How do you know when your team needs a rebel and when they need a prefect? And what happens when you've only ever learned to lead one of them?

In this episode, I sit down with Cat Hall to explore an idea we built together years ago: rebels and prefects, and why both are essential when you're driving change. Cat brings six research-backed traits from her master's in Change and Organisational Resilience that shape how well people adapt, and partway through the conversation, she turns that research back on herself. We land on something worth sitting with: adaptability starts with psychological safety, and with giving people permission to play.

Cat Hall is a workforce strategist and change leader who helps people thrive in a rapidly changing world of work. With a background in organisational development and change, she now works at the intersection of future-of-work strategy and practical change, designing future skills frameworks and adaptive ways of working, from her early years pushing against the status quo inside a large government department, through to building a practical adaptability playbook now used by leaders and HR professionals. Her recent master's research went beyond the adaptability buzzword, focusing on what actually enables people to adapt to change and what organisations and leaders can practically do to foster it.

We get into:

• Why rebels and prefects both matter, and how to know which one your team needs right now
• How psychological safety is the real starting point for building adaptability
• Why self-efficacy and resilience show up differently when change is happening to you rather than being led by you
• How small pockets of autonomy give people permission to experiment with change
• Why a simple mantra helped Cat get through one of the hardest years of her life

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:44) - Rebels vs prefects: what do the words actually mean?

(05:38) - From "good girl" to rebel: Cat's story

(09:22) - Finding organisational development and a career-defining moment

(14:09) - Full rebel mode at Inland Revenue, and learning to bring people with you

(20:11) - Back to study: a master's in Change and Organisational Resilience

(25:13) - The six traits of adaptability, and turning the research on herself

(29:51) - Doing a master's through the hardest year of her life

(34:37) - Bringing the playbook to life

(37:06) - Where adaptability starts: psychological safety and permission to play

(39:48) - Reflections, and where to find Cat Hall

You can find Cat Hall at:

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-hall-834220199/

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When everything around your team feels uncertain, what are you actually meant to give them? Not answers you don't have. Not confidence you can't hold onto forever.

A few weeks back, working with a group of senior leaders from a New Zealand local government agency, I asked what they found hardest about leading through uncertainty. Almost every answer came back the same: it's hard to give people certainty. This episode is about why I don't think that's actually the job.

I reckon most leaders default into one of two modes when things get shaky: heroing, where you perform having the answers and end up carrying it all yourself, or hoping, where there's no answer and nothing gets handed over either. There's a third mode: hosting, where you create real room for people to find their own answers, whether or not you know the way yourself. Certainty is a promise you often can't keep. Agency is a gift you can always give, and there's real research behind why that matters, including a decades-old study where small everyday choices measurably changed how long people lived.

In this solocast, you'll get:

• Why performing certainty under pressure quietly turns you into the bottleneck
• The difference between heroing, hoping, and hosting, and why hosting is the one that lasts beyond you
• What a nursing home study from the seventies reveals about the measurable power of small choices
• Why giving away agency is still hard, even after fifteen-plus years of coaching leaders through it
• The cultural pressures, boards, media, performance systems, that quietly punish anyone who says "I don't know"
• Three practical tools you can use this week: a certainty and agency check-in, an agency audit, and a language shift
• A simple sailing metaphor for what it looks like to lead without controlling everything

Timestamps

(00:00) The question that started this: what leaders find hardest about uncertainty

(02:29) Heroing, hoping, and hosting: a sailing metaphor for leading without controlling everything

(04:35) Why giving away agency is still hard, even after fifteen-plus years of coaching

(06:47) Three practical tools: a certainty and agency check-in, an agency audit, and a language shift

(09:11) A close: the one decision you could hand over this week

I've put together a free model and a downloadable toolkit with the practical questions and language shifts from this episode. Grab it here: https://assets.cdn.filesafe.space/8yuhB4NRc6tP0qlIfnMn/media/6a7003b2a4c8a1a2c376e427.pdf

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You've probably heard the advice: back yourself, have confidence, don't let self-doubt hold you back. But what happens when confidence tips into needing to prove something? And what happens when you're the one everyone comes to for the answer, every single time?

In this conversation, Monique Davidson traces her own shift from proving herself to improving herself, and what that's changed about how she leads. She talks about building a culture of curiosity, asking better questions instead of jumping in with answers, and about a metaphor she keeps returning to: the cape that leaders wear without realising it, and the weight of carrying it for too long.

Monique Davidson became one of New Zealand's youngest local government chief executives at 29. Nearly a decade on, she's leading Horowhenua District Council and serving as Vice President of Taituarā, Local Government Professionals Aotearoa. She's known for a candid, reflective style of leadership grounded in service rather than ego.

We get into:

• The shift from proving yourself to improving yourself, and why it changes everything
• How to build a culture of curiosity instead of always being the one with the answers
• Why leaders wear a cape without realising it, and the weight of carrying it for too long
• The cost of holding on to a hero identity, even when things are going well
• How to build a healthier relationship with your own ego
• The distinction between an ally and a confidant, and why every leader needs both

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:29) What got you to the top

(03:34) From proving to improving

(05:42) Your relationship with your ego

(10:46) Taking the cape off

(14:31) The cost of wearing the cape too long

(21:35) Imagine your actions written in the sky

(28:59) Balancing delivery and discovery

(30:08) Creating a culture of curiosity

(38:03) What she'd tell a 29-year-old

(41:19) Ally versus confidant

(43:59) The kitchen floor

(46:49) What she's learned from this conversation

You can find Monique on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moniquedavidson/

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Do you ever act fast and call it decisive, only to find out later you were missing half the picture? Or maybe you can see exactly what's going wrong, but you're not the one who gets to change it?

This episode explores why "focus on what you can control" is only half the story. Acting with agency but no awareness can set you up for exactly the mess you were trying to avoid. This episode walks through a simple two-by-two model, scrambling, sideline, stuck and solid, so you can spot which one you're operating from right now, and what it takes to move towards solid, where agency and awareness work together.

You'll walk away with:

• Why "focus on what you can control" only tells half the story
• A simple model for spotting whether you're scrambling, sidelined, stuck or solid
• Three practical shifts for each state, to help you move towards solid
• Why guarding your energy matters as much as guarding your judgement
• The ski-field story about the time Digby got tracked down on a chairlift, and what it taught him about hoarding agency

Timestamps:

(00:00) Why focus on control is only half the story

(02:26) What agency without awareness costs you

(04:34) What awareness without agency costs you

(06:56) Introducing the agency and awareness model

(09:16) Three shifts to move out of scrambling

(11:18) Three shifts to move out of sideline and stuck

(13:35) Staying solid, and where Digby gets caught out

(15:32) An invitation to explore this with other leaders

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How much of your energy goes into making sure everything looks perfect? Into being the leader who's got it handled, even on the days you really haven't?

This episode pulls together five conversations from the Dig Deeper archive, each one built around the same discovery: the leaders who earn real trust aren't the ones with all the answers. They're the ones who let people see what they're still working out. You'll hear what it costs to admit that, and what changes once you do.

Five guests, five very different stories. Jodi Willocks left a senior role with no plan and learned to trust her gut instead. Sarah Manley led an organisation through her own rock bottom and found the words to ask for help. Nicola Nation stepped out from under the leader she thought she was supposed to be. Rita Cincotta got called out by a friend for looking “too together” to need anyone. And Erin Judge worked out what leadership looks like once you stop making it about yourself.

Here's what we get into:

• Why trusting her gut mattered more to Jodi than having a plan
• What it took for Sarah to tell her team the truth about a really hard year
• The moment Nicola realised she'd been performing someone else's leadership
• The friend's comment that showed Rita what she'd been putting out into the world
• Why Erin reckons real impact has got nothing to do with you

Timestamps:

(00:45) Introduction

(01:54) Jodi Willocks: trusting her gut through a career break

(07:57) Sarah Manley: leading through rock bottom

(15:07) Nicola Nation: stepping into her own version of leadership

(20:59) Rita Cincotta: the friend who called out her L plates

(28:20) Erin Judge: leadership that isn't about you

(33:47) Closing thoughts

You can hear the full conversations with each of these guests in the Dig Deeper archive:

Jodi Willocks

Sarah Manley

Nicola Nation

Rita Cincotta

Erin Judge

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Do you know that feeling when you're the one everyone comes to, the one with the answers, the one holding it all together? It can feel like competence. It might actually be a bottleneck with your name on the label.

In this solocast I share a moment from a coaching conversation with a leader who runs a big, messy part of the health system. She described her role as owning the circus, then caught herself and landed on something better: it's everybody's circus, and she's just the ringleader. I unpack why that distinction matters, why leaders who hold onto everything end up exhausted, and why what they build tends to wobble the moment they step back.

You'll get:

• Why "I own that circus" and "it's everybody's circus" are two completely different ways to lead
• The difference between the ringleader and someone carrying every act themselves
• Why being across everything feels like competence, but works against you over time
• What tends to happen to a team the moment a leader who's been holding everything steps back
• A question worth sitting with: which parts of your circus were never yours to own in the first place
• Where to find my free five-minute Collective Brilliance self-assessment

Other references

• Are You the Circus Owner or the Ringleader? Blog Post
• Free five-minute leadership self-assessment: Your Lasting Impact Stage

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What if the thing you're calling stuck is actually the moment your character is being revealed, not tested?

Most of us treat the messy middle, that stretch between where we are and where we'd rather be, as something to survive rather than something to learn from. We chase the next skill, the next framework, the next fix, when the real block might be a story we've been telling ourselves for years without ever checking if it's still true.

This episode is an invitation to slow down and look at that gap differently. My guest Andrew Horsfield has spent his career helping leaders navigate exactly this territory, and he brings a host mindset and a systems-aware lens to it: rather than pushing for outcomes, he asks what a person, a team, or a relationship actually needs to move well. Andrew is a performance consultant and the author of Better. He's also just come through eighteen months in which he and his wife counted twelve or thirteen major life events hitting at once, including his mother's cancer diagnosis and a son struggling at school. What he shares isn't theory. It's lived.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why the messy middle reveals who we are rather than building it from scratch
• How to tell the difference between productive struggle and simply spinning your wheels
• Why reflection is a practice almost nobody actually does, and what gets in the way
• How a mentor's question, "why do you always have to be approved of?", can expose a story problem hiding behind what looks like a skill problem
• Why courage in leadership often looks quiet rather than dramatic
• How the tool Bigger Me and Smaller Me can help you notice which version of yourself is driving
• Why understanding someone's perspective matters more than winning the argument
• How three simple end of day questions can turn effort into genuine growth

I wonder what might shift if you started treating your own messy middle as information rather than a problem to fix. What's possible here isn't a tidier life. It's a truer one.

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Navigating the Messy Middle

(12:12) - Choosing Between Bigger Me and Smaller Me

(20:57) - Turning Struggles into Strengths

(31:08) - The Courage to Lead: Insights from Mentorship

(38:55) - Productive vs. Unproductive Struggle: Finding the Right Path

(46:52) - The Power of Story: Shaping Our Leadership Journey

References:

• Robin Sharma
• The Messy Middle | Scott Belsky
• Bigger Me Tool

You can find Andrew at:

Website: andrewhorsfield.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhorsfield/

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You've probably noticed that the way you lead in one room doesn't quite land in the next. The approach that makes you sharp in a crisis can fall flat in a quiet one-on-one. And most of the time you're not choosing your style at all. You're running the one that comes naturally.

This solocast looks at two things that separate leaders who operate well at senior levels: fluency and fluidity.

Fluency is your range across the organisation. The ability to move between functions, contexts and conversations without losing your footing. Fluidity is quieter. It's noticing your default mode and choosing, in the moment, to step out of it when the situation in front of you asks for something else.

You'll come away with a clearer read on your own defaults, and a simple way to choose who you need to be before you walk into the room.

Here's some of what we get into:

• Why fluency is built over time, through the range of experiences you collect along the way
• What organisational literacy actually looks like, and why fluent leaders lean on it
• The difference between knowing your natural style and being run by it
• A door-framing question to ask before any meeting: who do I need to be here?
• Why self-awareness, not just behaviour, is the real marker of fluidity

Have a think about your own default mode as you listen. I reckon you'll spot it quickly. The more interesting question is what it might be costing you on the days you don't step out of it.

Fluency & Fluidity Blog Post

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Have you ever caught yourself fighting a habit, a reaction, a way of showing up that you've been trying to fix for years? There's something worth sitting with in that. What if the behaviour you want to change isn't actually broken? What if it's doing exactly what it was designed to do, but it’s now just well past the point where it's still useful?

In this episode, Dr. Amy Silver and I explore the idea that the patterns we run, like people-pleasing, over-controlling, avoiding the hard conversation, aren't character flaws but protective strategies. They made sense at some point. The work isn't to fight them. It's to see them clearly, meet them with self-compassion, and then get deliberate about what happens next. I wonder what becomes possible for you and the people you lead when that reframe lands.

Dr. Amy Silver is a clinical psychologist with over three decades of experience studying how fear and habit shape human behaviour. She began her career at Oxford University, where she worked as a tutor and researcher before making a bold leap to drama school and then into the corporate world. She is the author of the award-winning book The Loudest Guest: How to Change and Control Your Relationship with Fear, and works with organisations, leadership teams, and executives across Australia to build cultures of courageous collaboration. Amy brings rare depth to this space: the rigour of clinical psychology combined with the humanity of someone who lives what she teaches.

You'll learn:

• How to recognise a protective pattern for what it is, without making it mean something about who you are
• Why self-compassion isn't a nice-to-have idea but the prerequisite for any real behaviour change
• How fear operates in teams and why so much of what looks like dysfunction is actually people trying to stay safe
• Why the question isn't "what's wrong with this pattern?" but "how flexible can I be with it?"
• How to identify your personal choice points and build experiments for what to do differently
• Why changing your environment, even in small ways, can shift the pattern before you've said a word
• How the difference between self-awareness and deliberate action is where real leadership lives
• Why the most useful thing you can do with your fear is stop fighting it and start using it as a guide

Other References

• The Loudest Guest | Dr. Amy Silver
• Conversations Create Growth | Dr. Amy Silver
• Oxford Guide to Behavioural Experiments in Cognitive Therapy | Bennett-Levy, Westbrook
• Exposure Therapy: Flooded vs Graded Approach
• The Amygdala and Threat Detection

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Mastering Fear: A Personal Journey

(05:51) - The Role of Self-Compassion

(17:49) - Deliberate Action and Choice Points

(21:10) - Changing the Environment for Better Outcomes

(29:37) - Understanding Team Dynamics and Patterns

(42:34) - The Power of Choice in Everyday Life

You can find Dr. Amy Silver at:

Website: https://www.dramysilver.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amysilverbrave

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Right now, public sector organisations across New Zealand are losing people in numbers we haven't seen before. The redundancy figures get reported. The org chart gets updated. But what happens to the knowledge that walks out the door with them, the way someone could read a tricky stakeholder in three seconds, the history of why a system was built the way it was, the relationships that kept the wheels turning?

In this solocast, Digby argues most leaders are treating workforce reduction as a numbers exercise when it's actually a capability exercise. Systems and technology can pick up some of the slack. They cannot replace the relational, tacit knowledge that lives in people's heads and in how a team works together. Digby sets out a practical way to prepare for these transitions: map where critical capability actually sits before it leaves, invest deliberately in the people who stay, and build systems strong enough to survive the next departure. As he puts it, you can be the fire or the fire tender.

You'll learn:

• How to identify the institutional knowledge that exists only in people's heads, before it walks out the door
• Why systems and technology can't replace the relational work that holds a team together
• The difference between leading as the fire and leading as the fire tender
• A practical way to map critical capability before a restructure hits
• How to invest in the people who stay so they can carry things forward
• What it actually takes to build a team that survives transition without falling apart

Other References

• What Survives When People Leave Blog Post

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