chart.

Steele said, in charities, a founder is often the story others tell about why they support you. Remove that story and reassurance needs to come quickly and credibly. The order matters; competence first, relationship development next, and both together over the weeks that follow.

This maps directly onto my self-awareness model. What a charity needs in those first hours and days is regulation of behaviour: deliberate, conscious action, not reactive scrambling. Regulation only holds if the groundwork of reflection and recognition has already been done. If the organisation has never honestly examined its dependency on one person, the capacity to regulate in a crisis just won’t be there.

Writing about this same challenge, Marcus Coetzee in a piece for the Cranfield Trust describes Founder’s Syndrome as an autoimmune disease; the personal characteristics that enabled an organisation to grow and succeed in the first place begins to work against it. Founder’s Syndrome tends to surface when an organisation reaches a stage of growth or complexity that the Founder isn’t able to manage, or when an organisation requires a significant change in direction from its original vision. It’s an inbuilt dependency that’s been there since day one, and no-one has thought about structuring it out to take account of the realities of life, where the only constant is change.

The silence that tells you something

Steele begins his article by asking, ‘If your founder took an unplanned six month holiday tomorrow, would the organisation hum along; or would you hear that very specific silence that means the wheels are thinking about coming off?’.

That silence is worth paying attention to. Not because founders are doing anything wrong by being central and essential; they often got to that position because the organisation genuinely needed them to be there. But from a self-aware leadership perspective, if you’re a listening organisation, the silence is telling you something - it’s data. It’s telling you about how decisions are made, who has and nurtures the essential relationships, and who holds the knowledge that keeps the wheels turning.

Reflection invites us to ask: how much of this organisation actually lives inside one person’s head? Recognition asks: do the people around that founder, i.e. the staff, board, stakeholders - understand the degree to which they rely on that one individual? And regulation of behaviour, as ever, is where the hard work has to happen.

There is another version of the story where things get more complicated though: the Founder steps aside but they keep appearing and hanging around. And that, Paul Sturm argues, can create an entirely different kind of problem.

When stepping down is not stepping away

Sturm, coined the term Post-Founder Syndrome to describe something he’s observed time and time again. Not founders who stayed too long in their roles, but founders who left their roles and hung around anyway; in the building, on the board, in the inbox, in the culture.

He said that one organisation allowed its founding executive director to retain an office after her successor was appointed. Within months, the new leader found himself navigating not just the organisation’s challenges but the founder’s quiet resistance; criticism of his decisions, and encouragement of staff to voice concerns directly to her rather than to him. He left within a year.

He talks about another founder who stepped down from the board chair role but remained as a board member. Nine years later, the organisation had been through eight executive directors. The founder continued to micromanage, asking one incoming leader for an hour-by-hour breakdown of their working day, every day. What did the board do throughout this, you ask? Not a lot!

I’ve stepped onto a board where the previous founding CEO had stayed on as Chair for a year, followed by a founding colleague taking on the Chair role after his time. The staff were tearing their hair out; having to work around these people whose attitudes and ideas were outdated and formed obstacle after obstacle.

I’ve also stepped into an organisation where the only story about the organisation ever told was the founding CEO’s life story. Even today, on their website, there isn’t a section that names the staff, only the CEO, trustees, patrons and external connections. What happens to the organisation when you remove the linchpin CEO from the infrastructure?

From a self-awareness perspective, this is a gap in recognition; the founder can’t see the impact their continued presence is having on others and the organisation. Without that recognition, shifting to the essential act of regulation is impossible. The founder might genuinely believe they are helping, but the gap between intention and impact is doing significant damage.

Coetzee says that when founders need to share some power, they are inclined to give it to loyal people who can act as their proxies in their absence. This essentially means running the organisation by remote control through friends, family members, or trusted allies appointed to senior positions. It may not feel like interference from the inside, but from the outside, it’s clearly visible.

What the research says about transition

One of the more counterintuitive findings in this space comes from research by Tuomala, Yeh and Smith Milway, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Challenging the assumption that founders and successors are best kept apart, their study of nonprofit transitions found that nearly half of all founders who step down continue to bring their knowledge, relationships, and passion to bear for the organisations they started, and that this extended involvement, when carefully managed, often yields better outcomes than a clean break.

Transitions that paired a founder in a continuing role with a successor from inside the organisation proved to be the most successful of all transition models examined, based on revenue growth through the transition, retention of the successor, and self-reported performance. The researchers identified specific areas where founders could contribute after stepping down; fundraising, ambassadorial roles, advocacy, and mentoring; without undermining the successor’s authority.

What made the difference, the research suggests, is intentionality. Not whether the founder stayed, but how deliberately the role was defined, bounded, and honoured by all parties. The Stanford team identified four conditions for an extended founder role to work well:

the founder has the capability and desire to stay engaged;
the board perceives clear value in that involvement;
the founder genuinely wants the successor to succeed;
and the successor is willing to work with the founder.

All four, they note, require both parties to manage their ego carefully.

The personal dimension of this is captured with unusual candour by Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, in a piece for the same publication titled ‘Knowing When to Let Go’. Lewis describes the particular challenge of separating funder loyalty from organisational loyalty: fundraising is very personal and people often give money if they believe in someone’s personal vision, which means a founder’s departure can feel to major donors like a jolt, even a rejection. Lewis dealt with this by calling his longest-serving donors personally before any public announcement, sequencing the news carefully to allow each relationship to be and appear to be valued. He also made the decision, after initial hesitation, to resign from the board entirely; recognising that staying on, even with good intentions, risked being perceived as second-guessing his successor. That act of self-aware restraint is, I think, a form of regulation at its most mature.

The board’s role in both scenarios

What connects Steele’s concern about founder absence with Sturm’s concern about founder over-presence is governance. In both cases, the board is the body that should be holding the balance. In the sudden departure scenario, a board that has never rehearsed resilience will be scrabbling around, reactively - doing business continuity on the hoof. In the post-founder scenario, a board that has never clearly defined the founder’s evolving role will enable confusion, without meaning to.

Coetzee identifies the roots of this clearly. Common weaknesses among boards of founder-led organisations include a lack of founder performance reviews, weak oversight of programmes and finances, and insufficient independence from the founder. These are not conscious or deliberate omissions, they’re accumulations of consigning conversations to the ‘too difficult’ box. Boards that are composed of loyal friends and early supporters, which Sturm also notes is typical of how founding boards are assembled, are structurally ill-placed to assert the independence the organisation eventually needs.

Sturm is clear about what boards need to do. They must clearly define a founder’s new role in writing. If a founder remains on the board, the chair must pay close attention to how they interact with their successor. And if a founder is actively damaging the organisation, the board must be willing to act decisively, including ending the founder’s involvement altogether if necessary. Those are not comfortable conversations, but his point is that effective governance sometimes requires difficult choices, and in the charitable sector, the mission must always take precedence over the interests of any one individual, even the person who started it all. And that’s not easy to recognise or implement.

Resilience is not a document

The practical guidance that emerges from all of this isn’t glamorous or explosive - it’s about raising the concerns and making their mitigations business as usual functions. Steele suggests auditing founder dependence; identifying which decisions, relationships and routines would stall if one person were unavailable for ninety days. He recommends mapping the handful of relationships that unlock revenue, funding or licence to operate. He talks about converting fragile, personal assets into shared ones; documented operating procedures, sharing inboxes, rotating ownership of key relationships so others become known and trusted over time.

Steele says ‘succession is not a document; it is a rehearsal’. That rehearsal needs to include clarity about what a founder’s role looks like after transition; not just who takes over, but what the founder’s relationship with the organisation becomes. The Stanford research recommends that organisations start planning years in advance, investing in developing internal successors, and treating succession as a regular topic at board level rather than a crisis to be managed when the situation lands. The Bridgespan Group found that the probability of a founder transition peaks at two points; at the ten year mark and after twenty five years; which means most founder-led charities have got plenty of notice to do something about it.

Holding the good - preparing for the change.

There is a tension here that I want to name, because I think it matters. Founders are often the reason an organisation exists at all. Their judgement, their networks, their energy are not replaceable inputs. You do not want to drain the place of personality in the name of resilience. And as Sturm acknowledges from his own experience as a founder of two nonprofits, the attachment is real. It feels like being a parent: it is not easy to let go.

But there is also a moral dimension too. Staff, beneficiaries, commissioners - they have all placed their bets on the organisation. That bet should not rest on a single person, and it should not be held hostage to a single identity either. Steele puts it simply: resilience is a moral duty.

Coetzee offers a useful frame for founders who are willing to hear it. Founder’s Syndrome is unlikely when leaders grow faster than their organisations. If founders are still adapting, still listening, still learning; still, in the language of the self-awareness framework, regulating their behaviour and going after learning opportunities, then there is the potential that founders’ syndrome won’t become a hampering situation.

In self-aware leadership terms, this is a challenge at both individual and organisational level. It is not enough for the founder to be self-aware as an individual. The system around them needs to be aware too - the board, senior team and governance structures all need to ensure no dependency on one person. Founder-dependency is not only a leadership problem, i is a governance one. And so, it turns out, is founder departure.

What to do next

Start with two questions rather than one. The first is Steele’s: which decisions, relationships and routines in your organisation would stop if one person vanished for ninety days? The second is Sturm’s: if your founder stepped down tomorrow, is it clear enough what their role would be afterwards; clear enough that everyone, including the founder, would know when a line had been crossed?

You do not need a full audit, you just need the courage and conviction to ask. And if the answer makes you uncomfortable? That’s the source code for your action plan.

A note on sources: This article draws on Dean Steele’s governance writing on founder dependence; Paul Sturm’s work on Post-Founder Syndrome; Marcus Coetzee’s piece for the Cranfield Trust, Founder’s Syndrome Undermines the Legacy of Strong Leaders; Tuomala, Yeh and Smith Milway’s Making Founder Successions Work, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Spring 2018); and Charles Lewis’s account, Knowing When to Let Go, also in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Spring 2005).

Core Concepts: Not everything they say about leadership is true...

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:00:16 GMT

Hello KSKOers

Today’s blog is inspired by a thought I had whilst chopping vegetables the other day. There are two phrases we often hear bandied about regarding leadership, that I just don’t agree with. Join me as I jump on my soap box to debunk the myths that ‘leadership is a lonely place’ and ‘I’m not here to make friends’.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey.

Link here to this week’s long blog

Leadership is relational, not solitary — you cannot be a leader in an empty room. Leadership is socially constructed; it only exists when others choose to follow you.
Loneliness is a symptom, not a feature — when leadership feels lonely, it tends to reflect a lack of meaningful connection, trust, or self-awareness, not an inevitability of the role.
Leaders exist at every level — research shows that effective leadership emerges throughout organisations, wherever individuals represent others and gather followers. The top is not the only place leadership lives.
Distance erodes self-awareness — leaders operating furthest from frontline delivery are often found to have lower self-awareness, and it is in that distance that isolation tends to take root.
Connection is not optional — leaders who invest in relationships, seek perspectives and remain curious about how they are experienced by others are far less likely to find themselves isolated when things get hard.
“I’m not here to make friends” carries a cost — positioning yourself as a lone wolf risks signalling that relational qualities like empathy, openness and respect are weaknesses. People notice - they see, hear and feel the aloofness, even if they can’t name it.

Likeability and effectiveness share the same DNA — research into likeability and leadership found that the qualities associated with each were remarkably similar, not two separate sets of attributes, but the same qualities expressed in different degrees.
Trust unlocks discretionary effort — where there is trust, people contribute, share ideas and take ownership. Where there is distance, engagement becomes guarded and functional. The difference between giving 110% and 99.9% to your job is a relational one.
Both phrases assume distance is strength — but it isn’t. Research and lived experience consistently tell us that leadership is not diminished by connection. It is strengthened by it.

The Last Word

The language we use about leadership shapes the leadership we practise. Rather than accepting loneliness as the price of responsibility, we might recognise it as a signal that connection and self-awareness need attention. Rather than keeping people at arm’s length, we might invest in the respectful, trusting relationships that allow everyone to do their best work. These reframes may be less meme-worthy, but they are closer to what leadership actually needs today, in our deeply human workplaces.

Not everything they say about leadership is true...

Dr Nia D Thomas — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:01:29 GMT

Hello KSKOers

Today’s blog is inspired by a thought I had whilst chopping vegetables the other day. There are two phrases we often hear bandied about regarding leadership, that I just don’t agree with. Join me as I jump on my soap box to debunk the myths that ‘leadership is a lonely place’ and ‘I’m not here to make friends’.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Take a listen to the podcast discussing ‘Not everything they say about leadership is true...’

“Leadership is a lonely place!”. It conjures up images of people at the top of organisations, carrying responsibility, making difficult decisions and feeling that the weight of those decisions sits solely with them. It feels like a phrase from the time when hero leaders were worshiped like organisational saviours.

Leadership does involve responsibility of course, and there are moments where difficult judgement calls have to be made. But to move from that reality to the conclusion that leadership is inherently lonely feels like an outdated idea that’s had its day. It should be banished to the back of the wardrobe along with shoulder pads and neon socks.

From my research into self-awareness and leader effectiveness, one thing became consistently clear: leadership does not exist in isolation. It exists in relation to others. I’m firmly of the view that you can’t be a leader in an empty room. Leadership is socially constructed and you can only be a leader when others choose to follow you.

When leadership feels lonely, it’s less about the role and more about the conditions surrounding it: the conditions that the leader has created. It can reflect a lack of meaningful connection with others, a lack of trust within relationships, or a lack of awareness about how one’s own behaviour is shaping those dynamics.

In other words, loneliness is not an inevitable feature of leadership. It is more often than not, a by-product of disconnection between the leader and everyone else.

What I found particularly interesting in my research was that effective leaders could be found at all levels of organisations. Leadership was not confined to those at the most senior level - leaders emerged throughout all levels of organisations, wherever individuals represented others and amassed followers. That finding alone challenges the idea that leadership is a solitary experience reserved for those at the top.

What may be more accurate is ‘making difficult decisions on your own is a lonely job’.

There was another finding from my research that adds an important contextual consideration to this debate: leaders operating at the most strategic level of organisation were often found to have lower levels of self-awareness than those at other levels. This suggests that as individuals move further away from operational delivery at the frontline, there is a risk of becoming more distant from the impact of their behaviour.

And it is perhaps in that distance that the experience of loneliness begins to take shape - not because leadership demands it, but because connection has not been formed, sustained and valued. When times are good, connection may be less important than when the chips are down. And in those times when the chips are down, they are the very instances where connection is essential, to get you through.

Leaders who actively invest in relationships, who seek out perspectives, who create space for dialogue and who remain curious about how they are experienced by others are far less likely to find themselves isolated in those tricky times. Their leadership is not something they carry alone; it is something that is shared, shaped and supported through deliberate inclusion and positive interaction with others.

I posted my thoughts on LinkedIn and this reply came from Eric Lynn:

Leadership is a mere word to describe ... erm ... what exactly?
There are so many different interpretations.

Leadership is not lonely. The concept is nonsensical.
Being a leader. Having the responsibility for leading people, leading a business ... this can be very lonely.

The distinction is essential.

This is interesting, as it seems to suggest that leading as an extraneous concept versus the responsibility of leadership as an internal concept should be separated and explicitly defined. This connects to the layers of self-awareness: reflection of hard and relational skills, recognition of impact and regulation of behaviour. Maybe the reflection layer is where loneliness is more likely to occur when recognition and regulation is not developed.

“I’m not here to make friends”, leans on a similar set of assumptions as ‘leadership is a lonely place’. It is often used as an overt signal of professionalism, setting the capable leader apart from those around them; to draw a boundary - to signal the ‘lone wolf’ status; to suggest that leadership requires a certain level of ruthlessness in order to be effective.

Of course, boundaries matters and leadership is not a popularity contest. There are tough decisions to be made, high standards to be upheld and sometimes difficult conversations to be had. But, even though leadership is not about making friends, it is fundamentally about building relationships.

My earlier research into likeability and leadership explored whether there was a connection between being liked and being an effective leader. What emerged was that the qualities associated with likeability and those associated with effective leadership were remarkably similar. They were not entirely different sets of attributes, but rather the same qualities expressed to different degrees depending on the context.

Qualities such as respect, empathy, openness and the ability to communicate well were valued in both cases. These are central to how people experience leadership and to how relationships function within organisations. When leaders position themselves as being “not here to make friends”, there is a risk that this is interpreted, consciously or unconsciously, as a move away from those relational qualities. It can create a sense of distance, a perception that connection is not a priority and even, that being likeable is a weakness.

And people notice - even if they can’t explicitly call it out, they can see, hear, feel and sense the coldness, the aloofness…

In any organisational setting, behaviour is constantly being observed, received, perceived and interpreted. People pay attention to how leaders speak, how they listen, how they respond under pressure and how they treat others. These observations form the basis of judgements about trust, credibility and intent.

Those judgements matter, because they shape how people choose to engage - relationships are a two way street and reciprocity is the key. How the exchange between individuals goes, establishes the kind of relationship they have. Think about what you know about ‘transactional analysis’ - it’s the space between people that determines how that relational volley happens.

Where there is trust, people are more likely to contribute, to share ideas, to raise concerns and to take ownership of their work. Where there is distance or uncertainty, engagement is fractured, inconsistent and guarded. People do what is required, and there is less impetus for anyone to operate at the layer of discretionary effort. That means where people could give 110% to their work, their want is restricted to 99.9%

So while it may be true that you are not at work to make friends, you are very much there to build the kind of relationships that enable people to do their best work. Without those relationships, leadership becomes functional rather than effective.

The Last Word

What both of these phrases have in common is an underlying assumption that leadership requires distance. Distance from others, distance from relationships and, to some extent, distance from the emotional dynamics of working with people. But both research and lived experience suggest otherwise, and as the millennium roles on, this is becoming increasingly the case.

100 years ago, leaders and workers were not connected, by accident or design. But as as the world has revolved, expectations have changed. Today, we recognise that leadership is not diminished by connection; it is strengthened by it. It is shaped by how well you understand yourself, how well you understand others and how effectively you navigate the space between the two. That space is where trust is built, where meaning is created and where impact is felt.

It is time to reconsider the language we use. Rather than accepting that leadership is a lonely place, we might recognise that it can feel lonely when connection and self-awareness are lacking. Rather than distancing ourselves with the idea that we are not here to make friends, we might focus on the importance of building respectful, trusting and constructive relationships.

These reframes may not be as neat or as easily repeated, but they are closer to the reality of what leadership actually needs now - today.

Core Concepts: Easter Book Sale!

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:01:03 GMT

Hello KSKOers

It’s Easter weekend, so I’m taking a few days break.

Here’s a LINK to my Easter books sale, as my little gift to support you in reflection, renewal and revival on your self-aware leadership journey.

Thank you for joining me on my learning journey and inviting me to join you on yours.

Wishing you health, happiness and peace.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS YOUR EASTER SALE COPY!

This is only available to subscribers in the UK and the US, due to printer limitations.

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

🥇Business Management & Leadership
🥇Occupational & Organisational Psychology
🥇Business Careers

A Gift for You: Wishing you a Happy Easter!

Dr Nia D Thomas — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:01:56 GMT

Hello KSKOers

It’s Easter weekend. Easter is a Christian festival celebrating renewal and revival. Here in the UK, we celebrating it by eating far too many chocolate eggs and have a long bank holiday. Friday and Monday are, for many people, public holidays.

As I can’t send each and every one of you a chocolate egg, I’m sending you a virtual egg and a LINK to my Easter books sale, as my little gift to support you in reflection, renewal and revival on your self-aware leadership journey.

Thank you for joining me on my learning journey and inviting me to join you on yours.

Wishing you health, happiness and peace.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS YOUR EASTER SALE COPY!

This is only available to subscribers in the UK and the US, due to printer limitations.

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

🥇Business Management & Leadership
🥇Occupational & Organisational Psychology
🥇Business Careers

Core Concepts: Self-Aware Leaders and Happy Workplaces - Reflections on the Global Workplace Happiness Report, 2026

Dr Nia D Thomas — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:01:55 GMT

Hello KSKOers

This week I went to the launch of the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026 by The Happiness Index at Google’s London HQ.

As I listened to the presentations, it became very clear, that the 9 behaviours of my self-aware leadership compass align directly with the findings of the report. The same relational dynamics at the heart of self-aware leadership are central to what makes workplaces happy. Join me as I share the connections.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey.

Link here to this week’s long blog

Care — Kindness is an essential element of organisational infrastructure. It’s not a nice to have. It shapes how feedback is given and how people experience being heard. Friction isn’t the enemy, and through establishing a caring culture, effective leaders create conditions to move through and beyond moments of friction constructively.

Humility — Being valued is one of the lowest-scoring yet most influential dimensions of workplace happiness findings in the report, globally. For me, humility means stepping aside at the right moments and making sure people’s contributions are named and felt.

Authenticity — Alignment between what you think, say, feel and do creates predictability, and predictability alongside consistency creates psychological safety. Authenticity is often felt more confidently with seniority, but it also grows alongside confidence at any work-life stage.

Reflection — Space to pause is the first thing to disappear in busy organisations. Without it, learning becomes accidental. Reflection is what turns experience into an opportunity for growth.

Trust — Trust is built through consistency and eroded by the gap between what organisations say and what they do. It lives in behaviour, not intention. Trust is an activity not a passivity.

Adaptability — Clarity is the enabler of adaptability. When people don’t know where to start, they don’t have a concept against which to innovate. ‘Cognitive surplus’, which is freed up by psychological safety and role clarity, is what makes agility possible.

Behaviour — What gets noticed gets repeated. What gets tolerated becomes the standard. Culture is behaviour in action, whether leaders intend it or not. Model the behaviour you want to see. Recognise and reward the behaviour you want repeated.

Listening — It’s not enough to believe you’re listening, people have to experience being heard. Listening is a cultural signal about whether people are participants or spectators, which links directly to engagement, empowerment and belonging.

Experience — Learning from experience only compounds in value when it’s shared. Mentoring, coaching and reflection turn individual experience into collective growth.

The Last Word

The launch reminded me that work and life are no longer separate. Employee expectations have shifted: engagement, inclusion, recognition and listening are no longer initiatives, they’re the baseline of the workplace contract. The biggest takeaway for me? The behaviours on the Compass aren’t abstract ideals. They’re grounded in what the data shows actually makes a difference to how people feel at work. The Report validates the work, and left the Launch more inspired than ever to keep learning.

More…

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

🥇Business Management & Leadership
🥇Occupational & Organisational Psychology
🥇Business Careers

Self-Aware Leaders and Happy Workplaces: Reflections on the Global Workplace Happiness Report, 2026

Dr Nia D Thomas — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:02:49 GMT

Hello KSKOers

This week, I went to the launch of the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026, by The Happiness Index at Google Head office in London.

I left with my head buzzing from all of the insights and ideas shares. During the day, it became very apparent that there was a lot of overlap in their findings and my model of self-aware leadership, specifically, the 9 behaviours of my compass. So, here’s a review of how my model overlaps with what the data is telling us about workplace happiness.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

As I listened to the themes of the presentations, authenticity, trust and listening were coming out loud and clear. I had one of those moments of realisation - my model of self-aware leadership and the findings about workplace happiness were overlapping. They are three of the nine points on my Self-Aware Leadership Compass.

Since then, I’ve been reflecting on the Report and my own model, and it’s clear: the same relational dynamics that sit at the heart of self-aware leadership, are central to the discussion about workplace happiness.

My model sets out the behaviours which we need to work towards in order to be self-aware leaders and the Report generates the findings that corroborate my view that these are indeed the behaviours that make for effective and happy workplaces.

Care

If you take the superhighway of CARE, you are heading on a journey of empathy and respect, appreciating the human aspects of the lives of your colleagues whilst not shying away from having difficult conversations.

In the compass, care is about empathy, respect and the courage to engage honestly with others. It’s not fluffy, it’s courageous and it’s as much about bing kind as it is about having difficult conversation when they need to be had.

Friction isn’t the enemy. It’s where the work happens. The role of leadership is not to remove it entirely, but to create the conditions where people can move through it together and come out the other end feeling positive and able to continue working together constructively.

In the launch, I got this same sense when people were talking about kindness. Kindness is not a nicety, it is part of organisational infrastructure. It shapes how decisions are made, how feedback is given and how people experience being heard.

The report reflects this through safety, relationships and belonging, some of the strongest predictors of workplace happiness.

Care isn’t about being agreeable and likeable. It is about creating the conditions where people can contribute and do their work well.

Humility

If you take the superhighway of HUMILITY, your sojourn will be filled with letting others’ light shine, supporting them to step forward and being open when you don’t know the answers.

Humility is about letting others shine, being open about what you don’t know and creating space for others to step forward.

This connects closely to what the report describes as acknowledgement and feeling valued, one of the lowest scoring yet most influential dimensions, globally. The report says that while many organisations talk about valuing their people, the experience of being valued is not always consistent.

Humility is not about stepping back entirely. It’s about stepping aside at the right moments. It’s about noticing contribution, naming it and making sure people feel that what they do matters.

Authenticity

If you take the superhighway of AUTHENTICITY, your hike will show you how to live your values, beliefs and priorities with integrity and make conscious decisions about who the professional ‘you’ really is.

Authenticity is about alignment, where you think, say, feel and do things consistently. Dan Pontefract talks about operating within a bandwidth so that people know where they are with you. Your emotional highs and lows are predictable which makes people feel comfortable around.

“For example, to achieve a sense of Freedom, we need authenticity, autonomy, and belonging.”

Report, p.9

The report views authenticity alongside freedom, autonomy and belonging. It’s about whether people feel able to be themselves at work. What struck me was the idea that authenticity often increases with age and seniority. Many people feel they have to earn the right to be themselves. I think it’s also about confidence. As we get older, we feel more confident in showing up as we really are, and saying what we really think.

Reflection

If you take the superhighway of REFLECTION, your cruise will involve being reflective in the moment and giving yourself the opportunity to respond rather than react so you can grow and become the best version of yourself.

As I’m sure you know, reflection is the beating heart of self-aware leadership. It’s both an essential layer of the definition of self-awareness as well as one of the 9 behaviours of the compass. It’s where we deliberately generate space to pause, notice and make sense of what’s happening, giving ourselves the opportunity to respond rather than react.

We know growth matters. But reflection requires space, and space is often the first thing that disappears in busy organisations. Without it, learning becomes accidental rather than intentional.

The report reflects this through personal growth, meaning and purpose, areas that are often underdeveloped despite being strongly linked to engagement.

Trust

If you take the superhighway of TRUST, you’ll trek into the land of kindness and consistency where you will instil trust in your colleagues so that they choose to follow you.

Trust is integral to all of the other behaviours of the compass, and it’s not a single behaviour you practice, but it’s made up of lots of behaviours that others experience. Trust isn’t yours to determine, but it is yours to grow for others to determine. It is built through consistency, integrity and accountability.

The strongest predictors of whether someone will recommend their employer (eNPS) are values alignment and inspiration, belonging, and trust.

Report p.10

The report describes trust as the connective tissue between belonging, inspiration and feeling valued. One of the most powerful insights from the day was that trust is often eroded not by poor intent, but by inconsistency, the gap between what organisations say and what they do. Trust lives in behaviour. It takes time to build and a moment to break.

Adaptability

If you take the superhighway of ADAPTABILITY, your expedition will mean responding with openness, flexibility and a growth mindset to the changing demands of your role and the changing needs of your people.

Adaptability is about responding to change with openness and flexibility. It is the ability to adjust, evolve and navigate uncertainty.

The report reflects this through freedom and enablement, whether people feel able to act, respond and adapt effectively.

“…a happy workforce, with high engagement, psychological safety, and role clarity, possesses the cognitive surplus required to adapt.”

Report p.55

This was one of the strongest messages from the day: clarity. Clarity reduces emotional and cognitive load. If people don’t have clarity, they don’t know where to start, so adaptability and innovation is hampered. Without clarity work is guesswork. With clarity, people have direction.

Behaviour

If you take the superhighway of BEHAVIOUR, your ride will mean modelling the behaviour you expect to see in your organisation and rewarding the behaviour of those that live the values you espouse.

Behaviour is where organisational strategy and standards becomes visible: behaviour is culture in action. My definition of behaviour is underpinned by the idea of modelling what you expect to see and recognising that people are always watching those behaviour.

“People repeat the behaviours that get noticed…

When recognition is done well it shifts attention from products and services to the ecosystem of people who make great outcomes possible. It reinforces the behaviours that create long-term value rather than short-term activity.”

Report p. 53

The report reinforces this through culture, values alignment, acknowledgement and recognition. When there is a gap between what an organisation says and what is does, people notice. And over time, they adjust their own behaviour and assimilate into the organisation’s culture. What is tolerated becomes the standard. Behaviour shapes culture, whether intentionally or not.

Listening

If you take the superhighway of LISTENING, you are heading on a voyage of giving voice to the quieter and marginalised people in your organisations to ensure everyone is heard.

Listening, in the compass, is active and deliberate. It is about creating space and opportunity for all voices, especially those that might otherwise go unheard.

In the report, listening appears through whether people feel heard, informed and included.

“The practical implication is that listening is a cultural signal that tells employees whether they are participants.”

Report p. 96

That distinction is important - it is not enough to believe you are listening, people have to actually experience being listened to, too!

Listening only counts if people are heard.

Experience

If you take the superhighway of EXPERIENCE, your flight will mean learning from your experiences and sharing what you know with others to nurture their growth and development.

Experience is about learning from what happens and sharing that learning with others. It is how leadership develops over time.

The report reflects this through personal growth, learning opportunities and progression, yet highlights that these are often lacking within organisation.

We all have experiences every day. The difference lies in whether we take the time to learn from them, and whether we create a culture where that learning is shared with others.

When there is experience, reflection, sharing, training, mentoring and coaching, it takes experience into opportunity for others to grow. When individuals grow, organisations grow in practice, size and effectiveness.

The Last Word

The Launch reminded me that work is part of life, and life is part of work. Since covid, the line between them has blurred. Expectations of employees have shifted. Engagement, inclusion, recognition and listening are no longer initiatives but they’re viewed as the essential baselines of the workplace contract.

For me, the biggest takeaway is this: the behaviours in the Self-Aware Leadership Compass are not abstract ideas. They are grounded in what actually makes a difference to how people feel and perform at work.

My work focusses on the behaviour of the leader, and the Report focusses on what workplaces actually look like, sound like and feel like. It absolutely validates my work and I’m both excited and inspired to keep learning and observing.

Hello KSKOers

This week I went to the launch of the Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026 by The Happiness Index at Google’s London HQ. As I listened to the presentations, it became very clear, that the 9 behaviours of my self-aware leadership compass align directly with the findings of the report. The same relational dynamics at the heart of self-aware leadership are central to what makes workplaces happy. Join me as I share the connections.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey.

Link here to this week’s long blog

Reflection — Space to pause is the first thing to disappear in busy organisations. Without it, learning becomes accidental. Reflection is what turns experience into an opportunity for growth.

Trust — Trust is built through consistency and eroded by the gap between what organisations say and what they do. It lives in behaviour, not intention. Trust is an activity not a passivity.

Experience — Learning from experience only compounds in value when it’s shared. Mentoring, coaching and reflection turn individual experience into collective growth.

The Last Word

More…

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Core Concepts: The Emotional Work of Caring - Leadership, Culture and the Organisational Response

Dr Nia D Thomas — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:02:14 GMT

Hello KSKOers

If you work in healthcare, social care, education, or the voluntary sector, you’ll know that the job is never just technical - it’s emotional. This article explores what that means for the people doing the work, and why self-awareness matters more than we often acknowledge.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey.

Link here to this week’s long blog

Emotional labour is the hidden work of caring. Behind every difficult conversation and late-night shift is the effort of managing your own emotional responses in order to serve someone else, staying calm when you’re feeling anxious, staying warm and affable when you’re feeling worn down.

The emotional cost goes unacknowledged. Organisations talk about targets, compliance and delivery. But underneath all of that sits something quieter: the emotional work of caring. For many frontline professionals and volunteers, this isn’t optional, it’s the job.

Suppressing emotions has a real cost. Research consistently shows that performing or suppressing emotions over time is linked to increased burnout and emotional exhaustion, a pattern that affects everyone from nurses and social workers to charity volunteers and support workers.

The Emotional Recession is real and measurable. A 2025 global study tracking 28,000 adults found that emotional intelligence declined by nearly 6% between 2019 and 2024, affecting every competency measured. That makes it a a workforce resilience issue, not just a wellbeing one.

The voluntary sector carries emotional weight without the safety net. Frontline charity workers face the same pressures as statutory services, often without clinical supervision, reflective practice, or formal debrief structures to support them. Research from 2025 found that 57% of homelessness workers felt at risk of burnout.

Staff welfare and quality of care are the same concern, The welfare of staff and the quality of care they provide are not separate issues. When workers are unsupported, it is ultimately the people they serve who feel the impact.

Self-awareness has three layers: reflection, recognition and regulation. Understanding your own emotional responses, noticing their impact on others, and making informed choices about how you want to behave differently: this cycle is happening constantly in emotionally demanding work, whether or not people are conscious of it.

Self-awareness underpins every other dimension of emotional intelligence. Research shows that people low in self-awareness struggle to develop strength in other areas of emotional intelligence, while those high in self-awareness are able to develop excellence across the board. This holds true whether you work in a hospital ward or a drop-in centre.

Emotions are contagious from the leader outward. The emotional climate a leader creates determines whether the people around them can sustain their work. The way a manager responds to a difficult debrief, or a chief executive models vulnerability, shapes what everyone around them is able to do. Modelling self-aware behaviour isn’t a soft skill, it’s an essential relational skill and it’s a leadership responsibility.

The Last Word

Leadership in human services isn’t only about strategy or delivery. When leaders notice what’s happening around them, and inside them, they create the conditions that allow others to keep caring too. In organisations where the work is emotion laden, that awareness matters more than most people realise.

Reading, Listening & Watching

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The Emotional Work of Caring: Leadership, Culture and the Organisational Response

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:02:36 GMT

Hello KSKOers

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the emotional weight that comes with working in services to others. This blog explores what that actually means for the people doing this work, why self-awareness matters more than we often acknowledge, and what happens when organisations start to notice the invisible.

Whether you work in these sectors yourself, lead teams within them, or support organisations that do, I hope this resonates with you.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

If you work in healthcare, social care, education, or if you work for a charity supporting people through some of the hardest moments of their lives, you’ll know that the job is never just technical.

It’s emotional.

Behind every safeguarding conversation, every service plan, every late-night shift, every session with a family in crisis, is a human interaction. Someone is scared, grieving or overwhelmed. And the person supporting them is quietly absorbing some of that weight.

We don’t talk about this enough.

We talk about targets, compliance and delivery. All of those things matter. But underneath them sits something quieter: the emotional work of caring. For many frontline professionals and volunteers, this isn’t optional. It’s the job.

There’s a term for this: emotional labour. It describes the effort of managing your own emotional responses in order to serve someone else. It’s staying calm when you feel anxious, staying warm when you’re worn down, and holding space for someone’s distress while processing your own.

Daniel Goleman, whose work on emotional intelligence has shaped how we think about leadership and self-awareness, described it well when speaking to Big Think: emotional intelligence is

“a combination of self-awareness, managing your emotions well, empathy, tuning into other people, and putting that all together to have harmonious or effective relationships.”

That’s exactly what caring professionals do, every day, often without it being named or recognised.

And when it goes unacknowledged, the cost can be significant. Research consistently shows that suppressing or performing emotions over time is linked to increased burnout and emotional exhaustion, a pattern that affects everyone from nurses and social workers to charity volunteers and support workers.

There’s also a growing concern about what researchers have started calling the ‘Emotional Recession’. A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology (Freedman et al.) tracked emotional intelligence scores across 28,000 adults in 166 countries between 2019 and 2024. Global EQ declined by nearly 6%, with every single competency measured dropping significantly. The researchers are clear this isn’t just a wellbeing issue. It’s a workforce resilience issue.

Much of the conversation around emotional labour has focused on healthcare. But the same pressures, often without the same support structures, exist across the charity and voluntary sectors.

Think about what frontline charity work actually involves. An outreach worker at a homelessness charity spending hours with someone experiencing severe mental illness, addiction or trauma. A caseworker at a domestic abuse service holding the stories of survivors every single day. A volunteer at a foodbank becoming a trusted face for someone who has nowhere else to turn.

These roles carry enormous emotional weight. And yet formal support, clinical supervision, reflective practice, team debrief, is far less common in the voluntary sector than in statutory services.

The numbers reflect this. A UK Frontline Network survey from 2025 found that 57% of homelessness workers felt at risk of burnout, and over half said their role was having a negative impact on their own wellbeing. One respondent described it simply:

“It is a constant conflict between experiencing vicarious trauma and remembering you are there to help. It is humbling but also can be crushing.”

This matters because the welfare of staff and the quality of care they give are not separate concerns. They are the same concern.

In The Self-Awareness Superhighway, I describe self-awareness as having three interconnected layers: reflection, recognition and regulation.

Reflection is about looking inward and understanding your own emotional responses. Recognition is noticing how your behaviour affects other people. Regulation is adjusting how you respond once you’ve noticed that impact.

If you read the academic literature about self-awareness, you’ll come across a number of articles talking about healthcare and the importance of self-awareness and reflection in clinical practice. Here are just a few articles that connect self-aware practice with patient care and recovery:

Novack et al. (1999) talks about how the emotions of medical students have the potential to impact on their relationship with patients and consequently, patient wellbeing. The study talks about the need for self-awareness to be included in medical training programmes, to make sure that doctors have the skills they need to help them manage their own stresses to avoid any negative impact their behaviour may have on their patients.
Freshwater (2002) talks about self-awareness and reflective practice in nursing care and how being your ‘authentic self’ can support therapeutic healing in patients. The study talks about the implication for nurses as self-aware practitioners who need to build rapport and have sympathy for and empathy with patients to support them to get back to good health.
Morgan (2009), talks about reflective practice and self-awareness in the public health workforce in Wales, saying that having an open mind and being self-aware are prerequisites for reflection. Beyrer (2015, p.1725) backs this view. Rasheed et al. (2019) go further and say that self-awareness helps nurses develop their critical thinking and clinical decision-making skills.
Bawafaa et al. (2015) talk about how resonant leadership, which is based on the ideas underpinning emotional intelligence impacts on nurses’ structural empowerment and job satisfaction.
Laschinger et al. (2014), also focus their study on resonant leadership in the nursing profession which again supports the idea that emotional intelligence-based constructs are relevant to healthcare.
Even the Resonant Leadership Scale developed by Cummings (2006) has its foundations within the healthcare sector in Canada (Cummings, 2004).

In emotionally demanding work, this cycle is happening all the time, whether or not people are conscious of it. A nurse who adjusts their communication style when they notice a patient is afraid. A social worker who manages a difficult conversation with calm empathy even when exhausted. A charity key worker who picks up on distress in a service user before it’s spoken aloud. These are all acts of self-aware leadership.

Goleman puts it clearly

“We find in our research that people low in self-awareness are unable to develop strengths very well in other parts of emotional intelligence. People who are high in self-awareness, however, are able to develop excellence across the board.”

That holds true whether you work in a hospital ward or a drop-in centre.

One of the most important insights about leadership in high-pressure environments is that emotions are contagious. Goleman cites research from the Yale School of Management showing that

“emotions are contagious, and they’re most contagious from the leader outward.”

The state of the person at the top, or the most senior person in the room, shapes what everyone around them can do. This is why modelling behaviour is a key self-aware leadership behaviour and sits as a key direction in the self-aware leadership compass.

Leaders in human services organisations often don’t think of themselves as setting a tone, because they’re so focused on the work. But the way a manager responds to a difficult team debrief, the way a chief executive models their own vulnerability or self-care, the way a supervisor holds space for a struggling team member creates the emotional climate that determines whether people can sustain their work or not.

Big Think’s analysis of learner data published in early 2025 identified emotional intelligence as one of the top leadership concerns heading into this year, noting that

“the most critical element for the success of every organisation is its workforce” and that people’s “anxieties, fears, hopes, and perspectives must be recognised and channelled” if organisations are to thrive.

That’s a corporate lens. But it applies just as powerfully, arguably more so, to organisations built around care.

Recognition is the first step.

Acknowledging that emotional labour is real, that it accumulates, and that it affects both the person doing it and the people they’re supporting. Organisations that ignore this don’t just risk losing good people. They risk the quality of care they’re able to give.

What does good practice look like? Recognition is the first step.

Acknowledging that emotional labour is real, that it accumulates, and that it affects both the person doing it and the people they’re supporting is an essential starting point, because organisations that ignore this don’t just risk losing good people, they risk the quality of care they’re able to give.

What that recognition looks like in practice will vary from one organisation to the next. But at its heart, it starts with something simple: creating the conditions where the emotional dimension of the work can be named, noticed and held, rather than quietly absorbed in isolation. When leaders make space for this, in whatever form that takes, it changes something. People feel less alone with what they’re carrying. And that matters, both for them and for the people they serve.

The Last Word

Healthcare, social care, education and the voluntary sector all exist to support people through some of the most difficult moments of their lives. The professionals and volunteers doing that work are doing something both practical and deeply human.

Leadership in these environments isn’t only about strategy or delivery. It’s about awareness. When leaders notice what’s happening around them, and inside them, and choose how to respond, they create the conditions that allow others to keep caring too. And in organisations where the work is this hard, that matters more than most people realise.

Reading, Listening & Watching

Sources & Citations

Freedman, J.M., Freedman, P.E., & Choi, D.Y. (2025). The Emotional Recession: global declines in emotional intelligence and its impact on organizational retention, burnout, and workforce resilience. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1701703
Goleman, D. (2024). Why emotional intelligence may be the number one indicator of organizational success. Big Think+. https://bigthink.com/plus/daniel-goleman-why-emotional-intelligence-may-be-the-number-one-indicator-of-organizational-success/
Big Think+ (2025). The leadership trends that will shape 2025. https://bigthink.com/plus/the-leadership-trends-that-will-shape-2025/
Frontline Network (2025). Frontline Worker Survey Findings 2025. https://frontlinenetwork.org.uk
For the three-layer model of self-awareness (reflection, recognition, regulation): The Self-Awareness Superhighway

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Core Concepts: Theory v Reality - Bridging the Leadership Gap

Dr Nia D Thomas — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:00:59 GMT

Hello KSKOers

This week’s blog explores the gap between leadership theory and what actually happens at work. Drawing on my MSc and doctoral research, I reflect on why leadership rarely fits neat models and why self-awareness may help bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Link here to this week’s long blog

Leadership Theory Simplifies Reality: Leadership theory often presents leadership as structured and predictable. Models like trait, style, contingency and transformational leadership offer neat and tidy frameworks that explain how leadership should work. In practice, organisations aren’t like that. Human behaviour, organisational pressures and competing priorities create complexity that rarely fits neatly into theoretical categories.

Leadership Is Relational: Leadership effectiveness is not only about what leaders do, but also about how they are perceived by others. Early research into likeability and leadership effectiveness suggested that the qualities associated with both were strikingly similar. This highlights that leadership is highly relational, shaped by trust, credibility and the way behaviour is experienced by those around the leader.

Leadership Behaviour Is Contextual: Leaders rarely operate in a single, fixed style. Instead, behaviour shifts depending on context, relationships and organisational pressures. What works in one situation may not work in another. Leadership is less about applying a consistent style and more about being able to adapt and flex to changing situations.

Self-Awareness Shapes Leadership Behaviour: Leadership behaviour doesn’t emerge in isolation. It’s influenced by a leader’s level of self-awareness and their ability to recognise how their thoughts, emotions and behaviours impact others. Greater awareness allows leaders to adjust their responses, regulate their behaviour and be more responsive to the needs of a situation.

Leadership Exists Beyond Formal Roles: Leadership influence is not confined to senior positions. In many organisations, people without formal authority demonstrate strong leadership through credibility, trust and relational skill. Leadership often emerges informally in response to need rather than strictly following organisational hierarchy.

Seniority Does Not Guarantee Self-Awareness: An unexpected finding from my doctoral research was that effective strategic-level leaders sometimes demonstrated lower self-awareness than leaders at other organisational levels. As leaders become more senior, they may receive less direct feedback, become more distant from operational teams and have fewer opportunities for honest reflection.

Technical Expertise Is Not Leadership Capability: Many people move into leadership roles because they’re technical experts. But, the skills needed to lead people effectively are different from those needed to perform a technical role. Relational awareness, emotional regulation and reflective capability often determine whether leadership succeeds.

Leadership Decisions Affect the Whole System: Leadership decisions rarely exist in isolation. The actions of leaders influence organisational culture, relationships and the experiences of people right across the organisation. Leadership behaviour ripples far beyond the original decision - leaders cast a long shadow, and some people forget that.

Self-Awareness Bridges Theory and Practice: Leadership theory provides useful frameworks and language for understanding leadership, but real-world leadership requires flexibility. Self-awareness enables leaders to interpret theory in context and adjust their behaviour. Effectively, self-awareness is the bridge between leadership on paper and the realities of organisational life.

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Theory v Reality: Bridging the Leadership Gap

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 07:01:08 GMT

Hello KSKOers

This week’s blog looks at the gap between leadership theory and what actually happens at work. It explores the bit where the neat theoretical frameworks meet real people, messy dynamics and the occasional organisational plot twist. Drawing on my MSc and doctoral research, I reflect on why leadership rarely fits neat and tidy models and why self-awareness may be what helps bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Leadership theory is neat and tidy. Real workplaces are not.

Most leadership models arrive packaged with clean frameworks, clear categories and confident explanations. Trait theory tells us leaders have particular characteristics. Style approaches suggest behaviour patterns that can be adopted. Contingency models argue that the right approach depends on context. Transformational leadership invites us to inspire and motivate. On paper, it all feels coherent, structured and anticipated.

Then you step into a real organisation and things become far more complicated. When you work with real people, things get messy.

My research journey has, in many ways, been about navigating the space between what leadership theory promises and what workplace reality actually delivers. That journey began with my MSc dissertation, which explored likeability and leadership effectiveness. At that stage, I was reviewing trait, style, contingency and transformational theories and trying to understand how they explained the leaders I was coming across every day.

What struck me early on was how limited theory sometimes felt when compared with lived experience. In workplaces, leaders rarely fit neatly into categories. People display different behaviours depending on context, pressure and relationships. Leadership felt messy, relational and dynamic, always changing and responding to extraneous influences.

The findings from that MSc research reinforced this. The qualities associated with likeability and those associated with effective leadership were almost identical. That result did not sit easily within some traditional theoretical distinctions. It suggested that leadership effectiveness was less about fixed styles and more about how individuals were received and perceived by others.

Even then, there was a quiet tension between theory and reality. Leadership models often focus on what leaders should do. Workplaces reveal what leaders actually do when faced with competing demands, constrained resources and complex relationships.

Years later, my doctoral research allowed me to revisit this tension from a different angle. My thesis explored self-awareness and leader effectiveness, drawing on real workplace experiences alongside theory.

Where the MSc largely examined external perceptions, the doctorate looked beneath the surface at the internal processes shaping leadership behaviour. It developed a three-layer model of self-awareness comprising internal, internal-social and external-social awareness. This shift helped explain why leadership theory can sometimes struggle to account for real-world complexity.

Theories tend to describe behaviour. Workplace reality is shaped by awareness.

A leader may understand a particular leadership model perfectly yet still struggle in practice if they lack awareness of how they affect others. Conversely, individuals with no formal training or theoretical knowledge may demonstrate highly effective leadership because they are reflective, relational and adaptable. Doing leadership from a book versus leading based on what people need from a leader are not the same!!

One of the most striking findings from my doctoral research was that effective leaders were identified at all job levels. This runs counter to many traditional leadership narratives that associate leadership primarily with senior roles. In reality, leadership frequently emerges informally, often driven by need and emerging situations rather than hierarchy.

This is where workplace reality challenges theory: organisational charts suggest leadership flows downwards. Everyday experience shows influence moving in multiple directions. People without formal authority often hold significant leadership influence because of trust, credibility or relational skill.

My doctoral findings also revealed something that other literature didn’t: effective strategic-level leaders demonstrated lower self-awareness than effective leaders at other levels. Again, this disrupts our neat and tidy assumptions. We might expect leadership capability, including awareness, to increase with seniority. Reality suggests otherwise.

Why does this happen?

Theory often assumes access to feedback and reflective space. Workplace reality, particularly at senior levels, can reduce both. Leaders become more distant from operational teams, feedback becomes filtered, and opportunities for honest reflection reduces. Context alters behaviour in ways theory appears to underestimate.

Another area where theory meets reality is the emotional dimension of leadership. Many leadership frameworks acknowledge emotional intelligence, but in practice organisations still seem to prioritise technical competence. My doctoral work defined leader effectiveness as involving not just technical knowledge but awareness of and ability to regulate emotions and behaviours. I generally refer to these as hard skills and relational skills.

In workplaces, this distinction matters. Technical expertise may secure promotion, but relational awareness often determines whether leadership succeeds. This is once of the reasons you’ll see articles written about accidental leaders - there’s a fallacy that technical experts will be great at team management, simply because they know their stuff. But, having relational expertise and technical expertise are mutually exclusive.

The qualitative themes emerging from the doctoral study highlighted behaviour, reflection, people management, strategic disconnect and the impact of decisions. These themes reflect the lived complexity that leadership theory often simplifies. Decisions don’t exist in isolation. They ripple through organisational culture, relationships and individual experience.

Looking back across both research projects, I see a gradual shift from engaging with theory as explanation to using theory as a guide rather than a prescription. And that probably aligns with my ever growing experience in the world of work and maturation in leadership. Theory provides language and frameworks, but workplace reality tests those ideas against messy, human unpredictability.

There is value in that tension, of course: theory helps us think systematically and reality reminds us to stay humble.

In practical terms, this has implications for how organisations approach leadership development. Programmes often focus on teaching models and frameworks, which can be useful starting points. But leadership capability grows most when individuals are encouraged to reflect on real experiences, examine their impact and adapt accordingly. As you may already know, experiential learning is the 9th direction of my self-aware leadership compass

This is where self-awareness becomes the bridge between theory and practice. It enables leaders to apply concepts flexibly rather than rigidly. Instead of asking which model they fit into, leaders begin asking how their behaviour is landing and what the situation requires.

My early MSc work explored leadership through the lens of qualities and attributes. The doctoral work added depth by examining the internal mechanisms shaping those qualities. Together, they suggest that leadership cannot be fully understood through theory alone, nor entirely through experience without reflection.

The meeting point between theory and reality is where learning happens.

Perhaps the most important lesson from this journey is that leadership is always contextual. Models can inform us, but they can’t predict every human interaction or organisational challenge. Real leadership means navigating ambiguity, balancing competing demands and remaining aware of one’s own assumptions.

The Last Word

In the end, leadership theory and workplace reality are not opponents. They need each other and they should be seen as two halves of a whole: theory offers clarity and structure; reality provides complexity and truth.

The challenge for leaders is not choosing one over the other, but learning to move between them as and when they need to. To understand the framework while remaining attentive to the human moments that frameworks can’t fully capture.

Leadership doesn’t happen in textbooks. It happens in conversations, decisions, misunderstandings and small acts of influence that rarely look as neat and tidy as theory suggests.

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Core Concepts: Standing on Their Shoulders - Women Who Lead the Way

Dr Nia D Thomas — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 07:01:39 GMT

Hello KSKOers

The 8th March is International Women’s Day and I wanted to take the opportunity to share the names, achievements and successes of some women that inspire me, both past and present.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Link here to this week’s long blog

💜🤍💚 Brené Brown – I first encountered Brené about ten years ago when I began exploring leadership. Her work explores what it means to be human in leadership. When I read Dare to Lead on holiday, I found it both exhausting and inspiring. Her thoughtful, research-based ideas have strongly influenced modern conversations about courageous and authentic leadership.

💜🤍💚 Emmeline Pankhurst (d.) – I wasn’t taught about the suffragettes at school, but I’ve learned more over time. When I worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital, our women’s staff forum hosted an International Women’s Day event with one of Emmeline Pankhurst’s descendants. Knowing she had lived nearby in Russell Square made the history feel very real.

💜🤍💚 Jacinda Ardern – Jacinda Ardern showed what emotionally intelligent leadership can look like in practice, guiding New Zealand with humility and compassion. When she stepped down in 2023, she said she no longer had “enough in the tank”, demonstrating real self-awareness about the demands and limits of leadership.

💜🤍💚 Jo Cox MP (d.) – Jo Cox’s legacy feels especially resonant given the murder of Southend MP David Amess just before I started working in the area. Jo herself was killed in 2016 by a white supremacist. Her family later established the Jo Cox Foundation to continue her work strengthening communities and promoting respectful politics.

💜🤍💚 Malala Yousafzai – After surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban, Malala turned personal trauma into a global movement. Through the Malala Fund and her advocacy, she continues to champion education and freedom for girls worldwide.

💜🤍💚 Maya Angelou (d.) – I discovered Maya Angelou’s work after her death and realised many of the quotes I loved were hers. One of my favourites is: “People will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” Her wisdom often reflects the humility and learning at the heart of self-aware leadership.

💜🤍💚 Murasaki Shikibu (d.) – During my undergraduate studies in Law and Japanese, I encountered The Tale of Genji. Murasaki Shikibu wrote at a time when intellectual pursuits were discouraged for women, yet she produced one of the most important works of early literature. I admire her quiet defiance and determination to write anyway.The Last Word

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Standing on Their Shoulders: Women Who Lead the Way

Dr Nia D Thomas — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:01:52 GMT

Hello KSKOers

The 8th March is International Women’s Day and I wanted to take the opportunity to share the names, achievements and successes of some women that inspire me, both past and present.

Join me in celebrating amazing and strong women: may we know them, may we raise them, may we be them.

Looking forward to joining you on your leadership journey!

💜🤍💚 Brené Brown – A research professor and bestselling author whose work on vulnerability, courage and leadership has influenced organisations and individuals worldwide.

I first came across Brené when I started exploring leadership about 10 years ago. She appeared as one of the preeminent leadership thought leaders. I’ve listened to Brené and read some of her books. I’m struck by the depth of thought and the intensity of her ideas and models, all of which are focused very much on emotional intelligence and the things that make us human. I read Dare to Lead on holiday, and I was both exhausted and inspired in equal measure. She’s a brilliant human being!

💜🤍💚 Emmaline Pankhurst (d.) – The British political activist who led the suffragette movement and played a central role in securing women’s right to vote in the UK.

I was never taught about the Suffragette movement at school, but over the years I’ve picked up pieces of the history. When I worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital, we were lucky enough to have a women’s staff forum. One year, on International Women’s Day, we hosted an event and were very lucky to have been joined by a descendent of Emmaline. Emmaline and her family lived in Russel Square, which is just a stone’s throw from Great Ormond Street, making it all feel very real and relevant.

💜🤍💚 Jacinda Ardern – Former Prime Minister of New Zealand, internationally recognised for her empathetic leadership and values-driven politics during crises, such as COVID.

Here’s an extract from my book about Jacinda: “One of the greatest public examples of self-awareness has come from Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023. She guided New Zealand through Covid with humility and a people-centric approach. She was held up as an exemplar of good leadership. When she resigned, she used the words “I no longer have enough in the tank”: an insightful comment demonstrating her awareness of her dwindling energy reserves and being on a road to burnout. In her resignation speech, she said:

“Now, I cannot determine what will define my time in this place, but I do hope I’ve demonstrated something else entirely: that you can be anxious, sensitive, kind, and wear your heart on your sleeve, you can be a mother or not, you can be an ex-Mormon or not, you can be a nerd, a crier, a hugger—you can be all of these things, and not only can you be here; you can lead. Just like me.”

💜🤍💚 Jo Cox MP (d.) – A British parliamentarian remembered for her passionate work on social justice, community cohesion and the belief that we have far more in common than that which divides us.

I worked in Southend on Sea for a few years. In 2021, their Member of Parliament, David Amess was stabbed to death by a terrorist linked to Islamic extremism. Jo Cox had been killed in similar circumstances in 2016 by a white supremacist. In that year, her family set up the Jo Cox Foundation which campaigns for stronger communities, respectful politics and a fairer world. You’ll also notice that branding colours of the organisation, evident on the front page of her website are the purple, green and white of the suffragette movement.

💜🤍💚 Malala Yousafzai – The youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate, globally recognised for her fearless advocacy for girls’ education and the right of every child to learn.

From personal trauma, Malala has built an international movement to support women and girls to access education and be given freedom and choice. Her recent statement on the position of gender apartheid being perpetrated by the Taliban should be considered a warning for the world.

“A country cannot progress when policies and institutions lock women and girls out of public life and rip away their basic freedoms.”

Her courage and tenacity fills me with admiration and pride.

💜🤍💚 Maya Angelou (d.) – An acclaimed American poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose writing and voice helped shape global conversations on race, identity and dignity.

I only really came to know Maya Angelou’s poetry after her death, when I realised that so many quotes and poems that I love had been written by her. Here are two of my favourites:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."

The latter quote embodies the directions of humility and adaptability and I often use it when I talk about the self-aware leadership behaviours we should espouse.

💜🤍💚 Murasaki Shikibu (d.) – An 11th-century Japanese writer and court lady, widely considered the author of The Tale of Genji, often described as the world’s first novel.

As part of my undergraduate studies in Law and Japanese, I occasionally came across The Tale of Genji, an 11th century literary treasure, about the life story of the emperor’s son. It was written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in waiting at the imperial court. She was born in the 10th century and wrote at a time when it wasn’t thought to be right and proper for a lady to be engaging is such intellectual pastimes. But she did it anyway. I love her audacity and how she thumbs her nose at the establishment, both to tell a story and live to her strengths.

The Last Word

These women have pushed boundaries and continue to do so, helping to lay the road towards equality in a landscape where men have so often taken the lead, drowning out women’s voices and crowding the space. I’m grateful to have been born in the West at a time when strong women have gone before me and helped clear the path, giving me the freedom to be, to choose and to achieve. I carry that gratitude forward by living in a way that keeps the door open and the pathway clear for those who follow. I will always extend a hand to help other women rise, encouraging those who are still breaking ground, because the journey towards equality is far from over.

💜🤍💚

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

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Core Concepts: From Likeability to Self-Awareness - Two Decades of Leadership Research

Dr Nia D Thomas — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 07:01:57 GMT

Hello KSKOers,

This week’s blog follows a question that’s been piquing my curiosity for years. What started early in my career has evolved alongside my own leadership experience. It’s not a big theory or a final answer, but it is a reflection on how my thinking has morphed, grown and expanded, and what I’ve learned along the way.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Here’s a link to this week’s long blog

The original leadership question: Early thinking centred on a familiar question: what makes a leader effective? Competence, confidence, communication and trust appeared to sit at the heart of it. The exploration began with a focus on one specific angle: whether leaders need to be liked to be effective.

Likeability and effectiveness overlap: Research within the NHS showed that qualities linked to likeability and those linked to leadership effectiveness were almost identical. Fairness, warmth and respect shaped how people judged leadership in real workplaces under pressure.

The missing mechanism: Although reassuring, likeability felt incomplete as an explanation. It described what people experienced but not why leadership worked. This gave rise to a more searching question: is likeability the cause of effective leadership, or simply an outcome of something else?

A shift toward self-awareness: Later doctoral work shifted the lens inward, exploring self-awareness rather than the outward lens of perception. The focus moved from how leaders are seen to what is happening internally that enables effective leadership behaviour.

Self-awareness as a capability, not a trait: Self-awareness emerged as an ongoing process involving reflection, recognition and regulation. It includes understanding personal strengths and relational dynamics, recognising impact, and intentionally adjusting behaviour rather than acting on autopilot.

Leadership redefined: Effectiveness was reframed beyond technical competence. Leaders were seen as effective when they understood their emotional and behavioural impact and could consciously manage how they showed up in relationships.

Leadership exists at every level: Findings challenged hierarchy-based assumptions. Effective leadership appeared across all job levels, highlighting that leadership often emerges in moments, influence and action, not just formal authority or senior titles.

Seniority doesn’t guarantee self-awareness: A surprising insight showed that strategic-level leaders sometimes demonstrated lower self-awareness than others. Distance from day-to-day operations and reduced feedback loops can make reflection harder as leaders move higher in organisations.

Leadership as a relational, reflective practice: Across both studies, the understanding of leadership evolved from fixed traits and styles toward a continuous human process. Leadership became less about performance and more about practice, grounded in relationships, reflection and intentional behaviour.

The Last Word

What emerges most clearly across this journey is that leadership is deeply human. Likeability, self-awareness, impact and connection all matter, but none stand alone. Effective leadership lives at the intersection of how we experience others and how well we understand ourselves. Rather than a destination or a fixed and finite identity, leadership becomes an ongoing practice, something we keep learning, refining and growing into as we travel along our own leadership superhighway.

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

🥇Business Management & Leadership
🥇Occupational & Organisational Psychology
🥇Business Careers

From Likeability to Self-Awareness: Two Decades of Leadership Research

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 07:01:41 GMT

Hello KSKOers

This week’s blog captures a thread that’s been running through my thinking for a long time. It started with a simple question I asked early in my career, and over the years that question has shifted, stretched and grown alongside my own experience of leadership. What you’ll read below isn’t a grand theory or a neat conclusion, but rather, a reflection on how my understanding has evolved and what I’ve learned along the way.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

If you’d asked me twenty years ago ‘what makes a leader effective?’, I might have given you a fairly familiar list: competence, confidence, good communication, trust, perhaps a touch of charisma. At that time, my research was focused on a simple question: does a leader need to be liked to be effective?

That question was the focus of my masters’ dissertation, which explored likeability and leadership within the NHS in South Wales. I was interested in the lived experience of leadership rather than abstract theory, and in understanding what people actually respond to in workplaces shaped by pressure, service delivery and human complexity. The findings were clear. The qualities associated with being likeable and the qualities associated with effective leadership were almost identical, differing only in emphasis rather than substance.

At the time, that felt reassuringly logical. Leaders who are liked are often perceived as effective. People value fairness, warmth, approachability and respect. It aligned with my experience and with much of the practical wisdom shared in organisations by those people who’d been around the block once or twice.

But, the answer felt incomplete, something felt unresolved. Likeability described what people experienced, but it didn’t really explain the mechanism behind it. It showed me the outcomes rather than causes. My questions started to shift toward whether likeability was the reason for leadership effectiveness, or simply a by-product of something more fundamental?

Years later, my doctoral research returned to leadership, but from a different starting point. Instead of asking whether leaders were liked, I began exploring self-awareness and its relationship to leader effectiveness. That shift marked a gradual but significant change in my perspective, moving from external reception and perception to internal reflection and recognition.

My doctoral thesis critically explored self-awareness and leader effectiveness across all levels of the Welsh public service. In doing so, I developed a three-layer definition of self-awareness made up of internal self-awareness, internal-social self-awareness and external-social self-awareness. This framework mattered because it moved the conversation away from personality labels and towards an ongoing reflective process. Self-awareness was not treated as a trait someone either had or lacked, but as a capability involving recognising someone’s hard and relational skills, recognising how they were received and perceived by others, and making decisions about how they wanted to regulate or change their behaviour next time. In later years, this has morphed in to ‘reflection, recognition and regulation’.

Leader effectiveness was reframed. It became defined not only through technical competence but through awareness of the self’s emotional and behavioural impact and the ability to regulate that impact.

Looking back, the connection between the two research projects is clearly evident. The MSc explored the visible surface of leadership. The doctorate explored what sits beneath that surface.

The most obvious difference between the two pieces of work lies in their direction of attention. The masters’ examined leadership from the perspective of others. It asked what people value and how they judge leadership. In contrast, the doctorate looked from the inside out, exploring what is happening within leaders themselves that enables effectiveness.

That difference changes the conversation in important ways. Likeability is an external judgement. Self-awareness is an internal capability with external consequences. One does not automatically produce the other. Someone can be well-liked but ineffective, particularly if decisions are avoided or difficult conversations are softened beyond usefulness. Equally, a highly self-aware leader may not always be universally liked, especially when making necessary but uncomfortable decisions.

The doctoral findings introduced further complexity. Effective leaders were identified at all job levels, challenging the assumption that leadership belongs primarily to those working at the most senior levels of organisations. This reflected what many of us observe in practice: leadership emerges in moments, not just in job descriptions. People without formal authority often step forward, represent others, lead the charge and influence change.

One finding in particular disrupted conventional thinking. Effective resonant leaders at the strategic level had lower levels of self-awareness than effective leaders at other job levels.

This challenges the comforting idea that experience and seniority naturally build self-awareness skills and muscle. Instead, it suggests that distance from day-to-day relationships, coupled with organisational pressure, may reduce opportunities for honest feedback and reflection.

Seen through the lens of the earlier MSc work, this raises interesting questions. Likeability may operate differently across organisational levels. In close working environments, daily interaction provides constant feedback. As leaders move up the hierarchy, those feedback loops can constrict, making genuine self-awareness more difficult to achieve and maintain.

Across both pieces of research, one of the clearest shifts is the movement from thinking about leadership as a collection of attributes to thinking about leadership as an ongoing relational and reflective process. The MSc engaged heavily with leadership theories focused on traits, styles and contingency approaches. The doctorate drew from these academic traditions and placed greater emphasis on emotional intelligence, relationships and self-regulation.

This evolution mirrors a broader change in how leadership is understood in practice. Organisations have long invested in competency frameworks and skills development, yet often struggle with the human dimensions of leadership. Training can teach communication techniques, planning skills and performance management processes. It is far harder to cultivate genuine self-awareness and the willingness to examine how the self impacts others.

The qualitative themes emerging from the doctoral research reinforced this point. Behaviour, reflection, people management, individual experience and the impact of decisions were all highlighted as areas requiring exploration. These are not technical issues. They are relational and human issues. They sit at the heart of how leadership is experienced by others.

Reflecting on the two studies together, I now see the MSc question as an early doorway rather than a final destination. Likeability matters because leadership is relational, but it is not sufficient as an explanatory concept. It tells us something about how leadership feels to others, yet it doesn’t fully account for how leaders make decisions, regulate behaviour or adapt in complex environments.

Self-awareness offers a sharper lens. It explains how leaders notice their own responses, understand their impact and adjust deliberately and with intention rather than just through habit. In many ways, it shifts leadership from performance to practice, from impression to understanding, and from academia to the office.

There is also a personal dimension to this arc. Early in many leadership journeys, there is a strong focus on being accepted, respected and trusted. Over time, and often through difficult experiences, the emphasis shifts towards responsibility and impact. The question becomes less about whether people like us and more about whether we are leading in ways that are effective.

What I find most interesting now is that both pieces of research remain relevant. The MSc reminds us that relationships and perception matter a lot. The doctorate reminds us that inner awareness shapes those relationships in ways that are often invisible but critical.

Taken together, they suggest that effective leadership sits at the intersection of external experience and internal understanding. Leaders who are able to hold both perspectives simultaneously are perhaps those most likely to create healthy cultures and meaningful outcomes.

The journey from talking about likeability to self-awareness has not been about replacing one idea with another. It’s been about broadening the frame of reference and recognising that leadership is more complex, more human and more reflective than what one construct can define..

The question that now feels most important is not whether leaders are liked, it’s whether they understand themselves well enough to lead with clarity, intention and awareness of their impact, which in turn will generate positive relationships, where they may well be liked!

The Last Word

When I look across both pieces of research now, what stays with me most is how human leadership really is. It lives in relationships, in reflection, in the small choices we make every day. Likeability, self-awareness, impact, connection, they all matter, but none of them sit on their own. My hope is that this leaves you with permission to see leadership as a practice rather than a perfect state, something we keep learning, and growing into as we travel on our superhighway of leadership life.

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

🥇Business Management & Leadership
🥇Occupational & Organisational Psychology
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Core Concepts: The Habit of Working Out Loud - Celebrating Success and Leading with Transparency

Dr Nia D Thomas — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:00:47 GMT

Hello KSKOers,

Every Friday, I share a LinkedIn post reflecting on my week. I’ve kept this habit for the past few months, and it’s a simple way to recognise progress, celebrate small wins, and practise working out loud. If you’re a Substack subscriber, you might not have seen them, so here’s a summary of some Friday reflections on leadership, my world of work, and keeping people at the centre.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Here’s a link to this week’s long blog

🔵 Introduced to Tech For Charities. Tom simplified tech and data into three steps: collect, analyse, store. I’ve been testing this lens across emails, AI chats and casework, and it fits perfectly.

🔵 Intro chat with Greg, founder of Only A Pavement Away, supporting people experiencing homelessness into hospitality jobs. Inspiring success stories.

🔵 My team reflected not just on what we do, but how we do it. Clarity, trust and communication matter even more in a tough fundraising climate.

🔵 I visited frontline services in Worcester and Redditch after realising how easy it is to get stuck behind paperwork. Getting out to meet people accessing services is essential.

🔵 Purposeful work creates the best kind of tired.

🔵 When time is tight, purpose and prioritisation matter most.

🔵 Build a network of people who share experiences and show up to help.

🔵 Strong basics like policies and processes create stability when things get hard.

🔵 What we don’t say matters as much as what we do. Reading the room protects people and organisations.

🔵 A reminder that listening drives good leadership: listening to understand, support, explore and enable change.

🔵 Joined a marketing workshop with Henny Maltby at The Growth Hub Cirencester. Key takeaway: visibility requires consistency and a clear plan.

🔵 Tax isn’t boring, it’s complex. Learned practical tips at The Growth Hub Cheltenham about planning early to make smarter decisions later.

🔵 Facilitated a peer group of interim professionals exploring business models. Community and shared lessons make big transitions easier.

🔵 My company officially became limited: Knowing Self Knowing Others Ltd.

🔵 Met Cherry at Read for Good and learned how the organisation grew from a home office into a national force for good.

🔵 First volunteer shift at FoodLoose Cheltenham. Great insight into the shop, volunteers and customers and I’m going back for more.

🔵 Started the week at Tech4Good South West’s AI Peer Network and learned about the government’s AI Innovation Hub speeding up access to information.

🔵 Networking brunch at The Growth Hub Stroud with inspiring people building businesses in copywriting, tech support and IP protection.

🔵 Joined the Bath Digital Divide Collective exploring inclusion, storytelling and how to hear all voices when making investment decisions.

🔵 Rounded off the week with the Glos AIspire Network exploring AI for good, from business tools to professional branding.

The Last Word

My challenge to you: reflect on three things you achieved this week and write about them. Share your work out loud so you can see your progress and help others learn alongside you.

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

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🥇Occupational & Organisational Psychology
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The Habit of Working Out Loud: Celebrating Success and Leading with Transparency

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 07:00:55 GMT

Hello KSKOers

Every Friday, I write a LinkedIn post, reflecting on my week. I’ve been doing this for the last few months. It’s a good habit to form and reminds you of just how much you’ve achieved. It also lets you celebrate your small wins and develop your transparency and ‘working-out-loud- skills. I realised that if you’re my Substack subscriber, you may never have stumbled on my posts. So, here’s a collection of reflections about leadership, my world of work and being people centric.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

🔵 I was introduced to a new organisation called Tech For Charities. Tom reviews organisations’ tech and data so that you can identify areas for improvement and development. Tom described the whole IT thing really simply: gathering and receiving information, analysing and evaluating it, and recording and storing it. I’ve been running all sorts through this process - emails, Ai chats, Google searches, case recordings and so far everything’s aligned with these 3 steps!!

🔵 I had an introductory chat with Greg, founder of Only A Pavement Away. They help homeless people rebuild their lives by brokering connections and facilitating employment into the hospitality industry. Greg shared lots of examples and success stories of people who had moved into job placements and gone on to be promoted into senior roles. If you’re an organisation working in and around the field of homelessness, please drop me a line and say hi. You never know when we’ll be able to help each other help someone else!

🔵 My team colleagues and I have been talking not only about what we do, but how we do it. We talked about our priorities and dependencies, what good looks like and how we ensure we have clarity for the future to do our best work, in an increasingly challenging fundraising climate. We know that communication, trust and support for each other are critical elements to working effectively. It was a good reminder about needing to be conscious and deliberate in rebalancing the weight of conversation between what we do and how we do it.

🔵 I realised that I hadn't left the office to visit our front line services since week 1 of my time at Maggs Day Centre. This was week 3! I visited our Day Centre and Clothing Project in Worcester and Day Centre and Hub in Redditch. I think it's very easy to become engrossed in paperwork, red tape and organisational bureaucracy to the detriment of meeting and talking to the real people who are using the very services your planning and protecting. If you have a corporate role and you haven't visited the services, day centres, facilities, hospital, schools and homes of your service, please do set aside time next week and get out there to remind yourself why you do what you do.

🔵 Coming home at the end of the day feeling really tired because you’ve achieved lots of things and worked to your purpose is the best kind of tired.

🔵 When time is short, doing purposeful things is even more important. Strategising, prioritising and including other are ways to make the time you have the most productive it can be.

🔵 Having people around you who will lean in and help you out, sharing experiences and resources are the kind of people you want in your network.

🔵 Prioritising the basics is essential to ensure you can move forward on a stable footing; ensuring you can weather storms and rely on your policies, processes and protocols to guide you through.

🔵 What we don’t say is just as important as what we do. Reading the room and knowing when not to make throw away comments that can come back to bite, protects you, your colleagues and your organisation.

🔵 I was also reminded of the importance of listening. As you know, listening is the 8th behaviour of my self-aware leadership compass and an essential component of good leadership. As the saying goes, 'we should listen to understand not to reply', but I'm a firm believer that you have to listen with the aim of understanding, supporting, replying, exploring and ultimately making positive change. And I'm very much looking forward to doing that with a brilliant team over the next few months.

🔵 On Tuesday, I joined Henny Maltby at The Growth Hub Cirencester for an excellent workshop on business marketing. My main take away was the relentlessness of it all. You need to have a clear and achievable plan to get your business seen in the right places and the right time, even on those days when you have other things to do and places to be.

🔵 Don’t let anyone tell you tax is boring. It’s not boring, it’s complex!! On Thursday, I joined Anita Rasheva MAAT at The Growth Hub Cheltenham helping to make tax less complex and make us all in to tax savvy businesses. We talked about real life situations and how good advice and planning now helps you maximise tax rules later.

🔵 I rounded the week off facilitating a group of Interims for Impact Ltd professionals working as sole traders, limited companies or considering the shift to limited company status. Having a group of peer supporters sharing advice, posing questions and offering solutions was hugely beneficial. If you’re thinking of making a business shift, I’d definitely recommend finding a community of likeminded people who want to help you get it right and are happy to share how they got it wrong.

🔵 My company officially graduated to being limited, and will henceforth be known as Knowing Self Knowing Others Ltd. Woop!

🔵 On Monday, Ruth, Edward, Peter and I met for a catch up, which we'd never done before, in a delightful cafe bistro I'd never been to before. We had a chance to establish some connections and share some experiences. It reminded me of the beautiful phrase by the late Jo Cox, now a key value of The Jo Cox Foundation, "We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us".

🔵 On Wednesday, I met Cherry at Read for Good for the first time, hearing about their brilliant organisation, seeing some of their wonderful books and sharing what they do with you. It was absolutely lovely to meet Cherry in person, hear about the history of the organisation and how it's grown from a few people in a home office to an impactful organisation with a national reach.

🔵 Today, I had my first volunteer shift at FoodLoose in Cheltenham, understanding how the shop works, the magnificence of volunteers and the needs of customers. As an incoming volunteer Director to this community benefit society, I really want to know what it looks like in action. I had such a great time I forgot to do any shopping for myself - so I'm going back tomorrow!!!

🔵 The week started with immersion in the Tech4Good South West's AI Peer Network, where I discovered that the government has an AI Innovation Hub doing all sorts of interesting things to make accessing past information for future decision-making much quicker and slicker.

🔵 Then I headed to The Growth Hub in Stroud for a social brunch networking session, where I met Erin Poppy Koronis pivoting into copywriting, Louise Romain rapidly growing her new Tech Fairy business and Umair Hotiana helping people to protect their intellectual property.

🔵 Mid week, I joined the Bath Digital Divide Collective exploring ways to connect people and shift from exclusion to inclusion. It was a brilliant discussion about their 4 work strands, one focusing particularly on storytelling and ensuring we’re hearing from all voices, to help make good decisions about effort and investment.

🔵 Finishing the week off, I joined the Glos AIspire Network, bringing together women in Gloucestershire focused on using AI for good, where we talked about tools for business cases, creating professional headshots, podcasts and accreditation for AI learning. Really enjoyed my conversation with Hannah Meek, Michaela Pearson and Sue Conboy!

The Last Word

My challenge to you and this week’s call to action is to reflect on 3 things that you have done or achieved over the last week and to write about them. It could be in a newsletter, social media post, blog or a staff newsletter. When you’re a leader of services or a leader of thoughts, people want to know what you’re doing, what you’re contributing and what they can learn from you. So, develop your discipline of reflecting and working out loud both so you can see just how much you’re achieving and so that your colleagues feel a part of what you do.

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

🥇Business Management & Leadership
🥇Occupational & Organisational Psychology
🥇Business Careers

Core Concepts: Walking the Floor - Where Strategy Meets Reality

Dr Nia D Thomas — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 07:01:51 GMT

Hello KSKOers,

This week’s blog is about the importance of getting out and meeting your teams and service users where they’re at. In the busyness of governance, funding, HR and reporting, it’s very easy to become desk-bound and unintentionally detached from the real experiences of staff and service users. But both research and practice tell us the same thing: strategy only works when it stays in contact with operational reality. Here are some thoughts on the importance of walking the floor to make sure strategy meets reality, regularly and frequently.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

Here’s a link to this week’s long blog

Strategic-level disconnect is experiential. Decisions that feel logical, necessary and financially responsible at executive level can land very differently on the frontline. Without testing assumptions against lived experience, leaders risk creating a gap between intention and impact.
Distance often begins as overload. Senior roles carry heavy cognitive and emotional demands. Under pressure, leaders can unintentionally retreat into analysis and governance, and the safety of their familiar office. Yet even when detachment is protective rather than careless, it still erodes trust and fuels a feeling of “them and us”.

Process can become a shield. Governance frameworks, reporting cycles and compliance mechanisms are essential, especially in regulated environments, but they can also narrow reflection. When leaders rely solely on formal systems, empathy and relational nuance can diminish meaning the human side of leadership is missed and its value becomes invisible.
Proximity sharpens strategic thinking. Direct contact with staff and service users provides context that no spreadsheet can capture. Operational pressures, cultural subtleties and emotional realities become visible, allowing strategy to be informed by what is actually happening rather than what is assumed to be happening.

Inclusive decision making strengthens ownership. When those responsible for delivery are involved early, decisions are more likely to be understood, supported and implemented well. Inclusion increases perceived fairness and reduces resistance born of surprise or exclusion.
Front-loading engagement saves time overall. Involving people early may feel slower at the outset, but it significantly reduces friction, rework and firefighting later. Smooth implementation is often the result of thoughtful design, not speed at the planning stage.

Collective intelligence reduces cognitive strain at the top. Complex challenges benefit from multiple perspectives. Distributing thinking across levels of the organisation improves problem-solving quality and avoids overloading a small senior group with every strategic burden.
Unfiltered insight requires intentional effort. Information becomes edited as it moves upwards through organisational layers. The higher leaders sit, the more deliberate they must be about seeking direct, unfiltered understanding of frontline realities.

Time is a cultural signal. Where leaders choose to spend their physical time communicates priorities more powerfully than strategy documents ever will. Presence signals care, interest and respect, and over time, that shapes culture.

The Last Word

Leadership rarely falters through bad intent; it drifts through distance. Self-aware leadership means noticing when distance is starting to extend and choosing to interrupt that drift. Stay close. Show up consistently. Because when leaders remain grounded in the lived reality of their organisations, strategy gains clarity, trust strengthens and decisions become both sharper and more human.

Walking the Floor: Where Strategy Meets Reality

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:01:19 GMT

Hello KSKOers

Every Friday, I write a little LinkedIn post, reflecting on my week. One of the things I wrote about on Friday, was the importance of leaders getting out and about, visiting frontline staff and talking to them about what’s going on, and meeting service users. In this week’s blog, I wanted to talk to you about the research behind my advice to leaders to go out, go visit and get talking.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

This is what I wrote in my end of the week round up on Friday:

🔹 I realised that I hadn't left the office to visit our front line services since week 1 of my time at Maggs Day Centre. This was week 3! I visited our Day Centre and Clothing Project in Worcester and Day Centre and Hub in Redditch. I think it's very easy to become engrossed in paperwork, red tape and organisational bureaucracy to the detriment of meeting and talking to the real people who are using the very services your planning and protecting. If you have a corporate role and you haven't visited the services, day centres, facilities, hospital, schools and homes of your service, please do set aside time next week and get out there to remind yourself why you do what you do.

When I encourage leaders to get out from behind their desks and visit frontline services, it isn’t just because it’s good to be visible. It’s grounded in the research behind my book, The Self-Awareness Superhighway.

One of the strongest themes in my doctoral research was what I called strategic-level disconnect. People I spoke to consistently described a gap between those making decisions and those delivering them. Strategic ideas made sense in executive meetings. They were rational, well-intentioned and often financially necessary. But by the time they reached the frontline, it was clear that in many cases, assumptions hadn’t been tested. Practical realities hadn’t been considered and the emotional impact on staff and service users hadn’t been fully understood.

The result? Frustration. Cynicism. A quiet erosion of trust and a growth in a feeling of “them and us”.

Several interviewees spoke about detachment at senior levels. Not necessarily cruelty or indifference (although they were mentioned), but essentially, distance. Emotional and experiential distance. One described it as leaders becoming removed from the human consequences of their decisions. Whether that detachment is self-protection, overload, culture or habit, the impact is real. It seems that when leaders lose proximity, they lose perspective.

In the research, detachment also appeared as a contributor to leader derailment. When leaders become overwhelmed, they retreat into process. They rely more heavily on spreadsheets, governance frameworks and formal reporting. All of those things matter, especially in regulated environments, but they can become a shield or a mask to hid behind. Reflection narrows, empathy reduces and decisions become technically accurate but relationally brittle.

This is where being deliberately self-awareness shifts ideas from abstract theories to operational realities.

Another theme in my research that speaks directly to this is inclusive decision making. In social care, there has been a shift from “doing unto” to “doing with”. That shift recognises something fundamental: if people don’t feel ownership of a decision, they won’t engage with it fully. The same applies inside organisations. If you design change without those who you need to implement it, you increase the likelihood of challenge, delay and resistance.

Inclusive decision making bridges the gap between strategy and operations. It strengthens emotional attachment and increases perceived fairness. It enhances problem-solving because it brings practical intelligence into the discussion early on. It also distributes cognitive load - we know that we’re better at problem solving when multiple perspectives are integrated rather than directed to the few leaders at the strategic top of organisations.

Importantly, inclusive decision making is not about endless consultation. It is about thoughtful involvement at the right stage. As one contributor to my research put it, front-load your engagement - it may make planning slower, but delivery will be smoother, quicker and less adversarial. When leaders skip that stage, they often spend far longer firefighting unintended consequences when their project is nearly over the line.

But, within all of this inclusive decision making needs contact and connection. You can’t co-produce solutions from a closed office in a building no one goes to in a site where no services are delivered. You can’t sense-check assumptions through a dashboard, stats and data. We know that feedback is filtered as it moves upwards through any organisation, so the higher you sit within an organisational structure, the more intentional you have to be about seeking unfiltered insight.

And that brings me back to my own small realisation last week: I hadn’t left the office for two weeks.

There were legitimate reasons, of course. Interim CEO life is busy. Governance, funding, safeguarding, HR issues: they are real and they demand attention. But my research tells me that is exactly when the risk of drift increases. The gravitational pull of paperwork is strong. It always feels urgent. It always feels responsible. It also creates an illusion of control.

But leadership can’t become entirely desk-based.

Getting out to Worcester and Redditch wasn’t symbolic it was very purposeful and intended to give me meaningful insight into both what we do and how we do it. Conversations with staff reminded me of operational pressures that don’t always make it into reports. Talking to service users reconnected me to why the difficult financial and strategic decisions matter in the first place. It sharpened my thinking. It didn’t distract from strategy, but rather it grounded it in the reality of operational service delivery.

When I spoke to Jon Rennie in episode 11 of The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast he talked to me about his Friday practice of ‘walking the floor’.

When Jon moved from the Navy into manufacturing, he was struck by the physical and cultural separation between office staff and the shop floor. On a submarine, proximity was unavoidable, everyone lived and worked in tight quarters and knew each other well. In manufacturing though, it was different. Offices were located in one space, production was in another. He said that it created a real “us and them” dynamic. So he created what he calls Fridays on the Floor. On the first Friday of every month, he spends four hours working side by side with his employees in a different department. Not observing from a distance, but actually doing the work. Learning the processes and hearing about their frustrations directly. He sees problems for himself rather than through reports or data.

In the early days when he brought in this practice, after those sessions, he would return to his senior team energised by what he\d learned, but he noticed they didn’t share the same insight or urgency. They hadn’t experienced it it themselves so weren’t feeling the same impact from the new information and relationship building. He expanded the practice to include all senior leaders. Each month they rotate onto the floor, then come together to reflect on what they have seen and heard. The impact has been significant. The leadership team gains unfiltered understanding of operational reality. Relationships strengthen and mutual respect grows. And rather than trying to solve problems from a conference room, they’ve started asking the people doing the work, who, more often than not, already have the answers.

There is something else that happens when leaders are physically present. It signals care. It signals interest. It signals that the frontline is not peripheral but central. That matters culturally. People notice where leaders spend their time. Time allocation is a leadership statement. When we say leaders cast a long shadow, this is exactly what we mean.

If we want to reduce strategic-level disconnect, we have to design against it deliberately. That means creating feedback loops, pushing authority and information down through the organisation and challenging cultures that equate seniority with distance. And sometimes it means something very simple and very human: showing up consistently, not occasionally.

Self-aware leadership is not just internal reflection. It is relational awareness. It is noticing when you are becoming distant and choosing to step back from visibility. It is understanding that strategy and humanity are not competing priorities; they are interdependent. Strategy needs regular contact with reality.

So if you’re in a corporate or strategic role and you haven’t visited your frontline recently, consider this your nudge, backed by research, not just opinion. Close your laptop. Go and see your colleagues where they are. And listen with intent.

The Last Word

Leadership rarely falters through bad intent; it drifts through distance. When diaries fill and paperwork expands, distance extends, and strategy risks becoming detached from the lived reality it’s meant to serve. Self-aware leadership is noticing that drift away from the business of the organisation and interrupting it: choosing contact over comfort, conversation over assumption, and presence with process. The higher you sit within an organisational hierarchy, the more intentional you must be about staying grounded. So go out, turn up and be visible, consistently and purposefully, because when leaders stay close to the frontline, decisions gain perspective, trust deepens, and strategy becomes both sharper and more human.

Core Concepts: Founder's Syndrome - Passion, Power and the Problem of Staying Too Long

Dr Nia D Thomas — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 07:00:36 GMT

Core Concepts will now be in your inbox every Thursday!

Hello KSKOers,

I’ve been thinking about Founder’s Syndrome. The more I explore it, the more I see it as a developmental and transitional challenge rather than a personal flaw. It invites leaders to think about power, identity and adaptability. At its core, it asks whether founders can evolve as their organisations move from start-up to grown-up.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

There’s a link to this week’s long blog

The Founder’s Paradox: The qualities that enable an organisation to be established can later restrict its growth. Vision, speed, conviction and personal sacrifice are often exactly what’s needed in the early days. But as the organisation matures, those same qualities can harden into inflexibility. What once fuelled momentum can begin to limit travel.

Scaling Changes the Game: The informal, agile style that works in a start-up rarely works at scale. Growth brings complexity: more staff, more governance, more scrutiny. Leadership must shift from entrepreneurial instinct to structured stewardship. Systems, delegation and distributed accountability become essential if the organisation is to survive and be sustainable.

Default Leadership Settings: Over time, founders can slip into habitual patterns of leadership. Decisiveness becomes control. Confidence becomes certainty. ‘My way’ quietly starts to mean ‘the best way.’ Without deliberate reflection, these defaults shape culture and narrow the space for alternative thinking.

Hero and Martyr Modes: Many founders over-function. They carry responsibility, step in to fix problems and protect the organisation at personal cost. While admirable, this can create dependency and silence critique and challenge. When the leader becomes the hero or the martyr, other people may not or stop stepping forward.

Centralised Decision-Making: As organisations grow, concentrated authority can suppress innovation. When decisions are only make by one person, staff voice diminishes and psychological safety weakens. Over time, turnover increases and progress slows, often unintentionally.

Board Design Matters: In the early phase, founders often recruit trusted friends or family to the board. These small, loyal groups provide flexibility and shared belief. But if boards don’t evolve to become diverse, independent and robust in their oversight, they can struggle to provide appropriate challenge and accountability.

The Self-Awareness Gap: Founder’s Syndrome frequently lives in the gap between recognition of impact and regulation of behaviour. Leaders who overestimate their effectiveness or stop seeking feedback risk weakening recognition of their impact. Without honest reflection and recognition, behavioural regulation can’t follow.

Power Is Emotional: Letting go of control is not simply a structural decision; it’s deeply personal. For many founders, the organisation is intertwined with their identity. Conversations about succession or shared power can feel threatening. Acknowledging this emotional dimension is critical to navigating transition well, and if Boards aren’t aware of it, they’ll have a major challenging in steering the organisation to sustainability.

Adaptability Defines Legacy: The most sustainable founders understand when a different leadership style is required. They shift from entrepreneur to steward, from central actor to enabler. Legacy is strengthened when leaders consciously evolve or step aside at the right moment, ensuring the organisation can thrive long after them.

Here’s a short, clear list of the 10 steps from the Funding For Good article on how to overcome nonprofit founder’s syndrome (Funding for Good)

10 Steps to Overcome Nonprofit Founder’s Syndrome

Clarify roles and responsibilities for both the board and staff.
Set up checks and balances so no one person has too much power.
Change systems so the founder isn’t automatically at the top of the chain of command.
Update bylaws and policies to include things like board term limits and proper oversight.
Build a diverse board whose loyalty is to the organisation, not just the founder.
Give the board’s executive committee responsibility for spotting and addressing founder’s syndrome issues.
Identify what the founder is good at and find ways they can support the organisation’s development.
Acknowledge the founder’s contributions while balancing their input with what’s best for the organisation.
Recognise that the founder often has a strong emotional attachment to “their baby.”
Help the founder see that the organisation needs to grow and function independently, with many people involved in its future.

The Last Word

Founders build something from nothing, and that deserves respect. But sustainable leadership is not about remaining indispensable. It is about creating an organisation that can stand independently of you. The question is not whether you care enough. It is whether you are still listening, still reflecting and still willing to adapt. True legacy isn’t measured by control, it’s measured by continuity.

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