I think ‘Disruptive’ is a very lazy word in leadership. It gets used a lot and defined rarely in any meaningful detail. To me, it sounds like a convenient diagnosis, and I’m starting to wonder if its more of an admission of ‘I don’t know what to do with this person so I’m filing them in the difficult’ folder.

This has been me (and many others I know I might add) for most of my life. The best person to describe this is my Mum – ‘Matthew, you’ve always been a bit if a sh#t stirrer, haven’t you ?’ (the only person who still calls me Matthew by the way)

Think about that person you were thinking about earlier…..

Did they stop meetings running late, or stop meetings that were feeling running pointless ?
Did they ignore the process, or point out the process hadn’t worked in two years and nobody had noticed ?
Did they make a colleague feel unsafe or was it just YOU they made feel uncomfortable ?

The last question is the one that really matters because some people earn the title ‘Disruptive’ in fair way and others less so.

The fair title is when there is damage caused by bad behaviour observed ‘by all’ around them and needs dealing with fast – no question. But, that same title gets used for the one who ask the question nobody else wanted to ask or felt brave enough to ask, and that is 100% a different thing.

Before you decide what to do about them, take a second look at them. Do not excuse any bad behaviour, because you shouldn’t, but try to find out which kind of person you’ve got. Were they telling you something you needed to hear, but didn’t want to hear ?

When you called them disruptive, were you describing what they did, or how it made you (just you by the way) feel ?

The company message

1) An internal memo goes out introducing the new hire, making them feel welcome, whilst also painting a picture of a rosy new future for the business.

The unspoken message

2) At the same time there is also an unspoken internal message that circulates amongst the team that says ‘We looked beyond you’ or ‘We didn’t think you were up to it’

Which communication is the one that people remember the most ?

Your team may not say anything at first but then things change and engagement shifts. Maybe you had people who were already thinking about leaving, if so they might start actively looking. Maybe the people who were on the edge of stepping up start to become more cautious. The team start waiting for permission to do things and stop offering ideas in meetings, and some ease back into being contributors instead of leaders.

Whether you meant it or not, particularly if you didn’t share your thoughts and plans, its possible that your last external hire said a lot more to the existing team than you thought.

Maybe it’s time to take a real ‘Second Look’ at who’s already in the business. They might be the people who saw the internal memo and thought ‘Its probably time for me to move on’.

If you’ve got some future talent in your business, why not sit down and have a coffee or lunch with them and give the a Second Look before your competition does.

I’ve designed a set of conversational questions that will help you develop your knowledge and appreciation of each other, because everyone deserves a ‘Second Look’

I left formal education at 16 and I have a single GCE in Mathematics to my name (a proper old style one 😊).

I grew up in a family of academics and for much of my early life felt like I was a complete failure because I didn’t measure up in a linear scoring system. I felt useless and if I had a CV at the time it would have told a simple story – I wasn’t good enough for this modern world.

Then someone gave me a ‘Second Look.’

They didn’t give me a job title, they didn’t point me to a course or try to change me. It just started with ‘Let’s see what you can actually do’.

Since then I’ve grown and sold 2 companies, mentored a number of highly successful people and written 3 books as well as put teams together to swim the Channel and row the Atlantic.

Whilst the teenage years were tough, I’ve spent the next 40 years proving people were right to give me a chance. Its not because I became smarter or got more qualifications, its just that I proved that the person who saw my potential was right, even when my paperwork didn’t say it.

I’m a firm believer that we are squandering huge amounts of talent and potential in society and business due to our failure to clesrly identify potential.

A ‘Second Look’ could the lives of the people you work with and make a radical change to the overall health of your organisation too.

DM if you’d like me to share the benefits of the ‘Second Look’ with your team

#SecondLook

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

There was nobody else to be seen as we waited for an ambulance so I had to step up to help. After 30-40 seconds I looked up to see where Joseph was. He’d positioned himself between me delivering CPR, and the lady. He’d full eye contact and was trying to reassure her.

After around 4-5 minutes I looked up again and he had led her away to a bench and was still talking to her when the emergency services arrived.

After we handed over to the paramedics we continnued our walk and I asked if he sought eye contact and moved her deliberately, he said ‘Yes’.

He then turned to me, looking at me and said ‘I just did what I thought was the right thing to do Dad’.

I thought I was stepping up and doing the leading that day but my son taught me that I wasn’t the only one.

That’s leadership. Its not a title, a qualification or ten years of experience. Its someone who sees what needs doing, knows they can help, and steps forward.

How many people in your business are sitting on exactly this kind of potential. Maybe they’re not putting their hand up because nobody’s asked, but maybe they’re not leading because you’re not giving them the permission.

The businesses I like to work with that are genuinely thriving aren’t the ones with the most senior leaders. They’re the ones where leadership is expected from everyone, regardless of role, and where stepping forward is rewarded rather than questioned.

#Unconventional #Leadership #Speaker

We’ve been conditioned to look for leadership in a very narrow set of places. Job titles. Seniority. The person who speaks most confidently in a room. The one who puts their hand up for every new initiative. The one who’s done the MBA or been on the expensive leadership programme.

And so we promote that person. We give them the team. We send them on the course. We call them a leader because they tick the boxes we’ve been taught to look for.

Meanwhile, some of the most natural leaders in the building are sitting in roles nobody associates with leadership at all. The junior who calms the team down when a project goes sideways. The ops person everyone gravitates towards when they need honest advice. The account manager whose clients would follow them to a competitor without hesitation, not because of what they sell, but because of who they are.

These people don’t look like leaders in the traditional sense. They haven’t been on the course. They’re not the loudest. They probably haven’t asked for a promotion. But they’re doing the thing that matters most: they’re making the people around them better.

When I ask a room full of business owners to think of a really great leader, someone who genuinely shaped them, they almost never name a CEO or a board member. They name a teacher. A coach. A first boss who took a chance on them. A grandparent who ran a shop. People whose leadership had nothing to do with status and everything to do with how they made others feel.

If you’re a founder building a business in the £2m–£50m range, the question isn’t whether you have leaders inside your business. You do. The question is whether you’re seeing them. Because if you’re only looking where you’ve been trained to look, you’re missing the people who could transform your team from the inside out.

This isn’t soft thinking. It’s commercial thinking. A business with depth of leadership is a business that runs when the founder isn’t there. It’s a business that retains its best people. It’s a business that someone wants to buy.

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I’ve been in rooms where business leaders introduce a shiny powerpoint, they can recite their 5 year plan from memory, but they can’t remember the names of all the people in the room.

When I run the ‘think of a really good leader’ exercise, the qualities people list are generally very similar:

* Listened to
* Believed in
* Gave me confidence
* Was honest
* Made time for me

Not once, never ever ever ever !! has anyone said ‘they had a brilliant strategy’ I’m not saying it dosen’t matter, because it does. But, thats not what people carry in their heads once they leave the meeting room.

The reason this matters commercially is incredibly simple – the leaders that teams remember are the ones that stick with them when the ‘sh#t hits the fan’. They’re the ones who build loyalty that survives a bad quarter, a tough restructure, or a competitor offering 10% more money. They’re also the ones who create teams that don’t fall apart when the founder steps back.

Strategy gets the buy in for the journey ahead, but its your people that will get you to the destination you’re aiming for.

#Unconventional #Leadership #Speaker

BUT I can tell you exactly how he made me feel. He made Captain, he said he believed in me and he made feel confident about myself, at times when I was often doubting myself.

46 years ago, I still remember his name and I still remember the feeling. It wasn’t about what he said – it was all about how he made me feel.

When I share this in a room full of business owners and ask them to think of their own version, the room goes quiet in a way it rarely does during a business talk.

The reason is that everyone has a ‘Mr Bryan’ – a teacher, a coach, a first boss, a parent, a mentor — someone who made them believe they could do more than they thought they could.

Here’s what I find truly remarkable about this. Its that these leaders weren’t trying to be remembered. They weren’t reading books about leadership or attending courses on how to inspire people. They were just being themselves, paying attention, being kind, investing in someone who needed it.

THEY STAYED – not in the room but they stay in someone’s head for years……….and that’s the kind of leadership that actually changes things.

The question isn’t whether your team will remember you, because they will. The real question is WHAT they’ll remember.

If you want to explore what lasting leadership looks like in your business with an Unconventional approach, my work with Senior Leadership Teams is built around exactly this kind of conversation.

#Unconventional #Leadership #Speaker

The week after leaving school I got a job on a trawler, making tea boy, gutting fish, scrubbing fish boxes and generally cleaning the boat. It was definitely real life.

And it didn’t take me long to realise that what I wanted for myself was not only out of reach, it had never felt so far away. I didn’t know it then, but it was teaching me about life, leadership and teamwork. Lessons I’ve never forgotten and lessons that I value to this day.

We all have a definition of a good leader and I don’t think there’s a one size fits all, because we’re all so different. You might feel you have natural leadership ability and take it easily in your stride, or you might struggle with it every day, worrying you’re not good enough.

I think it’s about being authentic and recognising the value of everyone in the team.

But whatever you feel about your leadership ability, it actually doesn’t matter.

Why do I say this? because ultimately you don’t decide if you’re a leader, people decide whether or not they are prepared to follow you. It really is that simple, if people are following you, you’re a leader.

The top five things that helped me become a confident leader:

1. Remembering what it felt like when I had a good leader and how I responded
2. Being very clear about my definition of success and how to achieve it
3. Leading with a light hand. Trusting my own skills and the skills and ability of my team
4. Showing my trust in my team by resisting the urge to micromanage
5. Controlling my own destiny, admitting when I’m wrong, asking for help from my team and consistently showing that I value their contribution

I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way to go about the business of leadership. It can be complex, rewarding, thankless, frustrating, and impossible, but when your team starts to be consistently successful, and you realise that you’re no longer flying by the seat of your pants, you can start to enjoy it.

I think enjoying being a leader really matters because confidence and enjoyment are contagious. I know I’m most successful when I see my team enjoying the challenges we face together and overcoming them together.

I am confident in my ability to lead, but I never lose sight of my goals: to be better, to keep learning and to keep improving.

When I sold a second business, I didn’t get remotely emotional about the brand, the revenue or the office we had. For the month running up to the sale I spent most of my time thinking about the people I would be leaving behind once I left.

I’ve since realised that quite a lot of what we were doing was setting up the next generation of the leaders I’d worked with, some of which have gone on to grow far more that I could have helped them to. When I stop and think about that, it makes me extremely proud.

Most business leaders I meet think their legacy is the deal, but its not. I’ve asked a number of exited founders what they’re most proud of and a large proportion tell me it seeing where its people have got to.

Ask yourself, are you really building a team and creating an environment where people grow into roles that take your business forward ? If the answer is ‘No’ then its unlikely that someone else will want to invest in it either.

When I ask a room full of business owners to think of a great leader, they don’t think of someone who built a great business. They think of someone who built them and trusted them to keep on growing. That is the kind of leadership team an acquirer gets interested in buying.

As someone who’s been there a couple of times, your real legacy isn’t the money you’ve got in the bank, it’s the next generation of leaders you create, develop and leave behind.