When I started making leadership videos, I did not have a detailed business plan, a carefully mapped out content strategy or any particular expectation that the project would become something significant. I was approaching another period of career transition, looking for a new position and preparing to leave my current role, and I needed something constructive to occupy my attention. I had tried developing a consultancy project around ten years earlier during another period between roles, so perhaps there was something familiar about turning towards a new project when other parts of my professional life were uncertain.
There were practical motivations as well. After nearly thirty years in education and around eighteen years in middle and senior leadership, I felt that I had accumulated experiences, observations and ideas that might be worth sharing. Building a visible body of leadership work might strengthen my professional profile and perhaps enhance my CV, and I see no reason to pretend that possibility was irrelevant. At the same time, I needed a productive use of my spare time and something that would provide a degree of sanity while I navigated the uncertainty of leaving one position and trying to find another.
The Quiet Leader HQ began somewhere in the middle of those motivations. It was not intended to prove that I had leadership figured out, nor was it created because I believed the world needed another person telling everyone else how to lead. I simply thought I had something to offer and that producing short reflections on leadership, communication and workplace culture might be worth trying.
One hundred videos later, the project has taught me something I did not entirely expect. Sharing ideas about leadership has required me to examine my own thinking far more carefully than simply having those ideas ever did, and the process of creating something for other people has become a form of professional reflection for me as well.
Making Ideas Clearer
I have never been particularly concerned that I will run out of things to discuss. Leadership provides an almost endless supply of material because organisations are made up of people, and people continue to surprise, frustrate, encourage and challenge each other in ways that rarely fit neatly into leadership models. I bounce ideas off other people, read widely and use different sources to prompt my thinking, but the final test is whether I can take an idea and say something about it that I genuinely believe is worth sharing.
Once I commit seriously to a project, I tend to see it through, and I always believed I could sustain the videos if I decided the project was worthwhile. What I did not anticipate was how useful the process of creating them would become for organising my own thinking.
The project has not caused me to abandon previous beliefs about leadership or suddenly discover that everything I thought before was wrong. If anything, it has brought greater clarity to ideas that developed gradually across years of experience. Leadership involves accumulating thousands of conversations, decisions, mistakes, successes and observations, but experience does not automatically organise itself into a coherent philosophy. It is possible to know instinctively what you believe without having taken the time to explain why you believe it.
Creating videos requires that explanation because a subject has to be isolated from the noise around it, examined and reduced to its essential argument. I have to decide what I actually think, whether the idea is sufficiently useful to share, and how it connects with other aspects of leadership. That process has helped me recognise patterns in my own thinking that were previously less explicit.
The work I have done around autonomy, belonging and competence is one example. Considering each of those needs, and then thinking deliberately about how they affect students, parents and staff, has helped me connect ideas that previously existed more independently in my mind. The underlying beliefs were already there, but creating content required me to organise them, test the connections between them and communicate them with greater precision.
In that sense, making leadership videos has become a form of professional reflection. I began the project believing I would spend most of my time sharing what I had learned, but the process has repeatedly required me to clarify what I think I have learned in the first place.
Paying More Attention
The project has also made me more observant. I would not claim that producing videos has fundamentally changed the way I lead or transformed how I behave in organisations, because that would give the project far too much credit and ignore the years of experience that came before it. However, I do pay more attention to the ordinary moments from which leadership lessons emerge.
An email arrives and I notice not only what it says but how it makes people feel. A meeting becomes difficult and I think about why the conversation changed direction. Someone handles a situation particularly well and I consider what made their approach effective. A small frustration, disagreement or misunderstanding becomes something worth examining rather than simply another moment in a busy working day. Part of that attention comes from knowing that these situations might become material for future videos, but the process has also reminded me that leadership is usually found in ordinary behaviour rather than dramatic moments.
The most recognisable ideas are often not the grand strategic decisions that occupy leadership books and conference presentations. They are the experiences that people encounter repeatedly: being left waiting for an answer, receiving an email that feels colder than the sender intended, watching recognition go to the most visible person rather than the person who did the work, or experiencing a change that nobody has properly explained.
What has surprised me most is how widely those experiences are shared. The project has only been running for around six or seven weeks, yet people from different parts of the world have watched, followed, liked and responded to the videos. They work in countries I have never worked in, organisations I know nothing about and roles very different from my own, yet many of the same themes continue to resonate.
Trust, clarity, communication, change, recognition and belonging are not particularly original subjects, and perhaps that is precisely the point. They continue to matter because people repeatedly experience organisations where these things are handled well, handled badly or simply not discussed at all.
Ironically, making videos through an artificial face has made me think more carefully about very human behaviour. Martin Mercer may be fictional, but the experiences behind the ideas are not. They come from years of working with people, from mistakes I have made, situations I have observed, conversations with colleagues and, increasingly, from the responses of people who recognise something of their own experience in what they watch.
Learning How To Build Something
The first hundred videos have also taught me a great deal that has little to do directly with leadership. When I started, I was not an experienced video creator, and I have learned how to produce the videos by producing them. Inevitably, that has meant making organisational mistakes, changing processes, improving the way I work and occasionally discovering problems far later than I would have liked.
At one point, I noticed a branding error that had appeared across roughly thirty videos. There was no sophisticated leadership lesson hidden in the experience. It was simply an irritating mistake that meant going back, correcting previous work and improving the system so that the same problem was less likely to happen again. There have been other changes as well, as I have worked out ways to improve the videos, organise the growing collection of content more effectively and make better use of the time I invest in the project.
Over the summer, I have been able to give the work more attention, including developing the website, building the Journal and thinking more carefully about how the different parts of The Quiet Leader HQ fit together. The process has been a useful reminder that projects rarely begin in their finished form. It is easy to look at something established and assume that the people behind it knew exactly what they were doing from the beginning, whereas my experience has been considerably less tidy. I started, made things, noticed problems, changed them, learned new skills and gradually developed a clearer idea of what the project could become.
That has made the work more enjoyable rather than less. There is satisfaction in improving something that did not exist a few weeks earlier and knowing that there are still hundreds of ideas that could be explored. If the project grows substantially, I can imagine investing far more time in it, but growth is not the only reason to continue because the process of building the project, learning new skills and developing my own thinking has already made the time worthwhile.
If One Person Finds It Useful
There is always a danger that creating leadership content becomes an exercise in building an audience rather than helping one. Views, followers and engagement are visible, measurable and difficult to ignore, particularly when platforms constantly encourage creators to pay attention to them. I would be dishonest if I claimed that I did not want the project to grow. If The Quiet Leader HQ develops into something substantial and creates professional opportunities, income or the possibility of concentrating on it more seriously, I would welcome that.
However, those outcomes are not the only measure of whether the project has been worth doing. After eighteen years in middle and senior leadership, I have had enough opportunities to practise leadership, get things wrong, try again, learn from other people and gradually develop ideas that might help someone facing a situation they have not encountered before. If one piece of advice, one observation or one question helps someone approach that situation more thoughtfully, then creating and sharing it has achieved something useful.
I may never know when that happens because most people who watch a video will never comment, send a message or explain whether an idea affected what they did next. That is the nature of publishing something publicly: you send an idea into the world and lose control over where it travels, who encounters it and whether it matters. Occasionally, however, you see a glimpse of that journey, and one of the most encouraging examples so far has come from a primary school in Africa that began following the project.
Leadership is an important focus for the school and, from what I can see, the videos appear to be supporting some of the work they are doing. I have no formal connection with the school, have never worked there and did not know when I began this project that anything I created would reach them. I now look forward to watching their progress over time, and that feels more meaningful than simply adding another follower to a platform total. Something created during a difficult period of professional transition has travelled to an organisation I have never visited and may be contributing, even in a small way, to conversations about leadership taking place there.
When I started The Quiet Leader HQ, I needed something productive for myself. I needed a project, a constructive use of time and somewhere to put some of the experience I had accumulated over nearly thirty years. I hoped it might strengthen my professional profile, and I thought there was a possibility that other people might find the ideas interesting.
One hundred videos later, I still do not know where the project will lead, and I am comfortable with that. I have learned new skills, corrected mistakes, organised my thinking more clearly and become more attentive to the ordinary workplace experiences that people across different countries and organisations seem to recognise. Perhaps the biggest lesson has been that leadership reflection does not need to produce perfect answers to be useful. Sometimes its value comes from noticing an experience, putting language around it and allowing someone else to recognise something they have experienced themselves.
I also do not want the next hundred videos to come only from my own experiences. If there is a leadership situation, workplace frustration, difficult question or small organisational behaviour that you think deserves more attention, I would be interested to hear it. Some of the most useful leadership conversations begin when someone puts words around an experience that others recognise but rarely discuss, and ideas or experiences shared with The Quiet Leader HQ may help shape future videos and Journal entries. Where they do, identifying details will be removed unless explicit permission has been given to include them.
If the next nine hundred videos continue to help me think more carefully, encourage useful conversations and occasionally provide an idea that helps someone facing a situation they have not encountered before, they will be worth making.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. 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.
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.