My Interests

 Most leadership development is designed for leaders who have enough time, energy, and a stable environment. Most real leaders have none of those things. I’m fascinated by what it takes to lead well when the conditions are genuinely hard - and what separates leaders who sustain themselves from those who quietly break.

Understanding how the brain responds to sustained stress, threat, and decision fatigue has fundamentally changed how I think about leadership performance. Leaders aren’t failing because they lack motivation - they’re often operating in conditions neurologically incompatible with good thinking. I love exploring how that knowledge can be made practical and usable.

This is the focus of my PhD research, and the concept I believe is most undernamed in leadership today. Moral injury occurs when leaders are repeatedly required to act in ways that violate their values - often because of system pressure or competing loyalties. It looks like burnout. It’s treated like burnout. But it isn’t. Understanding the difference matters enormously.

I’m not interested in resilience frameworks that essentially ask people to absorb more. I’m interested in what it takes to design leadership roles, teams, and organisations where sustainable performance is genuinely possible - where wellbeing and high performance are not in tension.

Men in leadership carry enormous pressure and are statistically far less likely to seek support until they’re in crisis. I’m interested in what it takes to create environments where men can talk honestly about what’s happening for them - without the conversation needing to be framed as therapy or weakness.

Schools are among the most complex human systems we’ve built. The people leading them carry responsibilities that would challenge leaders in any sector - with fewer resources, less margin, and more scrutiny. I’m deeply interested in what genuine system-level improvement looks like, as distinct from the performance theatre that often passes for it.

There is a significant gap between what the research says about leadership, culture, and wellbeing - and what most organisations actually do. Bridging that gap, in plain language and with practical tools, is something I care about.

Coaching, at its best, creates the conditions for leaders to think more clearly about what's actually happening, what matters most, and what needs to change. But insight alone isn't enough. The shift happens when reflection moves into deliberate rehearsal - practising the difficult conversation, testing the decision, preparing the response before the pressure arrives. That's where insight becomes capability. 

Some of the most important work in organisations doesn't happen in one-on-one conversations - it happens in rooms. When a leadership team thinks together well, something shifts. I'm interested in what it takes to design and hold spaces where people can engage honestly, surface what's really going on, and move toward something better. Good facilitation is invisible - the thinking feels like the group's own, because it is.