Note: this post is inspired by a wonderful conversation I had recently with behavioural scientist Renee Jaine about the power of coaching in the context of organisational change. She’s researching how coaching can support people to navigate change, and I was fortunate enough to be one of a handful of people she’s interviewed.

You know when you say things you don’t expect to say but they come out sounding quite good? That’s what happened in our conversation! I enjoyed it so much that I asked Renee to send me the transcript of our conversation so I could see what I said (hoping for moments of brilliance 🙂)

I then fed the transcript into Claude.ai to help me summarise it and help me shape up a blog post. Together, Claude and I came up with this:

Change and Leadership: It's About Agency, Not Heroics
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Organisations are living, breathing entities. They're always changing. Leadership isn't about being the hero with all the answers. It's about guiding evolution and sparking transformation. To me, leadership is about helping us all to be players in the sea of change that we’re perpetually surrounded by.

How is it that people respond to change differently? In my experience, it's all about having a sense of agency and choice. When you feel you have options, when you can influence what's happening, you can navigate change more confidently and decisively. That's why creating the conditions for people to make better choices during transition is crucial.

Yet as I look around me, I observe that much of the approach to organisational change is still top-down and patriarchal. It strips people of agency. It's the opposite of what we need. I’ve also noticed in my years of experience that organisations that invest in cultures that encourage long-term thinking, personal ownership, and high accountability weather the storms better.

My work is essentially about helping people build a sense of agency, both for themselves and for others. It's about developing leaders who facilitate and include, not dictate and exclude.

In small, growing pockets around the country, I see a shift happening. One from "hero" leadership to "host" leadership. One that is about creating space for others to contribute, not feeling pressured to have all the answers. One that leads with questions, rather than answers. Is it slower? Sometimes. Yet the outcomes make for far more sustainable, resilient people, teams and organisations.

Why does all this matter? It's not just about creating more efficient organisations. It's also about people realising their potential. Living purposeful lives. It’s organisational effectiveness meets personal fulfillment. That's the heart of change leadership.

What will you do today to build agency for yourself and others?

Interesting side note: working with Claude.ai didn’t save me a huge amount of time to produce this post. Yet it gave me a great starting point to help me see more clearly the raw material of what I wanted to share with you. Most of my work in creating this post was making it sound more like ‘me’. It seems that large language models like Claude.ai haven’t quite nailed that bit yet. Or maybe it was my fairly average prompt-writing skills? I’ll keep experimenting…