Why your best leaders go quiet with their own team
Your leaders can handle a furious customer. Can they handle their own team?
Most leaders we work with are good at difficult conversations. They have them with clients and stakeholders all week, calming tempers and winning people round under pressure. Then someone on their own team starts to slip, and the same leader goes quiet for months.
The skill your leaders are missing is one they already use every day. They’re just pointing it at the wrong people.
Where leadership training fall short
Plenty of leadership courses are built around content. Leaders get a strategy framework and a model with a tidy acronym, then default back to the same habits come Monday. The hardest part of leading never came up in the room, because that part is relational. It’s the honest but difficult conversation about performance, the feedback nobody wants to give, and the decision people need to feel part of. Strategic leadership capability building lives or dies on those moments, and most courses never get near them.
The data suggests this is where things are breaking. DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025, a global study of leaders, found trust in immediate managers fell from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024. These are leaders rating the managers above them, the people meant to be developing them.
In our work with teams across Australia, command-and-control style leadership rarely lands. People expect to be consulted and to understand the thinking behind a decision. A leadership day that skips the relationship leaves the real problem untouched.
The busy leader trap
When leaders avoid the hard conversations, they often compensate by doing more themselves. When I sat down with Matt Jenkins, Director of People & Culture at Applejack Hospitality, he described exactly this in the general managers he develops. Many are in their late 20s and early 30s and run their venues with full autonomy, and for some, doing everything became a point of pride. Delegating looked like weakness. As Matt puts it, “We can very easily walk up to a table and deal with a disgruntled customer, but we can’t do that with our own people.”
Long hours look like commitment, and hospitality even has a saying to back it up. “If you’re not doing 50 or 60 hours in hospitality, you’re not working hard enough.” More often those hours are a way of holding onto control, and a leader who does everything builds no one behind them. When one of those leaders moves on, the organisation finds out how thin its bench really is.
You can watch my Real Talk episode with Matt here.
Why influence scales
Growth makes this urgent. Every new team, site or merger stretches the culture a little further. Matt’s business doubled almost overnight, and when we spoke he was clear about the risk: “the bigger you get, the more diluted that [culture] becomes.”
Culture holds when leaders at every level can bring people with them without waiting for authority to do it. Our Leading with Influence workshop was designed with exactly this in mind. It’s grounded in the work of Marshall Goldsmith and John Maxwell. Leaders pinpoint the habits holding them back, then practise bringing people with them, including the people above them. For a newer leader managing staff their own age or older, trust counts for more than any title.
How we build a leadership day
Our leadership development days start with the conversations your people are avoiding. Before we design anything, we talk with you about where things are stalling, then build the day around those moments. Leaders work through real scenarios from your business, alongside the colleagues they’ll be having those interactions with next week. Our difficult conversations workshop draws on Donna Hicks’ Dignity Framework. You learn to be direct about performance without anyone leaving the room feeling small.
Everything we run is experiential, because a conversation you’ve rehearsed is far easier to have than one you’ve only read about. Our facilitators keep the room consultative, and participants decide how their own team will handle feedback and decisions. Over the last 18 years, we’ve noticed the leaders who help design the approach are the ones who keep using it.
We also build the bench. Every program is strengths-based and designed around your organisation, helping leaders develop the people beneath them alongside themselves. We often pair the Leading with Influence workshop with Emotional Intelligence, Accountability or Managing Competing Priorities, so a single day becomes a program shaped around your leaders and the gaps they face.
Pointing the skill inward
Your leaders already know how to listen, read a room and turn a hard moment around. They do it for customers and clients without thinking. A bespoke leadership day or off-site event run by Be Challenged is where your team can learn to do it for their own people.
And when they do, you can feel the energy in the team change. People know where they stand and start speaking up sooner, and before long they’re leading without waiting to be asked. It’s honestly my favourite part of the job.
If you’re planning leadership development in Australia for your next cohort, give us a shout. We’d love to build a day around your team’s real conversations and help you build the buzz from the inside out!
Thanks for reading,
Oliver Sheer
