Who Tells You You're Wrong?
Why the real test of your leadership is how safe people feel when they disagree with you.
Read on LinkedInJames' Writing
James' Writing
Essays and reflections on the hidden patterns shaping women's lives, relationships, leadership and power.
James writes to expose the hidden rules that keep women playing smaller than they know themselves to be and to help women become impossible for insecure men to diminish.
He also writes to help men recognise and step out of the patterns they grew up believing were normal, because they keep everyone smaller.
FEATURED ESSAY
Why Do So Many Women Rehearse Difficult Conversations?
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The Cost of Needing to Be Told You're Good: Why He Can't Hear Your Hurt
Explore By Topic
Understanding Yourself
Identity, self-awareness and the patterns that keep you small.
Understanding Insecure Men
The hidden behaviours that keep women doubting themselves and men stuck repeating the same patterns.
Relationships & Power
Love, boundaries, emotional labour and the hidden power dynamics inside relationships.
Confidence & Self-Trust
Self-worth, presence, courage and taking up space.
Leadership & Culture
Workplaces, power, visibility and the systems that shape how we lead.
The Bigger Picture
Personal essays, reflections and observations beyond the book.
Selected Writing
Evergreen essays from James' Substack, alongside selected book excerpts.
Leadership & Culture
Leadership & Culture
How Much of Your People's Time is Spent Managing You?
How insecure leadership wastes the intelligence of your best people by making them use it to manage you instead.
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Leadership & Culture
Why Your People Waste So Much Time Working Out How To Tell You The Truth
Why your people having to work out how to manage your reaction is costing your organisation far more than time.
Read on LinkedIn
Leadership & Culture
What You're Actually Afraid Of When You Can't Trust Your Team
Why struggling to trust capable people may reveal far more about the leader than the team.
Read on LinkedIn
Understanding Insecure Men
Is It Really About Control or Is Control About Something Else Entirely?
How the need to feel indispensable can turn insecurity into control and drive your best people away.
Read on LinkedIn
Leadership & Culture
Why Do Some Leaders Become Less Secure When Their Teams Become More Capable?
Why your most capable people can become a threat to the very leaders who should be developing them.
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Leadership & Culture
You Heard the Apology. Now What?
Why stopping the apology won't change anything if you don't change what taught people to apologise in the first place.
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Leadership & Culture
The Most Important Word in Your Next Meeting Might Be “Sorry” But Not From You
How one small word can reveal what people have learnt about taking up space in your organisation.
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Confidence & Self-Trust
Why Do Brilliant Women Apologise Before They Speak?
Why the apology may tell you far more about your culture than it does about her confidence.
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Leadership & Culture
The Most Dangerous Leaders I've Met Weren't the Ones With Bad Intentions
Why leaders who think they've finished learning can quietly become the reason your organisation stops growing.
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Leadership & Culture
Your Culture Isn't What You Say It Is. It's What People Have Learnt They Need to Do to Succeed in It.
Why the real culture of an organisation is revealed by what happens when somebody disagrees with the boss.
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Leadership & Culture
Your Best People Don't Leave Because They Stop Caring
How your people quietly learn whether telling you the truth is worth the risk.
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Leadership & Culture
If Your Organisation Makes Talented Women Smaller Instead of Bigger, What Exactly Are You Building?
How organisations start losing talented women long before they finally resign.
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Leadership & Culture
Most Insecure Leaders Have Absolutely No Idea They're Insecure
How insecurity disguises itself as good leadership and teaches talented people to stop speaking.
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Leadership & Culture
Why Shrinking Women is Bad for Business
Why talented women leaving may tell you far more about your culture than it does about them.
Read on LinkedIn
Understanding Insecure Men
How I learned to be loved instead of needed
Why so many men spend their lives trying to earn the love they never believed they deserved and how women can recognise the difference before they mistake insecurity for love.
Read on Substack
Understanding Insecure Men
Why Do Women Often Play Smaller Than They Know Themselves To Be?
Why shrinking can feel sensible long before we recognise what it is costing us.
Read on Substack
Understanding Yourself
Is It Me? Probably Not.
How insecure behaviour has a way of making the wrong person question themselves.
Read on Substack
Leadership & Culture
Good Leaders Can Still Get This Wrong
How even exceptional leaders can unintentionally reinforce the cultures they want to change.
Read on Substack
Understanding Yourself
What if it isn't your personality?
How the survival behaviours we learn can become the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
Read on substack
Relationships & Power
When did being in a relationship become better than being happily single?
How women's independence is changing what men need to bring to a relationship.
Read on Substack
Relationships & Power
Why Don't We Teach Our Sons What We Teach Our Daughters?
How teaching girls to recognise danger isn't the same as teaching them to recognise safety.
Read on SubstackRecent Notes
Selected recent thoughts from Substack and LinkedIn.
The Book
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