Stop Confusing Strategy with Leadership
And Why Your Team Thinks You’ve Turned Into Mr.Ms.Mrs.They.Them Potato Head
You want change. Growth. Agility. Market share.
So what do you do?
Lock a bunch of execs in a room, plan a shiny strategy, and then throw it over the wall.
Enter the middle manager meeting, where someone says, “Just do it.”
And that’s when your organisation starts to quietly crumble.
Let’s get real: strategy doesn’t change organisations—people do. And if you’re changing the system, but not the humans running it, you’re in fantasy land.
Behaviour Doesn’t Shift Because You Say So
If you show up after a weekend offsite with a “new way of working” and a slightly awkward smile, people don’t think “Wow, what a visionary.” They think:
“Why is Belinda acting like Worzel Gummidge?”
or,
“Who stuck a new face on my boss Kevin like Mr. Potato Head?”
They feel disoriented. Disconnected. Defensive.
Because when leaders shift without supporting their teams to make sense of that shift, it feels manipulative at worst—and ridiculous at best.
And guess what? That resistance you’re now seeing? That’s not people being “stuck in the past.” That’s people protecting themselves from performative leadership.
Change Starts With the Leader’s Inner Game
Bill Torbert said it best: transformation doesn’t start with action—it starts with awareness.
If you’ve never looked at your own leadership centre of gravity, your blind spots, your reactivity under pressure—you’re not leading change, you’re performing it.
Ken Wilber took it further: all true change is integral. It’s individual and collective. Internal and external. Behavioural and systemic.
If you skip the inner work, you’re skipping the actual work.
Why Great Leadership Programmes Change Everything
Done right, leadership development isn’t a workshop. It’s an intervention. It does three things:
Builds self-awareness – so leaders stop projecting and start responding.
Strengthens systemic understanding – so leaders see how culture, process, and power interact.
Creates space for experimentation – because leadership is messy, and changing how you lead should feel a bit uncomfortable at first.
It gives your people time to recalibrate. Not just to learn a new model, but to be the change.
When done well, it becomes the foundation for your entire transformation.
And let’s not forget the stats:
72% of successful transformations include a dedicated leadership programme (BCG).
Organisations with mature leadership capability are 4.2x more likely to outperform competitors (DDI).
So, What Should You Do?
Start with your leaders. All of them—not just the C-suite.
Use proper diagnostics. Not guesswork. What’s the real maturity matrix of your leadership culture?
Build space for the inner game. Self-awareness is the gateway drug to sustainable change.
Give people a safe space to try new ways of being. Support the awkward phase. The learning curve. The human bits.
Don’t slap on a comms campaign and call it culture.
Bottom line?
If your people feel like their boss just got replaced by a robot in a suit, you’ve skipped the most important step.
Transformation is human first. And leadership is the transmission.
Start there!!
