The leader who never asked to be one
On the people whose authority is granted in the corridor before it is granted in the org chart, and what happens when the org chart finally notices.
read the essay →journal
Field notes from the practice
Essays on leadership emergence, the unanointed, and the slow work of becoming visible.
Post-role intensity, in practice
Four years of doctoral data, condensed into the question I most often ask in a first session.
read the essay →What I no longer call "high potential"
The trouble with high-potential frameworks, and what listening for emergence asks us to do instead.
read the essay →Three things I have stopped asking
The questions a phenomenological coach learns not to ask, and why their absence opens more.
read the essay →Becoming visible to yourself first
On the work of recognising your own leadership before asking anyone else to.
read the essay →The still lake, and the churned one
Why a mind in motion cannot see itself, and what stillness is actually made of.
read the essay →Unanointed: a working theory
Building on the claiming-granting model, with post-role intensity as a boundary condition.
read the essay →On being asked to lead before you were ready
What happens in the gap between being needed and being named, and how to stand in it without borrowing someone else's confidence.
read the essay →What twenty-five years across nine companies actually teaches you
Notes from the research on how authority actually forms, in organisations that have stopped pretending hierarchy explains everything.
read the essay →The question I ask before any other
A single opening question, and what changes when a session begins with description instead of diagnosis.
read the essay →