One of the advantages of getting older is that you eventually accumulate enough mistakes to recognise some of them before you make them again, although leadership has a habit of presenting familiar lessons in slightly different circumstances just when you have convinced yourself that you finally understand them. I have moved into significant leadership roles on three occasions, and each experience taught me something different about joining an established organisation.
The first time, I tried to change too much before I had properly understood the place. I had spent a long time in one organisation and, without fully realising it, had begun to believe that the way things were done there was simply the way good organisations worked. I brought that experience with me and tried to apply too much of it elsewhere. The second time was different because I joined partway through an organisational year. People told me they were ready for change, and I believed them, but I discovered that wanting things to be better and being ready for the disruption involved in making them better are not always the same thing. The third time was different again. I already knew the organisation and moved internally into a more senior position, following a highly credible leader. I was determined not to arrive with a collection of solutions from somewhere else and wanted instead to understand what was already working and build from there. Yet that approach created criticism of its own, because some people believed I should have introduced more ideas from outside and challenged existing practice more aggressively.
Three experiences, three different contexts and three different lessons. If there is a fourth time, I hope I will be better because of all three.
Clarity Comes After Understanding
A follower of The Quiet Leader HQ recently shared a phrase about agile leadership that stayed with me: “Clear vision, free method.” I like it because it captures one of the most difficult balances in leadership. People need to understand where they are going, why it matters and what success looks like, but they also need enough freedom to use their own experience, judgement and creativity to decide how they will get there.
Some leaders provide freedom without enough clarity. People are encouraged to take initiative and make decisions, but nobody is entirely certain what the priorities are or how success will be judged. Other leaders provide clarity by controlling almost everything. The destination may be clear, but so is every step along the route, and eventually people learn that following instructions is safer than thinking for themselves. Neither approach creates genuinely capable teams, because independence without direction creates confusion, while direction without independence creates dependence.
The difficulty is that leaders cannot provide meaningful clarity about an organisation they have not taken enough time to understand. If I moved into another major leadership role tomorrow, one of the biggest changes I would make would be how I spent my first few months. I would spend considerably more time where the actual work happens. In my own context, that would mean classrooms, but elsewhere it might mean offices, warehouses, hospitals, shops, customer service desks or production floors. The principle is the same: get out of the office, meet people, watch, listen and ask questions. Understand what frustrates people, what they value, what they are proud of and what they stopped complaining about years ago because they no longer believe anything will change.
The administrative work still needs to be done, and perhaps some of it has to happen later in the day. However, particularly at the beginning of a leadership role, there is a danger that the demands of the office create distance from the organisation you are supposed to be leading. Clarity should not begin with telling people where to go. It should begin with understanding where they are.
You Inherit More Than an Organisation
Every leader inherits an emotional climate. I have experienced this in very different ways: joining an organisation where relationships within the previous leadership had visibly deteriorated, joining another where people said they wanted change but had become more cautious about what change would actually involve, and following a highly respected leader whose credibility inevitably shaped expectations about what came next. None of those environments was neutral.
Every team has a history made up of previous decisions, conflicts, successes, disappointments, promises that were kept and promises that were forgotten. Leaders arrive on their first day, but the organisation has been living its story for years. Earlier in my career, I sometimes interpreted people’s reactions too personally. If somebody challenged a decision, I could become defensive. If people appeared resistant, I wondered whether I had failed to convince them. If trust did not develop quickly, I looked too closely at what I was doing wrong.
Experience has taught me that people are not always reacting to the leader standing in front of them. A team that has experienced repeated change may be cautious about another initiative. People who have repeatedly been asked for their opinions and then ignored may be sceptical when another leader promises to listen. An organisation that has experienced conflict may take longer to trust, while a team that has worked with an exceptional leader may naturally compare the person who follows with the person who came before.
Understanding this matters because it changes the questions leaders ask. Instead of wondering why people are resisting them, they begin asking what has happened in the organisation that makes the response understandable. That shift from judgement to curiosity does not solve every problem, but it provides a far better place from which to lead.
Understanding the Past Without Blaming It
There is an important danger in all of this. Once leaders begin to understand the history of an organisation, it becomes remarkably easy to use that history as an explanation for everything that is wrong. The previous leadership did not deal with this. The old structure created that problem. People were allowed to behave this way before I arrived. The organisation has always done things badly. Some of those statements may even be true, but they become increasingly irrelevant once you are the person responsible for what happens next.
One of the strongest lessons I have learned is that leaders should resist the temptation to blame the people who came before them. Understand the history, certainly. Learn from it and recognise the effect it has had on the people you now lead. However, previous leadership cannot become a permanent excuse for failing to move forwards.
This becomes particularly important when dealing with customers, clients, parents or other stakeholders. They may bring you a problem that began long before you arrived, and you may have had absolutely nothing to do with the decision that created it. However, you are there now. Telling someone that a problem is not your responsibility because it happened before your arrival may be factually accurate, but it is of very little use to the person standing in front of you.
Leadership means accepting responsibility for situations you did not create. You do not have to accept blame for everything that happened in the past, but once you hold responsibility, you do have to decide what happens next.
The People Who Are Easiest to Miss
Understanding an organisation also requires learning to notice people who do not naturally attract attention. I am an outgoing person, and perhaps because of that, I have become increasingly conscious of how easily organisations can confuse confidence with competence. Confident people are visible. They speak, volunteer, make their ambitions known and are often comfortable ensuring that other people know what they have contributed. None of those things is inherently negative, and confidence itself is valuable, but confidence and competence are not the same thing.
Some of the most valuable people in an organisation are remarkably easy to overlook. They solve problems before those problems reach senior leaders, support colleagues without needing recognition, maintain standards when nobody is watching and consistently deliver without feeling the need to announce that they have done so. Because they rarely attract attention, their contribution can gradually become invisible.
The longer I have worked in leadership, the more interested I have become in these people. Who do colleagues quietly go to when they need help? Who understands how things really work? Who notices problems before everyone else? Who can be relied upon when something difficult needs doing? Who would leave a gap far larger than their position in the organisational chart might suggest? Leadership requires learning to see beyond visibility because sometimes the people creating the greatest value are the people making the least noise about it.
Helping Is Not the Same as Leading
One leadership trap I have been fortunate enough to be conscious of is the danger of creating dependence. My natural approach to leadership has always been strongly influenced by coaching, and I do not believe the leader should become the answer to every problem. One of the responsibilities of leadership is to help people develop the confidence and judgement to solve more problems without you.
That is not always the fastest approach. Sometimes giving someone the answer would take thirty seconds, while asking questions, allowing them to think and giving them space to reach their own conclusion takes considerably longer. However, leadership sometimes involves accepting slower progress today if it creates greater independence tomorrow.
Teams rarely become dependent overnight. Dependence develops through repeated interactions in which questions are answered, problems are solved and uncomfortable decisions are taken upwards. Eventually, people learn that passing responsibility to the leader is easier and safer than exercising judgement themselves. The leader then becomes frustrated because nobody takes initiative, without recognising that people may simply have adapted to the environment around them.
If every decision is questioned, people become cautious. If mistakes are punished harshly, people become hesitant. If leaders repeatedly take back control when situations become difficult, people learn that ownership is temporary. When capable people begin asking permission to do things they already know how to do, the better question may not be why they lack confidence, but what has happened in the organisation that taught them to stop using their judgement.
Time Has Its Benefits
I am calmer under pressure than I used to be, not because difficult situations have become easier, but because time gives you the opportunity to discover that reacting quickly and reacting well are not the same thing. The younger version of me was considerably more defensive and more likely to interpret challenge as personal criticism. When that happens, clear thinking becomes difficult because part of your attention is focused on protecting yourself. You listen for accusations rather than information, prepare your response instead of understanding the problem and become more interested in proving that you were right than discovering what might need to change.
Experience has helped me recognise that most difficult situations are not actually about me. Even when somebody is angry, critical or challenging, there is usually something underneath the behaviour worth understanding. Defensiveness narrows judgement in much the same way that panic does, while calmness creates enough space to ask questions, gather information and separate what is known from what has been assumed.
Calm leadership does not mean avoiding difficult decisions or pretending that problems are less serious than they are. It means refusing to allow the emotional intensity of a situation to determine the quality of the response. Time does have its benefits, and one of them is eventually learning that you do not have to win every conversation. You just need to understand enough to make the next decision well.
Success Can Teach the Wrong Lessons
One of my earliest leadership mistakes came from spending a long time in one organisation. I learned a great deal there, saw practices that worked and developed beliefs about leadership that were repeatedly reinforced by experience. The problem was that I began to assume the way things were done there was the way things should be done everywhere.
When I moved elsewhere, I tried to transfer too much. It took time to understand that successful practice is shaped by context because people, cultures, histories, expectations and challenges are different. Since then, I have deliberately tried to learn from a wider range of organisations, but even that creates another leadership tension.
In a later role, I tried much harder to work with what already existed. I wanted to understand the organisation, recognise its strengths and build upon them rather than immediately importing solutions from elsewhere. Some people believed that was the wrong approach too. They felt existing practice should have been challenged more strongly and that better ideas from outside should have been introduced.
Perhaps that is the real difficulty. Importing everything is not leadership, but preserving everything is not leadership either. The judgement lies in deciding what should be protected, what should be improved and what should be replaced. Previous success should give leaders experience, but it should not give them certainty.
Culture Is Often Hidden in Small Frustrations
When leaders join organisations, they are naturally drawn towards the big things: strategy, structure, performance, finance, staffing and vision. These things matter, but if I entered another organisation tomorrow, I would pay much more attention than I once did to the small frustrations.
The meeting that always starts late, the process everyone complains about, the decision that has been postponed repeatedly, the email nobody expects to receive an answer to, the piece of equipment that has been broken for months and the problem people have stopped reporting because they have concluded nothing will happen may appear insignificant individually. Collectively, they tell you a great deal about culture.
People form their understanding of an organisation through repeated experiences. They notice whether their time is respected, whether problems are addressed, whether commitments mean anything and whether speaking up changes something. The values written on the wall tell you what an organisation wants to believe about itself, while the frustrations people have learned to tolerate tell you what the organisation actually experiences.
Leaders should pay attention to both.
If There Is a Fourth Time
Three significant leadership transitions have taught me three different lessons. The first taught me not to arrive with answers before I understood the organisation. The second taught me that people saying they want change does not necessarily mean they are ready for what change requires. The third taught me that working with what already exists can be criticised just as easily as changing too much.
If there is a fourth time, I hope I will arrive differently. I will spend more time where the real work happens, listen longer and pay attention to the history behind people’s reactions without allowing that history to become an excuse. I will look for the quiet people whose contribution is easy to miss, continue trying to develop independence rather than becoming the answer to every problem, remember that previous success is evidence rather than certainty, and pay attention to the small frustrations that reveal what an organisation really feels like to the people experiencing it every day.
Perhaps the most important lesson, however, is the simplest. Do not blame the previous leadership.
Understand what you inherited, learn how it happened and recognise the effect it has had. Then get on with leading, because whatever happened before you arrived, you are there now. You may not have created the situation, but you have accepted responsibility for what happens next.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.