One of the clearest indicators of leadership is what happens when tension enters the building…

Leadership teams experience it regularly and it’s a bit like pressure: it’s a necessary and healthy part of a dynamic. Our decisions carry consequences, our resources are finite, our priorities compete for our attention and your people hold different views about what should happen next and how.

We know that having tension is part of life but it depends on how it’s handled when it’s felt.

In some teams, tension is treated as something to ignore, get rid of or panic at the mere sensation of it.

Difficult conversations don’t get the airtime they need, people make excuses and soften their stance in a disagreement, the next move is not dealt with while people search for certainty or broader consensus to get people onside.

In others, tension is used as part of the decision-making process where we listen and don’t judge so that different views are explored properly, assumptions are tested, competing perspectives hold their own long enough for other thinking to emerge.

The difference is the ability to stay stable under pressure.

Teams are highly sensitive to this.

When leaders become reactive, defensive or visibly unsettled in moments of disagreement, the environment feels different and some of the things that tends to happen is people contribute less, stop caring, risks rises and conversations narrow to what feels the safest.

When leaders remain engaged and thoughtful under pressure, people tend to stay in the conversation. Different perspectives continue to surface. Decisions are shaped by a fuller understanding of the situation.

Over time, this directly affects team morale, performance and how people decide.

Great leadership is hardly defined by the absence of tension.

📌 It is revealed in how well tension the leader can work alongside tension without losing the plot, clarity, judgement, perspective or indeed themselves in the process.

Every leader uses silence. The question is whether they understand what it is doing.

At its best, silence is intentional – a pause to think, to listen, or to let others step forward. At its worst, it becomes avoidance: the quiet that happens when something needs to be said and isn’t.

Silence is not neutral.

It shapes what is acceptable in a group just as clearly as spoken words.

I worked with a board where one member gradually began disengaging during meetings. At first it was subtle, on the laptop head down, checking emails and eventually, only their partial presence in the room while their attention was elsewhere.

The behaviour was obvious to everyone but no one addressed it.

Over time, something predictable happened. The group adjusted around that leader and what had once been noticeable became normal and their standard of engagement changed without anyone explicitly agreeing to it.

The cost to the board wasn’t immediate as you’d expect but it reared its ugly head later down the line in the tone of their meetings, in reduced accountability and in the quiet acceptance of behaviour that would and should have been challenged.

Nobody said anything to me and early on in their journey with me, I was invited to the annual Board meeting. Following that meeting which I can remember as if it was yesterday, I raised it with him privately, and soon after that, the behaviour changed quickly.

The issue was never the laptop but it was the silence around it.

Silence always communicates something. It either creates space for reflection and better thinking, or it leaves a gap that gets filled by assumptions and lowered standards. You and I both know which one we’d prefer…and that takes courage.

Some leaders assume silence does its job to preserve their stability but in practice, it often does the opposite.

It creates a parallel narrative in the room, one that no one has tested, but everyone begins to respond or surrender to.

The question is not whether silence is present.

📌 It is what it is allowing to become the new normal.

One of the more consistent observations from working with leadership teams is how often communication is assessed by intent rather than impact.

Most leaders place a high value on openness. They want people to feel informed, they want transparency and honesty to be part of how the organisation operates and their intention is a good one but the outcome they get is misaligned with their intention.

There are moments when communication feels clarifying to the leader, but creates uncertainty in the system around them.

This often shows up in three ways.

Over-explaining decisions that are already made.
Sharing concerns that are still being formed.
Thinking out loud in settings where others are looking for direction.

From the leader’s perspective, this is openness but from the team’s perspective, it is ambiguity in full colour.

Over time, teams begin to rely less on decisions and more on interpretation. Their focus moves from execution to reading signals, tone and subtext. They don’t have clarity because the direction is unclear.

The opposite dynamic is also true.

Leaders who are transparent about what is known, what is still in development and what has already been decided tend to create more stable environments and so people spend less time interpreting and more time delivering.

It’s not about the volume of information leaders are cascading to their people, it’s whether it creates clarity for the people who need to act on it.

📌 Leadership communication is ultimately judged by its effect on the system, not the intention behind the message.

There is a form of oversharing that gets mistaken for leadership.

It often arrives framed as authenticity or openness, or “bringing your whole self to work”. Underneath it is something less deliberate: using vulnerability to manage personal discomfort in the moment.

When leaders do this, they make the expensive mistake of weakening their credibility rather than what we’ve been told will strengthen it.

The issue is calibration.

When vulnerability is used to resolve the leader’s own tension rather than serve the room, it moves the burden onto others. The team is no longer just interpreting direction; they’re also absorbing emotional load that was not intended for them.

You see it in a few patterns.

The cautious leader who stays broadly transparent but avoids decisive language to protect themselves from future accountability.
The leader who shares overwhelm as an unfiltered release rather than a considered signal.
The leader who discloses too much, too early, in an attempt to fast track trust and instead creates uncertainty about their stability.

Teams remember what was made clear, and what was made unstable, in the moment.

📌 Credibility is built when vulnerability is used deliberately, not reactively. It is what is held back for the room, not what is released into it.

A finance director once made an observation that stayed with me.

He had just watched a difficult issue being addressed directly in a leadership discussion and commented on how unusual it was to see it handled with both clarity and respect at the same time.

That pattern appears pretty often in leadership teams, boards and executive groups.

The issue itself is hardly the problem.

In most cases, everyone in the room is already aware of it but what changes is whether it is discussed directly or allowed to fester and circulate through side conversations, private discussions and assumptions.

In some cases, the leaders make the relationship the priority and ignore the issue as the very large elephant in the room. In others, the issue is addressed in a way that creates unnecessary tension, making future conversations harder than they need to be.

Neither approach serves the team well.

Over time, teams become accustomed to carrying information that most know about but no one dares to name. Performance problems with people don’t get addressed properly, behavioural issues persist, others notice this and metaphorically roll their eyeballs losing hope and despair that it looks like nothing is being done. Focus of people starts to diminish because the problem is being discussed in lots of places except the room where it belongs.

The same pattern shows up in client relationships.

Important concerns are softened, emerging risks are partially expressed, strategic disagreements are hinted at rather than explored head on and followed through. The relationship appears intact because nobody is openly disagreeing but the quality of the conversation narrows in ways that no longer match the complexity of the situation in the clients mind.

Trust is often misunderstood in relationships – it gets associated with rapport, familiarity and goodwill.

If you want to have the type of trusted advisor trust that clients know, like and trust then the ability and willingness to address difficult issues directly while maintaining respect for the person across the table, is mandatory practice for ones future fitness.

📌 Practicing the skill to give clarity and respect in a difficult conversation is key and voila…hello to trust.

Most organisations are full of capable people working hard.

You see the progress with their projects, they’re discussing their priorities in the various meetings, people are saying they have significant workloads and from a distance, it can look as though momentum is building across the organisation.

The blindspot is that activity and alignment are totally different concepts.

This week’s insight comes from a leadership team I worked with – and the gap between the appearance of progress and the commercial cost of their fractured focus.

Just because your team is working hard, it doesn’t mean they are moving the right things forward.

Imagine a child tidying their room by moving toys from one pile to another. There’s effort that you can see but the result is their room does not get clean or tidy.

A leadership team may leave a planning session believing they have clarity on their direction. Weeks later, different functions are working towards outcomes that only partially resemble one another. Nothing has gone wrong but people have simply interpreted the same direction through different priorities, pressures and operational realities.

The result is usually not visible to others immediately.

It appears over time in projects that require repeated intervention, decisions that take longer than expected and initiatives that consume considerable energy without producing the impact leadership anticipated.

What makes this challenging is that each team can appear successful when viewed in isolation because they’re putting in the hours, doing the work, meeting some of the deadlines and the presentations are showing that there is progress.

But the organisation experiences a type of tension and friction because their efforts are no longer reinforcing itself in the same direction.

Leadership teams often spend significant time setting priorities and far less attention is given to how those priorities will be interpreted once they leave the top table and move through the organisation.

This is also the hotspot of when activity replaces momentum and creates the illusion of progress.

📌 The quality of direction is not measured by how clearly it was communicated at the top, it becomes apparent in how consistently it is understood everywhere else.

A client relationship can appear healthy while losing influence behind the scenes.

From the outside, both relationships can look remarkably similar. Both clients take calls, both attend meetings, both respond to communication, both may have worked with the same advisor for many years.

The distinction becomes clear when something important is being considered by their client.

Do clients call once they have already decided what to do, or do they call while they are still weighing options and making sense of the situation?

One advisor sits alongside the decision-making process. The other sits inside it.

The strongest client relationships are not defined by frequency of contact, responsiveness or years of tenure. They are defined by whether the client seeks your perspective before direction has been chosen.

There is a difference between the advisor a client calls to tell and the advisor they call to think with.

Recently, a client contacted me ahead of a board development planning discussion. The purpose of the call was not to review work already completed or approve a recommendation. The purpose was to explore options, test our thinking and discuss how best to approach an important conversation that would shape their future decisions.

As I’m writing this note, my clients ask me to support them in their thinking towards the next step or solution.

My key observations?

The decision had not yet been made and the thinking was still forming.

That is often where the greatest value add is. To help your clients think deeper, more strategic and innovate while the direction is still being determined.

One relationship manager gets informed and the other gets consulted.

📌 That difference is where trust becomes commercially significant.