16/09/2026
Four of our managers will spend two days in leadership development later this month.
Technical capability has always been at the heart of what we do - CPD, qualifications and staying sharp on the details matter enormously in our profession. But there's another side to the job. Steadying a team through a heavy month. Having the conversation that's been sitting in the too-hard basket since June. Making a new graduate feel like they belong here.
Those are leadership skills, and like anything else worth doing well, they're worth learning properly.
We think leaders have an outsized influence on an organisation - on the culture people experience day to day, on how our team members grow, and ultimately on how well we do our work. That's a lot to carry, and we'd rather support our managers in it than leave them to work it out on their own.
So we invest in both sides. The technical and the human.
For transparency: the program is Leadership Essentials, delivered by our sister practice, Melius Solutions. It felt right to start with our own team.
Call her Alex.
She's not one person. She's the version of about thirty people I've worked with over the years, and if you've ever been promoted for being good at the job, you already know how the story starts.
Alex was the best in the team at the actual work. So she got the team.
Six weeks in, nobody has told her whether she's any good at it.
She isn't struggling in a way anyone would notice. The work is going out. She's across the roster. She turns up early, stays late, and the reports get done.
But there's a conversation she hasn't had. One person's work has slipped, everyone can see it, and Alex has rehearsed the conversation in the car three times without ever having it. She doesn't know how to open it without it going badly. So she waits.
And every week she waits, the conversation gets more expensive - and a little of her authority leaks away, because the rest of the team can see she isn't dealing with it either.
That's the part that surprises people. It's rarely a motivation problem. It's rarely that the leader doesn't care. It's that nobody has ever told them what the first thirty seconds of that conversation should sound like, and nobody has told them what good looks like in the role. They're marking their own work with no answer sheet.
You can be a decent person, work hard, care about your team, and still have no idea whether you're doing this well.
There's a second version of this that gets written about even less. People who have been leading for four or five years and have never had a day of formal development. They've built something that works, out of instinct and hard experience. They're not after a personality transplant. They want to find out which of their instincts are sound, and to have a name and a method for the things they've been doing on feel.
Those two people have more in common than either would guess, and they usually end up in the same room.
The next one I'm running is 23–24 September, in Townsville. Two days, called Leadership Essentials.
Details in the comments.
