The person you should promote…..but probably won’t…..

You’ve started to think there is a need for another leader in the business. There are quite a few people wanting to put their names forward but before we get some interviews scheduled lets think about the person everyone trusts, but nobody would describe as ‘leadership material.’ They’re the quiet one, the steady one. The one who doesn’t self-promote but somehow holds the whole thing together.

In far too many businesses that person simply gets overlooked. Maybe they don’t interview well or they’re ‘not polished’ or they don’t ‘play the game’. So the promotion goes to someone more visible, more vocal, more conventional.

Six months later, the team feels different and something’s missing. The new leader has the title but not the trust. The person everyone actually relied on is still doing the real work but from the wrong seat.

I’ve seen this pattern in dozens of founder-led businesses. The owner knows, deep down, who the real leaders are. But the system they’ve built, the job descriptions, the performance frameworks, the interview processes, is designed to surface a different kind of person. A more visible kind. A more conventional kind.

Some of the best leadership decisions I’ve seen founders in the £2m–£50m range make weren’t about hiring externally or sending someone on a course. They were about finally recognising someone who’d been leading all along and giving them the seat that matched what they were already doing.

My keynote ‘Dare to Be Different’ is built around exactly this idea. That the leadership you need might already be inside your business, sitting in a seat you haven’t looked at yet. If you’re organising an event and want to give your audience something that genuinely changes how they think, lets have a coffee

#Leadershipinplainsight