Are We So Busy Managing Change That We've Forgotten How to Lead?

The pressures on leaders are growing. But perhaps the answer isn't another leadership course.

I was recently asked to speak to a group of leaders about having challenging conversations. It's a topic I know well, one I've delivered training on many times, and something that regularly comes up when I'm working with organisations. 

But the request got me thinking. And, if I'm being completely fair, it left me feeling a little perplexed about the state of leadership development.

Because how many times are we going to teach leaders how to have difficult conversations before we start asking why those conversations aren't happening in the first place?

Don't get me wrong. There is absolutely a place for developing communication skills, building confidence and giving managers practical tools to navigate uncomfortable situations. Some people genuinely haven't had the opportunity to develop those skills, and training can make a real difference. But I increasingly wonder whether we're spending too much time treating the symptoms of poor leadership and not nearly enough time understanding the causes.

We teach people how to have difficult conversations because performance issues aren't being addressed. We deliver workshops on collaboration because departments aren't working together. We introduce wellbeing initiatives because people are exhausted. And we talk about accountability because nobody seems particularly keen to take responsibility when things go wrong.

All worthwhile interventions, perhaps. But what if the problem isn't simply a lack of knowledge?

What if it's the environment we've created, the behaviours we've normalised, the pressures we've placed on leaders, or the things those at the top are unwilling to acknowledge about themselves?

And with the pace of change we're currently experiencing, I think those questions are becoming more important than ever.

Leadership has become an exercise in keeping up

Think about what we're asking business leaders to navigate at the moment.

Artificial intelligence is changing how organisations operate, how work gets done and what skills people will need in the future. Leaders are being encouraged to embrace AI, understand its opportunities, manage its risks and work out where it genuinely adds value. Yet many are still trying to get their heads around what it means for their own roles, let alone how to introduce it responsibly across a business.

Then there's employment law. The Employment Rights Act 2025 is bringing significant changes to the employment landscape, with reforms being introduced over several years. Employers need to understand what has already changed, what is coming, how their policies and practices may need to evolve and, crucially, how to equip their managers to navigate those changes confidently.

And that's before we consider economic uncertainty, rising operating costs, recruitment challenges, customer expectations, changing workforce priorities and the everyday realities of running a business.

For smaller organisations, this can be particularly challenging. The person responsible for strategic direction might also be overseeing finance, recruitment, operations and the occasional IT problem. In larger organisations, senior leaders may have more resources around them, but they're often balancing competing priorities, organisational politics and expectations to deliver increasingly ambitious results.

The pressure to keep up is enormous.

But here's what concerns me. When leaders are spending so much time responding to change, solving operational problems and trying to stay ahead of the next challenge, how much time and energy is actually left for leadership?

Not managing projects. Not answering emails. Not making decisions about budgets, systems or structures.

Because while you're busy working out how AI might change your business, your team is wondering what it means for their jobs. While you're reviewing employment law changes, your managers are still trying to work out how to handle the difficult conversation they've been avoiding for six months. And while you're focused on delivering the next set of business results, the culture of your organisation is being shaped by the everyday behaviours you may not even notice.

Change doesn't wait for leaders to feel ready. But neither do people.

How did we get here?

I think it's worth acknowledging that we don't all arrive in leadership positions through the same route.

Some of us progress because we're technically brilliant at what we do. We consistently deliver, we understand our specialism, we become the person others rely on and eventually we're promoted into a position where we're responsible for other people. It's a perfectly understandable progression, except being brilliant at doing a job doesn't automatically mean we're equipped to lead others doing it.

Others find themselves in leadership because they've started their own business. Perhaps they wanted more freedom, greater purpose, or the opportunity to build something that reflects their values. There's something incredibly exciting about that. But being a business owner means becoming a leader, often without any formal preparation and sometimes without even recognising that leadership is now part of the job.

And then there are those who are recruited into senior positions because of their reputation for delivering results, driving transformation or turning difficult situations around. They arrive with experience, credibility and a track record that suggests they know how to get things done.

There are, of course, plenty of other routes into leadership. But these three illustrate something important: the qualities that get us into leadership aren't necessarily the qualities that make us good at it.

Technical expertise is valuable. Entrepreneurial drive is valuable. A reputation for delivering results is valuable.

None of them, however, makes us immune to getting leadership wrong.

In fact, I sometimes wonder whether a successful track record can become one of the biggest obstacles to good leadership. When you've spent years being rewarded for having answers, making decisions and delivering outcomes, it can be difficult to accept that the next stage of your development might involve listening more, questioning your own assumptions and allowing other people to challenge you.

There's a world of difference between having confidence in your experience and believing your experience makes you unquestionably right.

And the moment a leader decides they know best, and stops being curious about what others might see differently, is often the moment their leadership starts to become less effective.

The pressure at the top is real. So, where's the support?

One of the things I find most interesting about leadership is how support can gradually disappear as responsibility increases.

When we're developing in our careers, we might have regular supervision, structured development opportunities, mentoring, feedback and people who help us work through difficult decisions. Yet as we move into more senior positions, there's often an assumption that we no longer need those things.

We're experienced now. We're capable. We're paid to make decisions.

And yes, senior leaders should be able to operate with a degree of autonomy, navigate complexity and take responsibility for difficult choices.

But since when did capability mean we no longer need support?

The decisions leaders make can have significant consequences. They might affect someone's livelihood, the future of a business, the wellbeing of a team or the direction of an entire organisation. Add financial pressure, competing priorities, constant interruptions and the expectation that leaders should always have an answer, and it's hardly surprising that many find themselves mentally and emotionally stretched.

Decision fatigue is real. So is the tendency to become reactive when we're under pressure. We become shorter with people, less patient, more focused on immediate solutions and less willing to entertain another perspective. We might convince ourselves we're simply being decisive, when in reality we're operating on very little capacity.

And here's the uncomfortable part: our pressure doesn't stay neatly contained within us. It travels through the organisation.

A stressed leader can create a stressed team. An impatient leader can create a culture where people stop asking questions. A leader who is constantly firefighting can unintentionally teach everyone around them that urgency matters more than thoughtful decision-making.

So, I'd encourage leaders to ask themselves a question that doesn't get asked nearly enough. 

Who supports you?

Who gives you the space to think rather than react? Who challenges your assumptions? Who helps you untangle the difficult decisions without simply telling you what you want to hear?

That might be a coach, a mentor, a trusted peer network or someone else who can provide perspective and constructive challenge.

Whatever form it takes, I think we need to stop treating support for senior leaders as a luxury and start recognising it as part of responsible leadership.

The culture you complain about might have something to do with you

This is probably the part of leadership that requires the most honesty.

I've worked with leaders who are frustrated that their teams don't take accountability, yet they routinely step in and make decisions on everyone's behalf. Leaders who want people to speak up, but become defensive when challenged. Leaders who talk about collaboration, while rewarding individual performance and allowing departments to operate in isolation.

And leaders who are genuinely passionate about wellbeing, but regularly send emails late into the evening and create an unspoken expectation that everyone else should be available too.

Most of the time, I don't think these contradictions are intentional. In fact, some of the leaders demonstrating these behaviours care deeply about their people and want to create a positive working environment.

But good intentions don't automatically create good outcomes.

Leadership requires us to hold up a mirror and consider the part we might be playing in the very problems we're trying to solve.

If your managers avoid difficult conversations, what happens when someone challenges you? If your teams aren't taking ownership, are you giving them the freedom to do so? If people are reluctant to raise concerns, how have you responded when they've brought you uncomfortable information in the past?

And if your organisation feels exhausted, what are you modelling about boundaries, priorities and what it means to be successful?

These aren't comfortable questions. But they're far more useful than automatically deciding that the answer is another management training programme.

Because you can teach someone the perfect structure for a difficult conversation, but if they work in an organisation where challenging senior decisions is discouraged, where poor behaviour is tolerated or where nobody has the time to follow through, that training is unlikely to change very much.

Sometimes the biggest leadership development opportunity isn't about learning a new skill.

It's about recognising a behaviour we need to stop.

Your department is not the business

Another challenge I see, particularly within senior leadership teams, is the tendency for leaders to become so focused on their own areas of responsibility that they lose sight of the organisation as a whole.

The finance director is focused on financial performance. The operations director is focused on delivery. The HR director is focused on people. The commercial director is focused on growth.

Of course, they should be. That's part of their responsibility.

But if everyone is only looking after their own department, who's looking after the business?

I've seen leadership teams where meetings become a series of departmental updates rather than meaningful conversations about collective priorities. Where leaders defend their own resources, protect their own targets and quietly become frustrated when another department's decisions make their lives more difficult.

Everyone is working hard. Everyone is delivering something. Yet the organisation isn't necessarily moving forward together.

At a senior level, leadership needs to become bigger than the function you represent.

It requires an understanding of how decisions affect the wider business, a willingness to challenge priorities that no longer serve the organisation and the ability to make choices that might not always benefit your own department.

In other words, leaders need to think like business owners, even when they aren't the business owner.

That doesn't mean abandoning your expertise or neglecting your responsibilities. It means recognising that the success of your department is only meaningful if it contributes to the success of the organisation.

And perhaps more importantly, it means remembering that your fellow senior leaders are supposed to be your team, not your competition.

We could do with better examples of leadership

I can't write about leadership without acknowledging the wider environment in which we're all operating.

We live in a world where disagreement increasingly seems to be treated as an invitation to attack, where public debates can become more about scoring points than finding solutions, and where the behaviours demonstrated by people in positions of authority don't always reflect the standards we'd expect in our own workplaces.

Personally, I find some of the shouting, interruptions and point-scoring we see in political debate embarrassing. If a senior leadership team behaved like that in a boardroom, we'd probably be having a conversation about how they work together.

And the public's trust in political leadership is hardly encouraging.

The 2025 Ipsos Veracity Index found that just 9% of Britons trusted politicians to tell the truth, matching the lowest level recorded for the profession since the survey began in 1983.

Meanwhile, the British Social Attitudes research published in 2025 found that only 12% trusted governments to put the nation's interests ahead of their own party's interests most or all of the time.

These are different measures of trust, but both point to a significant challenge around confidence in those who lead.

Of course, political leadership and business leadership aren't identical, and businesses can't solve every wider societal problem. But I do think organisations have an opportunity, and perhaps a responsibility, to demonstrate what good leadership can look like in practice.

To show that disagreement doesn't have to become hostility. That accountability doesn't require humiliation. That confidence and humility can exist together. That changing your mind when presented with new information isn't weakness. And that leadership should be about making things better for the people you're responsible for, rather than simply protecting your own position.

People experience leadership in their workplaces every day. Those experiences shape what they believe is normal, what they come to expect from people in authority and, in many cases, how they go on to lead others.

That feels like something worth taking seriously.

So, what should leaders actually be focusing on?

I don't think the answer is to stop investing in leadership development. Far from it.

But I do think we need to be more thoughtful about what we're developing and why.

Before commissioning another course on difficult conversations, perhaps we should understand what's making those conversations difficult in the first place. Before launching another wellbeing initiative, perhaps we should examine the expectations and working practices that are leaving people exhausted. And before asking managers to be more accountable, perhaps we should look at whether we're giving them the authority, clarity and support to take accountability in the first place.

For me, good leadership in a changing world comes back to a few fundamental things.

It's having the self-awareness to recognise how your behaviour affects others, particularly when you're under pressure. It's being curious enough to challenge your own thinking and listen to people who see things differently. It's recognising that your responsibilities extend beyond your own priorities, and that the organisation succeeds through collective effort rather than individual victories.

It's also knowing when you need help.

Not because you're incapable, but because leadership is complex, and having someone who can challenge, support and help you think clearly is a strength rather than a weakness. 

And perhaps most importantly, it's creating enough space to actually lead, rather than allowing the demands of running a business to consume every moment of your attention.

AI will continue to develop. Employment law will continue to change. Economic pressures, workforce expectations and business priorities will continue to evolve.

There will always be another challenge demanding our attention.

But while we're busy trying to keep up with everything changing around us, we can't afford to lose sight of the impact we're having on the people alongside us.

Because navigating change is part of leadership. But how we lead while navigating it is what people will remember.