Look before you lead

It’s true, anyone can lead.

In twenty years I’ve watched people grow into leaders, helped a few get there, and grown into the role myself. How far each of us got depended on the trust, backing and incentives around us as much as on what we brought.

Before you say yes to a lead role, find out who will stand behind you when the decisions get hard.

Same player, different moment

Joe Root captained England in a record 64 Tests between 2017 and 2022 and averaged about 46 with the bat. He stepped down in 2022, and under Ben Stokes his batting flourished. In 2024 he passed Alastair Cook as England’s leading Test run-scorer. In July 2026, after Stokes retired, England made Root captain again, with Stephen Fleming as head coach.

Root was a reasonable choice in 2017. His second spell comes with a new coach and a different dressing room. He’s the same player, and the circumstances around him have changed.

Tech companies make the same call with less thought. They promote the engineer who has been there longest, or the one whose turn it seems to be, and expect the title to do the rest. If you’re the one promoting, ask whether the organisation will give this person the authority, support and conditions to succeed. People learn to lead on the job when they have those.

Three leaders and no leader

My first lead role was at Cambridge Assessment. Exam boards were in the news for late and inaccurate marking, and our brief was to keep Cambridge Assessment out of the papers. I’ve written about how agile helped Cambridge Assessment scale. When we arrived, the team was trying to make BizTalk do things it was never built for.

Three of us took the initiative and rebuilt the system from scratch. It scaled to millions of exam scripts, and it still runs today.

None of us held the title. We all acted like we did, and we clashed. We didn’t always get on, but we respected each other and argued with facts. Trusting each other didn’t mean agreeing. Any of us could tell the other two they were wrong, and the argument stayed about the system. Each one made the system better. The three of us are friends now, and we still talk about what we built.

Trust I’d earned at University Press

By the time I led the Higher Education project at Cambridge University Press, I had a track record there. I wrote about how I got people to believe in the vision that won me the project. The team was a mix of people with strong reputations who had never worked together.

My title gave me authority. My team lead’s backing let me use it. He told me: “It is your project. Do what you want. You would not be where you are without full trust. Do not ask permission.” With that I could experiment and take bets, and we changed what the Press built with, how we composed it and how we worked. Clare, who ran the team with me, and I “were not best friends, but there was trust and respect”, as I put it in before you change the process, understand the problem. It’s one of the best places I’ve worked, and I’ve described the product culture we built there.

Strangers at Curve

At Curve I built the payments platform from day one. Nobody in the team had met before. I’d never heard of the people I worked with, and they’d never heard of me. The CTO knew my earlier work and got me the interview. That was the only reputation in the room.

I did at Curve what I’d done at University Press, with strangers. We squashed the Jira lanes, so dev, QA and code review stopped being columns where work queued. We worked on each ticket together at every step, and our tester shaped the work from the start instead of checking it at the end. The way we deployed would give most companies heartburn. For us it ran without friction, because every person on the team knew how the system worked and why we’d built it that way.

Wanting the same outcome made trust possible. We built it by working each ticket together until every one of us had watched the others deliver.

When the incentives reward conflict

I’ve also led in the other kind of room. Two consultancies worked in the same department. The client had picked one of them, and the other wanted its place. The people were fine. The consultancies behind them shaped how they acted.

We didn’t all want the same outcome, so trust never got started. The other consultancy put obstacles in our way and moved its own people into roles our team needed. Every meeting carried a second agenda. You wondered whether you’d been set up to fail, and whether speaking up would get you shot down.

One team’s goodwill can’t build trust across a department when the incentives around it reward conflict. You can lead how your own team behaves. We chose openness over guarding our position. We told the client where we’d fallen short and didn’t hide the work we hadn’t done well. Over time the client came to favour us.

You need the same honesty with your own management. When stakeholders think a project is behind and don’t understand why, tell them where you are and what’s blocking you. Sometimes that means fighting for your team, as my lead did for us in the leadership gamble.

Before you say yes

The title and the pay answer the easy question. Picture month three instead, when you’ve made an unpopular call and need the room behind you. Before you accept, ask:

• What happened to the last person in this role?
• Who wanted the role filled, and who wanted someone else in it?
• If you made an unpopular call, who would defend you in a meeting you weren’t in?
• When two people here disagree, what happens next?
• Does anyone gain if you fail?

Don’t stop at the values page, with its “we’re a family” and “we don’t hire arseholes”.

Check whether the behaviour matches the claims.

You want people who disagree with you to your face and back you once a call is made, in an organisation that rewards them for it. I’ve seen good products die when people become resources and collaboration gives way to protecting individual positions. If you enter a team without that trust, your first job is to earn it. Be honest about what isn’t working, deliver what you promise, and let people see how you make your calls.

The room you’re stepping into

You won’t always get to choose. Sometimes you inherit the team, the politics and the decisions made before you arrived.

You can still build trust inside your own team. You can be honest about what isn’t working and show people that disagreeing with you won’t turn personal. You can’t make two consultancies want the same outcome, and you can’t build trust on behalf of everyone else in the building.

So before you accept the title, find out who speaks for you when you’re not there. That’s the room you’re stepping into.