Be More Academy

The minute the situation landed on your desk you did exactly what you always used to do.

You looked around for someone more senior to weigh in. Reached for your phone to call the person whose opinion you have always trusted. Bought yourself a little time with the quiet hope that someone with more experience would arrive and make the call so you did not have to.

Then you remembered. This one is yours.

No committee. No safety net. No one to defer to or hide behind. Just you, the information in front of you, your judgment, and a decision that needed to be made quickly.

Making your first real high stakes call as a new leader is one of the most defining experiences of early leadership. The adrenaline of it. The weight of it. The strange, uncomfortable mixture of terror and clarity that arrives when there is no other option but to trust yourself completely.

What I find in the leaders I work with is that this moment, as frightening as it feels, is also the one that builds something no training ever can. The quiet, unshakeable knowing that you are capable of leading under pressure. That your judgment, even when imperfect, is enough to move through uncertainty with intention.

You made the call. Recognize the courage it took to do that and give yourself a bit more credit.

What is the decision you have had to make completely alone as a new leader that taught you the most about yourself?

You’ve been quietly watching their leadership style even before you stepped into your own role.

The way they walk into a room. The way they handle pressure without visibly flinching. The way they seem to know exactly what to say in the moments that matter most. The ease and authority that comes with years of experience that you do not have (yet).

You hold them up as the model of the leader that you want to become. Always comparing and finding yourself lacking almost every time.

This is one of the quietest and most damaging habits a new leader can fall into. Don’t get me wrong – it is great to have aspirations but comparing yourself to someone else when they are at chapter three and you’re just getting started is not measurement – it is a diminishment.

The leader you have been watching did not arrive that way. They were shaped by years of exactly the kind of experience you are living right now. The uncertainty. The mistakes. The moments of clarity followed immediately by confusion. The slow, invisible accumulation of decisions made and lessons earned that eventually becomes the kind of leadership that looks effortless from the outside.

One of the most freeing things I invite new leaders to do is to stop measuring themselves against where someone else has arrived and start measuring themselves against where they personally began.

That gap, the one between who you were and who you are becoming, is the only one worth your attention.

Whose leadership have you been comparing yourself to in a way that has been making you feel smaller rather than more inspired?

You’re feeling the pressure of the past few weeks - the decisions piling up, the exhaustion, the moments where you were running on near empty – but you believed you had kept it professional and managed it well enough that nobody around you had noticed.

Then one of your team members stopped by your desk and quietly said “we just want you to know that we’ve got things covered – it’s all ok”.

That moment landed somewhere deep for you because it meant they had seen everything you thought you were hiding. They had watched you carry it. They had noticed the weight behind the composure. They had simply been waiting, with patience and care, for you to be ready to be human with them.

New leaders often believe that protecting their team from their own struggle is part of the role - that showing difficulty is a weakness. They feel that the person at the front of the room must always appear steady regardless of what is actually happening on the inside.

What your team showed you in that moment is something I want every new leader to carry forward. Vulnerability, offered with honesty and at the right moment, does not cost you your team's confidence. More often than not, it deepens it in ways that no amount of composed professionalism ever could.

They are not just following your leadership. They are invested in you as a person. Let them!

Has your team ever shown up for you in a moment you did not expect? What did it teach you about the culture you had been building?

You’re invited to a senior leadership meeting. Your first one at that level. You walk in, find a seat that feels neither too prominent nor too invisible, open your notebook and spend the first fifteen minutes trying to look like someone who belongs there - while internally wondering if everyone could tell that you don’t quite feel like you do.

The conversation moves at a pace and a depth you are still learning to track. People reference context you do not fully have. Decisions are made with a confidence that feels miles away from where you are. You say less than you want to and more than you think you should have. You leave not entirely sure what you had contributed or whether anyone noticed either way.

This is an uncomfortable and disorienting experience that many new leaders go through, and one of the most important rooms a new leader can sit in.

Not because you need to pretend that you belong, but because proximity to that level of leadership, even in silence, even on the edges of the conversation, teaches you things about how decisions are made and how influence actually works that cannot be learned anywhere else.

You were not out of your depth. You were exactly at the edge of your growth. That edge is the most valuable place a new leader can stand.

What is the room you have walked into as a new leader that stretched you the most?

There was a moment, quiet and significant, where something shifted in how you understood your role.

You made a call that not everyone agreed with. You held a standard that disappointed someone. You said something honest in a room where easy agreement would have been so much simpler. You chose what was right over what was comfortable and felt the brief, uncomfortable sting of not being the most popular person in that moment.

Then something unexpected happened.

The respect in the room changed. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the dynamic shifted. People started bringing you their real problems instead of their polished ones. Conversations became more honest. Your team started trusting that what you said was actually what you meant.

I see many new leaders spend so much of their early time trying to be liked, and it is completely understandable. You care about your people. You want to be someone they enjoy working with. You want the culture to feel warm, connected and safe.
Liked and trusted are not opposites. They can absolutely coexist. The difference is in which one you are willing to sacrifice when the moment asks you to choose.

The leaders who build the deepest loyalty are the ones whose teams know, with complete certainty, that they will always get the truth. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

When was the moment you chose honesty over approval and felt your leadership change because of it?

You told yourself it was about standards. About making sure things were done properly. About not letting something important slip through the cracks.

So you checked. Then checked again. Asked for updates before they were due. Rewrote things that were already good enough. Stayed involved in details that were never really yours to hold onto.

From the outside it looked like high standards. From the inside it felt like an anxiety you could not quite understand.

Here is the honest truth that most new leaders arrive at somewhere in their first year. Micromanagement is rarely about the team - it is almost always about the leader. About the fear of being held responsible for something going wrong. About the discomfort of trusting people with things that feel too important to leave in someone else's hands. About the quiet worry about what happens if you let go and it does not go well.

That fear is completely understandable. It is also, when it goes unexamined, one of the most damaging things a new leader can do to the people they are trying to lead well.

One of the most important questions I ask leaders sitting in this pattern is simply this – ‘What would you need to believe about your team to feel safe enough to let go?’

The answer to that question changes everything.

Where have you been holding on too tightly out of fear rather than genuine leadership intention?

You were having a hard morning. Nothing dramatic. Just one of those days where everything felt slightly heavier than usual before you even reached your desk.

You walked into the office, said good morning, sat down and got on with it. You thought you had hidden it well enough.

By midday the energy in the room had shifted. Conversations were shorter. People were quieter. Someone who usually stops by your desk twice before lunch had not appeared once.

Your team felt it before you even noticed you were carrying it.

This is one of the most humbling discoveries of early leadership. The realisation that your emotional state is not a private experience. It moves through the room the moment you enter it. It sits in the tone of your voice during a morning check in. It lives in the pace of your responses, the tension in your body language, the slight flatness behind your eyes on a difficult day.

In my work with new leaders this realisation is often a turning point. Not because it means leaders must perform positivity they do not feel, but because it creates a new and important awareness. That self leadership - the honest, daily practice of knowing what you are carrying and how it is landing - is not a personal matter. It is a leadership responsibility.

You do not have to arrive perfect. You do have to arrive aware.

When last did your mood set the tone for your team without you realising it?

There was a moment this year, maybe more than one, where you wondered if this role was actually for you.

Not out loud – but in the quiet space between one hard week and the next, in the exhaustion of one Sunday evening before another demanding Monday, in the middle of a situation that felt too big and too complicated and too relentless for someone who is still finding their footing.

You thought about what it would feel like to step back. To return to the version of your career that felt more manageable. To stop carrying the weight of other people's performance, wellbeing and growth on top of everything else you are already holding.

That thought does not make you weak. It does not make you unsuited for leadership. It makes you human.

Every significant role that asks something real of you will bring you to that edge at some point. The question is never whether the doubt arrives. It is what you do in the moment that it does.

In my experience working with new leaders through their first year, the ones who stay and grow through that moment almost always say the same thing afterward. They are grateful they did not make a permanent decision in a temporary moment of depletion.

You are still here and that is everything.

What kept you going in the hardest moment of your leadership journey so far this year?

Halfway through your first leadership year and there is a question worth sitting with.

Have the decisions you made in the last six months been driven by genuine conviction, or by the quiet, persistent fear of getting it wrong?

Fear in new leaders is one of the most common and least talked about realities of the first year in a leadership role. The fear of being exposed as someone who does not fully know what they are doing. The fear of making a call that damages something – or someone. The fear of saying the wrong thing, missing something important, or losing the respect of the people who are counting on you.

That fear does not announce itself. It disguises itself as perfectionism. As over preparation. As saying yes when every part of you needed to say no. As avoiding the conversation that needed to happen because the timing never felt quite right.

Don’t you think that leading from fear is exhausting?

Here is what I know from sitting with leaders in exactly this place. The shift from fear-based leadership to confidence-based leadership does not happen all at once. It happens in small, deliberate moments of choosing your own judgment even when it feels uncomfortable. Of trusting yourself one decision at a time.

The second half of this year is yours to lead differently. It starts with this honest question.

Where in your leadership have you been letting fear drive the decisions you make?

Halfway through the year, most new leaders are measuring themselves against targets, timelines and performance reviews.

Very few stop to measure the thing that actually matters most.

Look at your team today. Really look at them. What has shifted for the better?

The way they communicate with each other? The way they bring problems to you? The confidence in the room during a meeting compared to what it felt like in January? Note the small, quiet shifts in how people show up that have nothing to do with a spreadsheet and everything to do with the environment you have been building one interaction at a time.

You did that. Maybe there were a few moments you would handle differently if you could go back, but take time to acknowledge that you did that.

One of the most powerful exercises I take new leaders through at this point in the year is simply asking them to name one way their team is different today because of how they chose to lead. Not a project outcome. Not a number. A human shift. A cultural change. A moment of trust that did not exist before they arrived. Something they either built from scratch – or helped to boost.

The answer is always there. It is just rarely the first place a new leader thinks to look.

In what way is your team different today because of how you have shown up as their leader?