From new ideas to leadership - and the power of two's
by Pete Ashby, March 2025
For most of my working life, I have been fascinated by "new ideas". Working in the TUC in my '20s I became gripped by the scandal of mass unemployment, not least because my Dad was one of those who lost his job and never properly recovered.
I worked up various ideas for reforming government policies around employment and training that I went on to promote through two think tanks that I set up and led: Action for the Long-term Unemployed and then Full Employment UK.
A life-changing moment came in the late ’80s when I was appointed as a Fellow of St George’s House, just by St George’s Chapel inside Windsor Castle, to lead a series of Consultations on the future of citizenship, income and work.
St George’s House became my spiritual home for more than 30 years, during which time I facilitated more than 200 overnight events in the Castle.
Ideas-building in Windsor Castle
Throughout the '90s I worked with different Government Departments in testing out new policy ideas. In the privacy of Windsor Castle we would bring together top civil servants and leaders of industry to explore with unemployed adults and other "consumers" of key government policies how they could best be tailored to maximise their impact.
Then we all experienced the awfulness of 9/11, and along with so many others I wanted to do something more than just watch from the sidelines. I thought here I am working in the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world ... what a great venue to set up an international series of events about what the new world order should look like!
So that was my passion for the next four years, running the New World Order Forum, during which time I welcomed some amazing international groups to Windsor.
Among the many things I learnt during that time, one BIG ONE was that policy wonks won't change the world! Of course Governments need the right policies. But the future of our planet and our whole way of life depends on one thing above all else, and that's LEADERSHIP!
We need leaders who possess integrity and trustworthiness as well as vision and strategy. From then on, I resolved to focus my energies on working with leaders who have both vision AND integrity.
By 2005 I switched my whole focus to high trust leadership, working with all sorts of leadership teams across the country and occasionally bringing them to Windsor. In 2016 I was delighted when the Board of St George’s House invited me to become the founding Director of the Society of Leadership Fellows.
Creating a leadership community with some 250 Leadership Fellows, including many CEOs and company Chairs and other established leaders, was an incredibly worthwhile experience.
Facilitating intensive conversations for them across one, two and three day events was a real privilege and enabled me to work closely with some outstanding leaders whose personal stories and insights will never cease to inspire me.
A simple idea - and
a game-changer
Through this experience of working closely with all sorts of different leaders, I became evermore aware of one of the greatest challenges facing many top leaders: they can so easily become disconnected from their own immediate teams.
Once this happens, the whole organisation tends to slip back.
So it felt right to focus more on the challenges of team working and what CEOs would need to do to create stronger models of one team leadership.
Hence the idea of TEAM2030, that I set up in 2020 with my then business partner, Krysia Hudek. Working with a range of Leadership Fellows and other leaders we have worked with over the years, Krysia and I explored a variety of innovations in leadership practices that could foster a more unified culture among leadership teams.
Over time, the idea that we kept on coming back to was Coaching Pairs.
It's an idea that sounds so simple. Yet its potential is huge, once one introduces the principle that there should be a change-around every six months.
This transforms a good idea into a game-changer, with all team members gradually taking on a shared responsibility for the leadership development of every member of the team.
Bubbles of two:
safe enough to offer candour
One of the many lessons that I take away from my years in Windsor, and also from going round the country to join all sorts of Executive teams and Boards for Awaydays, has been to do with the power of personal breakthroughs in thinking once they are shared with others in the room.
Whenever I'm facilitating a Board or leadership team Awayday, and can see someone in a small group achieving a significant breakthrough in their thinking, I know that my job is to encourage them to share that with the wider group.
Once one person trusts the team enough to share a personal breakthrough, others will follow suit.
Trust makes so much possible. It is also very fragile, and it requires us all to exercise a degree of caution when someone calls on us all to say exactly what we think, and "put it out there, without worrying about the consequences"!
From radical candour to cautious candour!
Yep, you're right, the quote above the heading rather leads on to it as something of a conclusion!
I'm one of those people who has always been attracted to the principle of maximum candour. I was much energised by Kim Scott's book Radical Candour, when that came out in 2017 espousing the delightfully attractive proposition that we can "get what we want by saying what we mean".
in that same year multi-billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio wrote his breathtakingly brilliant book Principles, with radical transparency and radical open-mindedness as his two core principles. (And I would say that for anyone interested in leadership who hasn't yet read this book, it is a 'must read' like no other!)
Despite my personal fascination with all of these radical propositions, my personal sense is that whilst we should of course put candour and truth as non-negotiable principles at the core of any leadership model founded on trust and integrity, we should also proceed with caution.
After the years of lockdown and the fear culture that took over so much of our lives, and with so many members of so many teams now having such divergent working patterns, it is too easy for people to withdraw behind their screen (or easier still, turn off the screen on the grounds that there's a poor internet connection) whenever someone says something to them that they would rather not engage with.
More and more people have a policy nowadays of not responding to challenge. They head for the exit, emotionally, and once they do there is very little the rest of us can do about it.
I say this because there's something hugely important, to me, about creating zones of truly "safe space" for people, where they can discuss difficult issues that take them pretty close to the edge of their own comfort zone, and where they manage to remain emotionally present because they know they are with someone they trust and who "sees them".
I see Coaching Pairs as bubbles of two that should provide this safe space, where we each feel able to be pretty open with our coaching partner, knowing that we have a relationship of equals and the deal is that we each chose the other as our coaching partner. No-one made that choice for us!
I think this means that each of us can, and should, aim to be as candid with our coaching partner as we can let ourselves be, taking our cue from them if they feel that our honesty is making them distinctly uncomfortable, whilst reassuring them that we are assuming the best in whatever we are saying about them.
Once we are all part of the wider leadership team, we just need one or maybe two people to show some personal bravery and share an insight that involves some vulnerability on their part, and others will generally follow suit and share their own story.
Generosity and respect in the wider team
The point is that it's up to each of us to decide how much to share with colleagues. None of us should feel bounced into enforced candour because someone else has chosen to speak ungenerously at our expense!
We aim for maximum candour In our bubbles of two, whilst recognising that in wider team meetings certain things might need to remain unsaid because there are too many witnesses to the conversation to be able to protect someone's self-respect.
As Coaching Pairs become established, I really hope that CEOs will encourage individuals to speak freely and generously when the team comes together at the end of each six-month coaching cycle.
In this sort of way, Coaching Pairs should support the development of leadership teams that are stronger and closer than ever, and better able to think and act as one single team.
If you take up the idea of Coaching Pairs, please let me know how it works out for you. We are hoping that through this site we can share lots of insights and tips, as leader-leader coaching gradually becomes the norm across more and more leadership teams over the next few years
Many thanks and VERY GOOD LUCK!