Kate Dee

When I first stepped into leadership roles, I thought I had to be decisive, strong, and show no vulnerability. But over time, I realised something far more powerful: Empathy isn’t the opposite of strength - it’s what gives strength direction. Balancing urgency with thoughtfulness is the challenge every leader encounters from time to time. There’s always going to be a little tension between urgency and empathy - between doing what drives the business forward and being present for your people. The real skill is learning how to hold space for both. Here’s a few ideas on how: → Listen more than speak. Especially in difficult moments. People rarely want immediate solutions - most times, they just want to feel heard. → Ask questions like “How are you really?” and mean it. It’s amazing what surfaces when you create space for honesty. → Try to hold the whole person in mind. Someone might be delivering brilliant work while also navigating a tough season personally. Both matter. → Share some of yourself. Vulnerability helps give others permission to be human and think of themselves beyond just being high performers. EQ is the ability to read the room, build trust, and bring people with you, not just tell them where to go.

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When we think about performing at the highest level, our minds often go straight to preparation, attention to detail, purposeful practice, and delivering under pressure. But what’s often overlooked is the performance mindset– the edge that comes from focusing on being a better team. Looking back at my time playing cricket for England, the foundation of our rise to No.1 in the world wasn’t built in the nets or on the pitch. It started three years earlier, when our team analyst mapped out what it would actually take for us to achieve the ambitious goal that Andy Flower (as coach) and I (as captain) had set: to become the best England team ever. That meeting turned intention into reality. It showed us exactly where we were versus where we needed to be, created individual and collective accountability, and gave us a framework to execute and review against. The most powerful part? How uncomfortable it was. We were told that, at our current level, we had only an 11% chance of beating Australia away from home in 12 months. That challenge didn’t discourage us — it unified us. It made the scale of the task crystal clear, and it forced us to learn, adapt, and grow at speed if we wanted to reach the top. In the end, performance isn’t just about skill or preparation. It’s about mindset, clarity of purpose, and the willingness to face tough truths together as a team.

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Transformation doesn’t live in a single job description. It happens in the spaces between people, roles, and functions. There’s a lot of talk about heroic leaders being the catalyst for change; but wide-scale shifts can only happen when an organisation can harness *collective capability*. That’s why we believe teams – not just individuals – are the real engines of transformation. It’s also why we created the X-Model: to give leaders and their teams the data-backed insight they need to build trust, define their collective goals, and drive high performance. 👉 Find out more about the X-Model here: https://lnkd.in/e9_47rWZ #teamdevelopment #coachingtheconnections #organisationalchange

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