

annual review 2025 - a year of connection
I’ve been missing it. I think our industry has been missing it. But we’re bringing it back. Connection is absolutely core to what it means to be human and so it was that I set this as my word for the year for You Burn Bright 2025, and I am very glad I did. I realised I needed more human connection. Screens and working from home are efficient, but in overusing these tools I was morphing into heads down, silo-ed, ‘busy’ ways of working that felt distinctly un-me. So I got out


Is the desire for authenticity holding leaders back?
Authentic leadership has been around over a decade now, but it’s a leadership shift I believe we’ve still not got the measure of. What I have observed is that our version of authenticity, instead of freeing us (as it was intended to do), actually restricts us. Authenticity has unintentionally become this armour: A way to avoid doing hard things. An excuse for attitudes or behaviours that make people feel uncomfortable or undermine team performance. A story we tell ourselves


have we misunderstood empowerment?
When I made the transition from running a team of 18 to a team of 30, the biggest thing it made me realise was that I’d totally misunderstood what it looked like to empower my team. I had been operating on the assumption that if my team was happy, then all was well - we would have harmony, no one would leave, the work would be good. How did this assumption lead me to behave? - I was jumping in, solving, fixing, accommodating, pleasing, advising. This felt good in the moment f




