Yesterday, I attended the 61st anniversary of the mountain rescue team I served in during the 70s.

Yup, the days before Goretex, smart phones, and pretty much anything digital. And photos, the quality of which, only became apparent days later after film was developed at Boots the Chemist.

And well before social media and the rise of one-trick, minimal lived experience experts pushing this or that brand of “leadership”.

LOOK AT THOSE OLD GITS…

“Is this the end-of-life ward?”  I quipped on arrival to peels of laughter (btw many of us are frequent flyers with the NHS!)

Non-pc, but an enduring example of the black humour that helped us deal with the situations we volunteered for.

Old gits, connected by something deep and lasting.

CONTEXT…

We operated in the Southern Cairngorms and the Lochnagar areas of the Highlands.

Difficult, dangerous, remote.

In those days – no drones, no high-mobility vehicles, no digital mapping, very few estate roads, and very cold, big snow winters.

Call-outs, or shouts, often involved the sombre recovery of bodies. Hypothermia, avalanches, bloody climbing falls.

I joined a decade after the team’s 1964 formation. Processes and protocols were early stage and local. Now they are nationwide and codified. Equipment is amazing. There are mandatory national training courses. Professionalisation, but still charity-based. And a lot of good as a result.

SO WHAT?

Knowing what I know now, as a result of a 50+ year leadership journey supported by continuous professional development, and reminded by meeting these amazing souls yesterday (some of whom I see regularly, some of whom I have not seen for 50 years!):

• The team leaders we worked with were/are all flawed human beings (aren’t we all).

• They didn’t have names for different leadership strategies or styles.

• Rather they were virtuoso leadership magicians who dynamically understood context, people, and themselves; and knew when to teach, coordinate, delegate, ask questions, listen, reflect, amend, and direct.

• They knew when to grip and when to hug, to throw a steely glare and when to smile.

• They created – indeed we collectively created – a team that also understood context and the ways that getting stuff done needed to happen in service of our partners (the Police, other teams), casualties, and wider stakeholders (benefactors like Order of St John).

• And sometimes the team leader got it badly wrong and pissed off a lot of people. And that was ok.

A CLOSING WORD…

There was and still is a high bar to be welcomed in as a trusted mountain rescue team member.

Nothing to do with the concept of “othering” that some people focus on . This “in-group” is all about a level of trust that is based on competence, consistency, and connection; it’s about contribution and challenge; and it’s about ownership and accountability. And laughing lots!

A non-negotiable high bar that colleagues and casualties alike demand and deserve.

Look at these faces. They say it all.

Dave Stewart

Founder & Chief Executive

Hard pressed team leaders and their HR/L&D colleagues often roll out a psychometric questionnaire in the belief this will open the door to great conversations and enhanced team performance. They might also arrange for colleagues to have one-to-one coaching.

But nothing really shifts. Why?

Teams are highly complex adaptive systems. Performance is the result of aligning multiple interacting factors, in addition to dynamically managing the many relationships in play. Add shifting operational contexts over time, and interactions with other teams across an organisation, and you have a massive challenge on your hands.

Take Gordon Curphy’s and Dianne Nilsen’s Rocket Model for example. This shows the interacting factors that need to be considered in developing and leading a team. We will highlight the Peter Hawkins 5-Disciplines model and the David Clutterbuck PERILL model in other posts. As with all models, they are not reality but they offer a great way into understanding the complexity involved.

No wonder that leading organisations are now rebalancing their investment from one-to-one coaching to team development.

(Source: PwC’ 2025 Coaching Industry Benchmark Study).

High-performing teams are built through honest reflection, tough conversations, collective leadership, and continuous learning—not a one-time personality profile, one-to-one coaching, or an internally facilitated workshop.

This is our core business.

We can help.  Get in touch.

RUDYARD KIPLING’S “ I Keep Six Honest Serving Men”  contrasts how, as adults, we seem to have lost our capacity for wonder and curiosity compared to young children.

The poem laments how we let our “Six Honest Serving Men” (What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who) rest during work and mealtimes. We are too busy.

Too busy for curiosity and imagination. Really?! What a lost opportunity.

Contrast this to children who ask “millions” of questions from the moment they wake, giving flight to their sense of wonder and curiosity, never allowing the Six Honest Serving Men to rest.

—

I KEEP six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

I send them east and west;

But after they have worked for me,

I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five,

For I am busy then,

As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

For they are hungry men.

But different folk have different views;

I know a person small—

She keeps ten million serving-men,

Who get no rest at all!

She sends’em abroad on her own affairs,

From the second she opens her eyes—

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

And seven million Whys!

With this in mind, perhaps we can help rekindle your imagination and curiosity. It is core to the experiential inquiry work we do with leaders and teams.

📸 Joe Yates, Instagram: josephyates_

Why sweating the small stuff is super-important!

Your team, your business, is a system, and sits within a wider system of systems.  A complex arrangement of actors that has been interacting towards the present moment.

In complexity theory, there is a concept called Self Organised Criticality that describes how large, dramatic, and unpredictable events can occur through the collective impact of small, interdependent changes.

Nothing new really. You have heard the phrase, “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. Or “the tipping point”. And how avalanches can be triggered by a final snowflake. 

THE LEADERSHIP TEAM FELL APART…

One of our client teams on a short walk and talk. A colleague tripped and grazed a knee. On the face of it, a minor incident.

Months of resentment has been building up to this moment. One half of the team sought to “rescue” their colleague. The other half encouraged the colleague to “just get on with it.” 

Voices were raised. Accusations were made. Months of “stuff” came spilling out.

It was pretty unpleasant!

And yet this presented an opportunity for the team’s new leader with our support to do the work the team and previous team leader had been avoiding. 

All those previous moments of friction had made the team increasingly unstable. Moments unnoticed by some colleagues. Wrapped in resentment by others. Feelings that were dismissed.  Swept under the carpet. “Small stuff.”

SO WHAT?

Your team needs to look after itself. It needs care and maintenance. It needs the small stuff attending to. Not necessarily in a big song and dance way. But there needs to be recognition and some way of dealing with emerging issues early.  It is everyone’s job!

NOW WHAT?

We can help you live the behaviours and develop the ways of working needed to keep you all operating at your collective best.

Let’s get to work on the small stuff before it becomes an avoidable drama.

Get in touch now.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY…

Hmmm…

Is it time to widen attention onto “workplace charters”…

…Agreements that highlight that stuff needs to get done, that there is mutual accountability for delivering on promises made to one another in service of customers and other stakeholders.

…That the workplace is not some sort of privileged, indulgent sanctuary from tough conversations and growth?

For sure, creating an environment where everyone feels welcome, is safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge (after Timothy R Clark) is super-important.

But let’s not lose sight of the deal which involves us being accountable to our team, organisations, and partnerships for delivering what clients are paying for.

And the opportunity for personal and collective growth that is possible.

Thoughts?

Read our case study here.

Chief executives…

9 THINGS TO DO. NOW.

To be clear on definitions, the SMG is not the same as a Senior Leadership (SLT) or Executive Team (ET).

The SLT or ET, typically comprised of 4 – 8 senior execs, create the conditions for the long-term success of the business by setting direction, promoting the desired culture, architecting the development of new capabilities, and providing collective oversight of operations. They may do so in discussion with and/or at the behest of the board, if one has been established.

At one stage of your company’s growth, you probably knew everyone…

For sure you were setting direction etc.. but you also had your sleeves rolled up and were right in amongst the detail of operations, product development, and client conversations. You were fire-fighting. And rather enjoying it!

You successfully scaled and established a leadership team around you…

The distance between you and your staff was still pretty short, and you hadn’t quite managed to escape the gravitational pull of operations and putting fires out.

THE COMPANY IS NOW A GOOD BIT BIGGER…

You are going to have to let go and trust others to manage the business, to make things happen. Your key responsibility, and that of your senior execs, is strategic leadership and capability building.

Now is the time to bring your senior managers together into a HIGH VALUE forum. Your ET’s first reports and other key people perhaps.

They will provide a sense-making, interpretation, and alignment bridge between the Exec Team and the staff delivering value to your clients.

They will make sure that the business is delivered. They will trouble-shoot and collaborate across the business to make this so.

They will help inform strategy with the experiences and intelligence gathered from front line staff and clients.  And once the strategy is updated and business plans made, they’ll run with the explicit tasks as well as the work that is implicit in these.

And they’ll get to learn how the ET and Board works. For some this will build their confidence and ignite their passion for a future executive leadership role themselves. You will be growing fabulous talent.

And they’ll take the operational and fire-fighting pressure off you and the ET, and give you the space to be the strategic and capability building chief executive your Board expects and your company deserves.

SO WHAT?

#1.   Let go. You cannot manage operations on your own, or even through an ET anymore.

#2.   If you haven’t formed an SMG, give it some thought. Now.

#3.   Establish Terms of Reference or a SMG Charter to provide clarity of purpose, alignment, and value. Make this the goal of the first gathering.

#4.   Consider making this a forum enabled and supported by your Chief Operating Officer. Or one of your senior managers on rotation.

#5.   Bring them into the ET’s thinking and planning.

#6.   Meet regularly, maybe monthly; and maybe quarterly or biannually with the ET. Maybe offsite. In fact, ideally offsite for the big, performance improvement and innovation conversations.

#7.   Consider the cross-cutting projects they could put their heads, hearts, and souls around. Consider whether they could become something of an innovation hub.

#8.   Don’t communicate AT them. Don’t debate your well prepared positions. Engage in dialogue. Create new understanding and winning ways together.

#9.   The SMG is not a leadership barrier between you and your staff. Keep getting out and about, talking and listening, and inspiring and being inspired by everyone.

NOW WHAT?

You might not need help to get the ball rolling but we can certainly help facilitate and coach the conversations you are all going to need.

We can help you inquire into really significant questions and issues; help you really listen to one another; help you discover new insights; help you shape and deliver the value to your clients and wider stakeholders.

Get in touch now to find out more.

I was recently asked about how to improve accountability across a business.

Let’s look at this through a series of questions about the BUSINESS environment, you as the LEADER, and the INDIVIDUAL charged with delivering a task.

Notice in what follows how much rests on there being an enabling environment and effective leadership. If you are a chief executive or senior leader, much of this falls on you!

It is rarely a simple case of blaming a single individual for stuff that doesn’t get done!

THE BUSINESS

First, consider whether the accountability challenge you are experiencing is an isolated individual case or something more systemic and widespread.

Do the conditions exist to enable safe communications up and down and across the team and wider business? Is the business a psychological safe place to work, where everyone feels included, safe to learn, and safe to contribute and challenge?

How do you know this?

Consider some form of confidential team survey, ideally by a trusted third party, to explore this.  This can usefully be widened to look at team effectiveness as a whole. Read our thoughts on this here.

Next, run one or more workshops to identify the development actions needed, and then nail these in priority order. Keep these under review. Create a development roadmap. We can help here too. Check out our case studies.

THE LEADER

What is the nature of the relationships between leaders and team members? Is it one of surveillance or coaching? The former can switch people off; the latter can promote  discretionary effort and capability growth.

How often do leaders engage and review priorities and resourcing with colleagues? This is a key leadership function.

Or do leaders just pile on more and more tasks? And when less and less is achieved, do leaders get more and more frustrated and blame others?

A surveillance culture will lose you goodwill, people, and money. A coaching culture will generate goodwill, growth, and added value.

How has the task been set up?  Has it been clearly scoped in terms of outputs, inputs, resources, and processes? Are reporting requirements clear and understood?

Is it a routine, transactional task where best practice can be deployed with a high degree of confidence in satisfactory completion? Or is it more of a discovery exercise in a complex setting requiring cycles of develop, test, fail, repeat?

Are delivery expectations appropriate to these different types of task?

Have constraints and freedoms of action been clearly identified?

What are the linkages and dependencies with other work being done by others? Are they playing their part in delivering collective success?

Has there been a stakeholder review of risks, ownership, and active management?

THE INDIVIDUAL

Has the task owner reached out to stakeholders to establish effective working relationships?

Has the task owner identified risks and taken steps to mitigate them in accordance with the business’ risk management process? Is it clear what should be escalated, and do stakeholder relationships enable or hinder this?

Does the task owner have the capability and capacity to do what has been asked of them?

If not, what will you as the leader do? (Yes, here we are back at the role of the Leader!). Provide coaching and training? Reprioritise other tasks? Task  someone else who has the capability and capacity?

Finally, are there clearly understood consequences that comply with employment law and best practice for repeated underperformance?

Featured image courtesy of GranzCreative via Canva

What are they?

A questionnaire-based assessment that provides team members and stakeholders with a confidential means of sharing their lived experience of the team and improvement suggestions..

It turns conjecture into evidence-based confidence around the foundations on which to invest in relevant development activities.

Who are they for?

Great for team leaders who want to lift collective team effectiveness, and who know that others’ views are vital if the team is to develop and deliver the success the business deserves.

Why do them?

Leaders can often overestimate the effectiveness of their teams (overconfidence bias) and don’t appreciate the need for collective development. Yet teamwork is often cited as a top organisational value.

A team effectiveness assessment gives the team’s stakeholders (team members, delivery partners, customers, governance bodies etc.) a safe and confidential voice, and creates an evidence-base for investing in developmental activities that is better than the biased judgement of the team leader.

What sort of things should be included?

🔹 They should be confidential, practical, situated in your organisation’s context, reflect the purpose of the exercise, and be based on the attributes associated with high functioning teams. There are plenty of models of high PERFORMING teams out there so be choosy, especially as this may be an unnecessary and costly ambition! In 2008, there were more than 130 different models of team effectiveness available (Salas et al, 2008)!

🔸 Depending on team size, context, and requirement, the questionnaire could be a set of bespoke questions in Word that seek narrative-based responses (an often underrated and powerful inquiry-based approach) or an automated, online, scored tool that allows benchmarking and comparison of teams across a large organisation.

🔹 Interviews as required.

🔸 Collation, review, and sharing of responses on a non-attributed basis.

🔹 Discussion of themes and development options with the team leader.

What next?

 A team effectiveness assessment offers a snap shot of a very messy, unfolding space!

Don’t sit on it.

Get moving with the development activities it suggests! See our case studies for examples.

Guide price

A Team Effectiveness Assessment starts from £ 1,250 + VAT for a team of 8.

Want to know more?

Get in touch with Dave Stewart, dave@freshairleadership.com, +44 7776 153428.

Ever find yourself wading into or being sucked into a drama? 

Tension can be helpful in terms of creativity and pushing for results, but some dramas can become dysfunctional and unhealthy.

Maybe you feel you have no choice around being drawn in?

You do! Read on…

Are you one of these “stars” in the Drama Triangle, a model proposed by psychologist Stephen Karpman in 1968?

• PERSECUTORS blame Victims and criticise Rescuers. They find fault but don’t offer solutions. They control with order and rigidity. And maybe bully. “It’s your fault!”
• VICTIMS feel picked on and trapped. They are unwilling to take responsibility for their situation. They blame Persecutors and want Rescuers to solve their problems. Learned helplessness. “Woe is me!”
• RESCUERS feel guilty standing by. They can misread situations and launch well-meaning “rescues” that are not needed nor welcomed. And some may be projecting their own needs to be valued, rather than actually help!

So what?

Reflect on which role you are playing. How is it serving you?

Moving out of role may not be easy.

Why? It might just be your comfort zone! 

3 moves you can try…

#1.   SUPPORT.  Seek support from a colleague outside the drama, or a coach, or contact your employee assistance scheme.

#2.   NON VIOLENT COMMS.  If you feel able to, employ Non Violent Comms to engage the other players in the drama e.g.

• Observation:  “This is what I observed took place…”
• Feelings:        “This is how the situation made me feel…”
• Needs:            “I need…” (a general need e.g. feedback, respect etc..)
• Requests:       “Specifically my request is…”

#3.   A BIG REFRAME. Consider exploring how the players could move to the positions in the Womeldorff Empowerment Triangle (2016).

• Victims move to CREATORS and focus on possibilities and outcomes rather than problems.
• Rescuers move to COACHES and support Creators in action planning, and support Challengers in testing the feasibility of options.
• Persecutors move to CHALLENGERS and test assumptions and hold Creators to account for making progress.

A note of caution…

Models and frameworks are not real. Some people find some of them useful some of the time in some contexts. And in situations where there is some level of inter-personal drama you will naturally be cautious. That said, the three moves offered above are certainly worth exploring with colleagues and using when needed.

Of course, the best option – where possible – is simply to pause, think, and step away from the drama altogether!

Photo credit: Annie Spratt via Unsplash

Let’s be honest, we all behave badly on occasions.

Go on, fess up!

This post isn’t about the events in your life which have shaped the way you are. The inside as it were.

Rather this is about how the external environment can present stressors which trigger how you feel (e.g. fear, anger, hurt, distrust etc..) and how you act. Sometimes unthinkingly so.

YOUR TEAM…

Think now about your team as a working environment.

It is easy to think of this as being “simply” made up of a physical or virtual space and a set of relationships.

And this is why so many team development interventions don’t deliver on their promise.

They try to “fix” behaviours by simply writing down nirvana and hoping people will play nicely.

THERE IS SO MUCH MORE TO PUT IN PLACE…

And to continuously nurture.

Here are 11 questions against which you and colleagues can self-assess your team. Either red, amber, green. Or a scale of 1 – 4 (with no easy middle number!).

Team Self-Assessment Here

OFFER…

Valid until Friday 16th August 2024.

If you are interested, we will be delighted to offer you a more in-depth questionnaire-based team health-check at no charge (assuming team size less than 10).

We will review responses and present you with a high level summary and offer some suggestions around the areas of greatest risk of dysfunction.

SO…

If you have been wondering why your best efforts to create a highly effective team aren’t hitting the mark, why there are some stubborn behaviours still in play, why all the decisions end up on your desk increasing your frustration and stress, then maybe a team health-check could be a good place to start.

Read here for some case studies covering the work we have done for various sizes of teams across multiple sectors and industries.

Offer valid until Friday 16th August 2024.