Leadership has never been short of advice. Every few years, a new book, framework or workplace trend promises to transform organisations. Open plan offices encourage collaboration. Meetings improve communication. Promotion motivates people. Leaders should always be available. Emails should never be sent outside working hours. The advice is often well intentioned and, in many cases, supported by good evidence. Yet one lesson has stayed with me throughout my career: very few leadership ideas are universally true.
This article brings together six reflections from my Quietly Controversial video series (Videos 0035–0040). The title was chosen carefully. The intention was never to be controversial for the sake of it, nor to persuade anyone that there is only one correct way to lead. Instead, these reflections explore ideas that occasionally challenge accepted leadership wisdom and invite us to pause before assuming that popular opinion is always the best guide. Leadership deserves curiosity far more than certainty.
Perhaps that explains why I have become increasingly comfortable questioning accepted wisdom. Not because I believe I have better answers than everyone else, but because leadership is rarely improved by accepting fashionable ideas without first asking whether they genuinely fit the people, culture and organisation in front of us. Experience has taught me that successful leadership is usually less about finding the latest solution and more about exercising thoughtful judgement.
One conversation has stayed with me for some time because it perfectly illustrated this point. It centred on whether colleagues should send emails outside working hours. Opinions were almost perfectly divided. Some believed it was completely inappropriate. Others saw no issue whatsoever. What interested me most, however, was how quickly the discussion moved towards creating a policy. To me, that felt like addressing the symptom rather than the cause. If people genuinely feel anxious about receiving emails during the evening, the problem is not necessarily the time the message was sent. The real question is whether the organisation has unintentionally created an expectation that every message demands an immediate response. Changing the culture would achieve far more than simply changing the rule.
That experience reminded me how often organisations reach for policies before fully understanding the behaviour they are trying to influence. Leadership can easily become a process of collecting rules, procedures and initiatives, each introduced with good intentions but without always asking how they fit together. Individually, many of those ideas have merit. Collectively, however, they do not automatically create a healthy organisation.
The same principle extends well beyond email. Throughout my career I have found myself questioning a number of assumptions that have gradually become accepted as leadership truths. Not every excellent employee wants promotion. Some derive enormous satisfaction from becoming exceptional practitioners rather than managers. Open plan offices undoubtedly encourage collaboration, but they can also quietly undermine concentration and thoughtful work. Meetings are valuable when they create clarity and progress, yet too many exist simply because they always have. Being approachable is essential, but being endlessly available often creates dependency rather than empowerment. Even confidence deserves careful examination because the loudest contribution in a meeting is not always the wisest.
None of those opinions are intended to be universally correct. In different organisations, the opposite may prove true. That is precisely the point. Leadership is contextual. The best leaders I have worked alongside never applied ideas simply because they had become fashionable. They remained curious enough to ask whether those ideas genuinely served the people they were leading, rather than simply following what everyone else appeared to be doing.
I have also noticed that organisations can become surprisingly attracted to visible initiatives. New systems, new structures, new office layouts and new ways of working often create the impression of progress because they are easy to see. Real organisational improvement is usually much quieter than that. It happens when those individual pieces begin working together to create a coherent culture. Leadership is rather like conducting an orchestra. Every instrument may be outstanding on its own, but success depends entirely on how well they work together. Introducing another initiative without considering its wider impact rarely strengthens an organisation. Sometimes it simply adds another layer of complexity.
If I am honest, I have probably changed as much as the organisations I have worked in. Earlier in my career I often felt a greater need to defend my opinions. Experience has gradually taught me that leadership conversations are rarely about winning arguments. They are about improving understanding. Some of the most valuable professional discussions I have experienced have been with colleagues who challenged my thinking respectfully. None of us was trying to win. We were simply trying to understand the problem more clearly. Looking back, I suspect that has become one of the greatest shifts in my own leadership. I no longer see disagreement as something to overcome. More often, I see it as an opportunity to think more carefully.
Perhaps that is the real purpose of the Quietly Controversial series. Not to convince people that conventional wisdom is wrong, but to remind us that leadership is far too complex to be reduced to slogans or absolute rules. The older I become, the less interested I am in proving that my opinion is correct and the more interested I become in asking whether we are asking the right questions in the first place.
If someone finishes this article disagreeing with one or more of these reflections, that is perfectly acceptable. In many ways, I would consider that a success if it encouraged them to reflect more deeply on their own leadership. My hope has never been to create agreement. It has always been to encourage thoughtful reflection. Leadership is not strengthened by collecting more opinions. It is strengthened by developing better judgement.
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.