I was out on a run last Friday in the flat grey drizzle in Kent, half-listening to a podcast because the weather wasn’t giving me much else to look at.

But it didn’t take long before I properly started listening.

It was the latest episode of the great Trenton Moss’s podcast, Human Powered, where he was talking to Ben Tye, CEO of Gate One. Ben spends four days a week running a 300-person consultancy and one day a week working as a psychotherapist. That combination really piqued my interest.

And what a great episode it was (it had my attention, which led to me running a lot faster than if my mind isn’t occupied!). Not quite a PB for the route, but close to it.

Much of what was discussed had me mentally nodding in agreement. It was a good reminder of the choices we have about how we lead.

One line that nearly stopped me mid-stride was “the invitation is to get curious before you get directive.” Ben was talking about what’s really going on when a leadership team keeps saying it needs more data before it’ll commit to a decision. Often it isn’t the data that’s missing – it’s a fear of being wrong that nobody’s said out loud. I’ve seen that so many times but not thought about it in that way.

To be honest, curiosity is the thing I have to consciously reach for most as a coach and in my wider work. My instinct, like most operators, is to fix. Ben calls out that instinct precisely as being common to the leader who gets their mojo from diving in and solving things. And he calls it what it is: a habit that takes away the very accountability you’re trying to build in other people.

Then Trenton got him onto founder transitions, which is where I spend a lot of my working life. Ben led Gate One through the handover from its four founders to full ownership by Havas. He leaned on William Bridges’s transitions model to make sense of it – a period of endings, a messy neutral zone and only then new beginnings. Most businesses try to skip straight to the beginnings bit in their impatience to get on.

What particularly struck me was his answer to the “what do you keep, what do you change” question that I tackle with my founders who are making transitions. He kept the values, the rituals and the entrepreneurial permission to try things. He changed where the accountability sat, pushing decisions out from a small founding circle to the people actually closest to the work.

And the bit that’ll stay with me longest: if you’re a leader and people have quietly stopped asking you for advice, that’s not you becoming irrelevant – it’s usually a sign you’ve done the job properly. It might feel odd, but it’s a good thing.

There’s loads more good stuff in the conversation – coaching cultures, layers and repetition when communicating in times of change, localisation of narrative. Definitely worth forty minutes of your own drizzly run or whatever your equivalent is this week.

Thanks to Trenton for the consistently great podcast and to Ben for being this generous with it. Ben’s episode is here.

Before your next difficult conversation this week take a beat and think: are you actually being curious or have you already decided you’re being directive?

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