The Leadership Trap: Encouraging Without Holding Accountable
The Most Expensive Kindness in Leadership There is a particular kind of management failure that never shows up on a project dashboard. It does not trigger a red RAG status. Nobody logs it as a risk. It accumulates quietly, the way damp accumulates behind a wall, invisible until the structural damage is already done. We call it encouragement. And sometimes, that is exactly what it is. But sometimes it is something else: the comfortable avoidance of a necessary conversation, dressed up in the language of belief. I have been guilty of this. Most leaders I respect have been guilty of this. The instinct to protect someone’s confidence, especially someone with real potential, is not wrong. It becomes wrong when it outlasts the moment that required honesty., – The Situation Eighteen months into a critical data migration programme, this was 2022, mid-execution, the kind of phase where every slipped dependency costs you three downstream, we had a senior analyst who was, on paper, exactly what a programme manager wants. Sharp. Fast. Energetic. The kind of person who volunteers for the hard problems and makes the rest of the team feel that progress is possible. Her delivery estimates were also consistently optimistic. Consistently, measurably wrong. Not by catastrophic margins, no single miss looked disqualifying, but with a reliability that, in retrospect, was its own kind of pattern. A ten-day task would land in fourteen. A two-week dependency would take three. Each time, the explanation was credible. Each time, the team absorbed it with grace. What nobody did, and I include myself here, was name the pattern out loud. We celebrated her energy. We noted the delays privately. We did not connect the two in any conversation she was part of. By the time we did, three downstream teams had quietly stopped building her timelines into their plans. They had worked around her. Built in their own buffer, recalculated their dependencies, and said nothing, because naming it felt unkind, or risky, or above their pay grade to raise. She found out the way people always find out in these situations. Late, and from a direction she did not expect. When we finally had the direct conversation, her response stopped me. She said: *”I didn’t know it had that effect. Nobody told me.”* She was not defensive. She was genuinely surprised. And she was right to be, because we had collectively chosen comfort over clarity for eighteen months, and the cost of that choice had been charged to her account, not ours., – What This Actually Means The first insight is the uncomfortable one: the teams that worked around her were not protecting the programme. They were protecting themselves from an awkward conversation, and in doing so, they removed her ability to course-correct. When you route around someone without telling them, you are not managing risk. You are manufacturing a blindspot and handing it to a colleague as a gift. The second insight inverts what most people assume about accountability. We tend to treat correction as the opposite of belief in someone. The working assumption, rarely stated, frequently operative, is that raising a hard truth signals reduced confidence. In practice, the opposite is closer to true. Leaders who only affirm eventually build people who cannot process critical feedback when it finally arrives. And it always arrives. The longer it is deferred, the more it arrives not as a conversation but as a consequence. Accountability is not the withdrawal of belief in someone. It is the proof of it. The colleague you correct early is the one you still think can change. The one you quietly work around has already been written off, they just have not been told. The third insight is about timing, and it is the one I find most useful now. Encouragement and correction are not opposing forces on a spectrum that leaders must balance. They are the same act, performed at different moments. Telling someone they are doing excellent work and telling someone their estimation pattern is creating downstream risk are both forms of investment in that person’s future. The problem is that we have built a professional culture where the first feels natural and the second feels like a performance review conversation that needs to be scheduled, prepared for, and survived. That friction is artificial. We created it by treating directness as a special occasion rather than a baseline expectation., – What This Means for Your Organisation Most enterprise programmes have at least one version of this dynamic running silently in the background. Someone whose work is being quietly compensated for. A pattern that the immediate team has accepted as a fixed variable. A gap between what is said in one-to-ones and what is said in dependency planning sessions. The question worth sitting with is not whether this is happening on your team, it almost certainly is, but what it is costing the person at the centre of it. They are operating without accurate information about their own impact. They are being managed around rather than managed. And when the moment of reckoning arrives, as it will, they will have been deprived of the eighteen months of feedback that might have changed the outcome. The most generous thing you can do for someone with genuine potential is make the invisible visible, before the damage compounds quietly into distance., – Closing Encourage loudly. Correct early. Not because the second makes the first more credible, though it does, but because both are expressions of the same underlying belief: that the person in front of you is capable of more than the version of them you are currently protecting. The kindness that costs nothing to give is usually the kindness that costs the most to receive., –
Investing in Junior Talent: The Leadership Edge
Standing in the lift at Canary Wharf one morning, I realised the most important professional conversation I’ve had in the last twelve months happened over a flat white in a coffee shop around the corner from the office, with someone who had been on my team for eight months and whose full professional history I could not have described accurately if asked. That says something. I’m not sure it reflects well on me. Senior leaders talk a lot about inclusive culture, psychological safety, and building teams where every voice is heard. We commission surveys, review results, and nod at the right parts. Then we walk back upstairs and spend the next three weeks talking exclusively to the four people whose names appear on our recurring calendar invites. The hierarchy doesn’t disappear because we have good intentions. It calcifies quietly, one polite meeting at a time., – The Situation Last quarter, I had a catch-up with a junior analyst, no agenda, no prep, no performance review. We’d walked past each other in corridors for eight months. She was quiet in meetings, solid in output. The kind of person a busy senior leader files under “performing well, nothing to flag.” I knew almost nothing about her. What I didn’t know, and this is the part that has stayed with me, is that before joining us, she’d spent two years on the ground in East Africa building financial inclusion infrastructure. Payment rails in low-connectivity environments. Regulatory navigation across multiple sovereignties with overlapping and sometimes contradictory frameworks. The kind of operational context you simply can’t build in a classroom or a London risk team. She mentioned it the way you mention something you’ve stopped expecting people to find interesting. I sat with that for a moment. And then, because the coffee shop wasn’t a meeting room and there was no deck to move through, I asked her to tell me more. She did. And somewhere in that conversation, she flagged a gap in our risk model, a regional assumption we’d baked in without realising it was an assumption. The kind of gap that looks fine from the inside and only becomes visible when you’ve sat in the specific context it fails to account for. We reviewed it. We changed the decision. That change mattered. The conversation that prompted it had no entry on any project plan., – What the Coffee Actually Did The first thing I understood from that morning is something I should have understood earlier: proximity is not the same as understanding. I’d been physically near this person for eight months. I’d seen her work. I had a mental model of her contribution that was accurate as far as it went, which was not far at all. The corridor version of a person is a silhouette. The coffee version is a human being with a history. There’s a pattern in this that I’ve seen cause real damage to organisations. It’s not malicious. It’s the natural bureaucratic gravity of seniority, the way that as you move up, the information you receive becomes increasingly curated, filtered through layers of people who are, consciously or not, optimising for what they think you want to hear. I’ve written about how this kind of slow signal distortion quietly kills projects before anyone names the problem, the silent killer in teams is often not conflict or failure, but the steady narrowing of what gets said out loud. Coffee breaks the curation. Not entirely. Not permanently. But for forty minutes, it relaxes the hierarchy enough for people to say the true thing instead of the safe thing. The second thing: expertise does not announce itself in organisations with strong hierarchies. This is the counter-intuitive part. You might assume that genuinely valuable experience surfaces because people share it, because meritocracy works, because good organisations recognise good thinking. That’s not consistently true. What surfaces is the experience that has been given permission to surface, by title, by tenure, by proximity to the right meetings. Everything else waits. A junior analyst who spent two years building payment infrastructure in East Africa will wait a long time to be asked about it in a risk team meeting that already has an agenda. The third thing is less comfortable: the gap between what I thought I knew and what I actually knew was invisible to me until I accidentally closed it. That’s the specific failure I’ve been sitting with. It wasn’t that I chose to ignore her background. I genuinely didn’t know it existed. That’s not a knowledge gap I could have managed, because I didn’t know to look for it. The only way to find that kind of unknown unknown is to create the conditions in which people tell you things unprompted, in a setting where unprompted honesty feels safe. No survey instrument captures this. No one-to-one performance template gets you there reliably. Coffee gets you there. A walk gets you there. Lunch with no deliverable attached gets you there., – What This Means If You Lead Anything If you run a team of any size, there’s almost certainly someone three levels below you sitting on a professional history, a regional insight, or a technical understanding that’s directly relevant to a decision you’re currently making without it. Not because they’re withholding it. Because no one has asked, and the architecture of the working week doesn’t create the moment when they’d offer it unsolicited. The fix isn’t a new meeting. It isn’t an initiative. It’s the deliberate, unstructured hour, the coffee, the walk, the lunch with no outcome attached. Block it. Do it consistently. Accept that most of those hours will produce nothing immediately measurable. The one that does will make the others worth it., – I’ve been more wrong about the people closest to me professionally than I have about markets, models, or forecasts. The difference is that markets tell you when you’re wrong. People tend not to.
Why I Left a Contentious Meeting for 10 Minutes and What It Changed
The Best Decision in That Room Was Not Made in That Room A particular kind of silence descends over a contested governance meeting about forty minutes before everyone stops pretending they are listening. You can feel it. The energy shifts from engagement to endurance. People stop building on each other’s points and start defending positions they arrived with. Someone begins annotating their own slide deck. Someone else checks a phone with the careful nonchalance of a person who absolutely is not checking a phone. We were four hours into a six-hour session last quarter. Four regions. Three risk functions. One deeply contested data ownership model that had been, depending on who you asked, either almost resolved or fundamentally unworkable for the better part of eight months. The kind of meeting where the pre-reads are forty pages and everyone has read different forty pages. I have sat in enough of these rooms to know the difference between productive tension and performed disagreement. What we had, by mid-afternoon, was the latter. Then someone, someone who had barely spoken in two hours, asked for a ten-minute break., – The Moment Nobody Planned For The request landed awkwardly. We were mid-thread on a particularly thorny question about accountability boundaries, and the interruption read as avoidance. I thought, briefly, that we were about to lose momentum we had spent forty minutes building. I was wrong about what momentum looked like. We came back. Within eleven minutes, the blocker that had absorbed two months of alignment meetings dissolved. Two people had shifted positions. Not because new data had surfaced. Not because anyone had made a more compelling argument. In ninety seconds of corridor conversation, without a room watching, two people had given themselves permission to think differently. I did not fully understand what had happened until I asked one of them about it afterward. The answer was immediate and slightly disarming: *”I already knew I was going to move. I just needed somewhere to do it that wasn’t in front of everyone.”* That sentence has followed me into every complex negotiation since., – What the Room Was Actually Doing to People Here is the thing about contested enterprise decisions that rarely appears in any change management framework: the room itself is a performance space. The moment you seat twelve senior people around a table to resolve something difficult, you have created an audience. And audiences do something to human beings, they make the cost of changing your mind visible, immediate, and social. This is not weakness. It is entirely rational. In high-stakes institutional settings, the ability to hold a position under pressure signals competence. Shifting ground mid-meeting, in front of peers and stakeholders who will interact with you tomorrow and in six months, carries a real professional cost. Even when the shift is the right call. Even when, privately, you have already made it. The result is that contentious meetings frequently do not fail on logic. The logic, often, has been exhausted. They fail on the cost of being seen to change your mind in real time. The position people defend in the room is not always the position they hold. It is the position they can afford to be caught holding. The pause removed the audience. The audience, it turned out, was the problem., – On Designing What Happens Between the Agenda Items What interests me more than the psychology is the structural implication. If the break was not a rest but a mechanism, a designed permission to recalibrate outside of observation, then it can be built in deliberately, not stumbled into accidentally. I have started doing exactly that. Not breaks as courtesy, not breaks as schedule management, but breaks as architecture. In sessions where I know the contested points are coming, I plan the pause to arrive just after we have surfaced the conflict but before the positions have fully calcified. The timing matters. Too early and you have not created enough pressure to make the corridor conversation necessary. Too late and people have committed publicly to things they cannot walk back without losing face. This also means paying different attention to what happens outside the room. The corridor, the coffee queue, the thirty seconds by the door, these are not the informal margins of the meeting. In a complex negotiation, they are often the meeting. I have learned to be present in them rather than using them to check messages, which is, I realise, a more significant behavioral change than it sounds for someone whose instinct in any gap is to clear the inbox. There is something here that connects to a broader pattern I have noticed in transformation work: the most consequential moments are rarely the ones on the agenda. The conversation that unlocks eighteen months of deadlock happens in the ten minutes before the room fills. The decision that reframes a programme happens in the walk to the car park. There is an argument, and I find it genuinely compelling, that the scheduled session exists partly to create the conditions for those unscheduled ones. Which means the design of the pause is as important as the design of the agenda., – What This Means If You Lead Contested Sessions If you are running complex negotiations, across regions, across functions, across competing ownership models, the question worth asking is not only *what needs to be decided* but *where does the decision actually want to happen?* Some things can only be resolved in a room. They need witnesses, they need formality, they need the weight of a recorded agreement. But the movement toward that resolution, the actual shift in position, the private acknowledgment that the other side has a point, the quiet decision to stop performing certainty, almost never happens under observation. It happens when the audience leaves. Your job, in part, is to design those moments as intentionally as you design the agenda., – The most important conversation in a complex negotiation often happens in a corridor between two people who
Strategy Fails Without Communication Clarity
I first saw a particular kind of organisational dysfunction that looks, from the outside, like productivity. People are at their desks. Emails are being answered. Status updates are being filed. If you walked through the office or scrolled through the project management tool, you would see motion everywhere. You would probably leave satisfied that the function was operating as intended. It wasn’t. It was spinning. I have seen this pattern more than once across my career, but the version I encountered in Q1 2022 was the clearest example I have ever had to diagnose and fix. Twelve people. Defined roles. A roadmap that existed as a document. And almost no meaningful forward movement. The organisation had confused activity with execution, and nobody, including the people inside it, could quite articulate why things were not progressing. — The Situation When I inherited that function, my first instinct was that prioritisation was the problem. Too many things on the list, not enough forcing function to separate what matters from what merely feels urgent. I was wrong. Completely, and in a way that cost me several weeks before I understood it. The roadmap was not too long. The roles were not unclear. The team was not under-resourced. What they were was uninformed, not about their tasks, but about the reasoning behind the decisions being made above and around them. They were executing in a context vacuum. So they did what reasonable, conscientious professionals do in that situation: they slowed down. They checked before moving. They escalated questions that should have been within their authority to resolve. They waited for signals that it was safe to proceed. From the outside, this looked like a motivation problem, or possibly a talent problem. It was neither. It was an information architecture problem. The organisation had been accidentally withholding the one input that would have unlocked movement: the reasoning behind the decisions they were being asked to implement. I sat with that for longer than I am proud of. The answer, when it eventually became obvious, was almost embarrassingly simple. — The Analysis **The “why” is not context. It is infrastructure.** Most organisations treat explanation as a courtesy, something you offer when you have time, or when someone asks. A communication style preference of a particular manager. Optional, in other words. That framing is wrong. When people understand why a decision was made, they gain the ability to make hundreds of downstream decisions correctly, without requiring escalation at every step. They know the intent. They can infer the direction. They can course-correct in real time when circumstances shift, because they understand what they are trying to achieve, not just what they have been told to do. Withholding that reasoning does not protect decision-making authority. It undermines execution quality at every level below the decision-maker. The bottleneck most organisations search for, in their processes, their tooling, their structures, often sits inside this gap: information asymmetry between those who set direction and those who carry it out. **Clarity before implementation, not after, changes everything.** The change we made was not structural. We did not redesign the function or rewrite the roadmap. We introduced one practice: before any significant decision was implemented, we held a ten-minute conversation to explain the reasoning, and we explicitly asked what was wrong with it. Not a memo. Not a Slack message. A conversation, before the fact, with an invitation for challenge. The effect was not that people agreed with everything. Some of the pushback was genuinely useful and changed how we proceeded. But the more important effect was that people stopped operating in a state of ambient uncertainty. They knew the thinking. They trusted the direction was considered. And they could move. Execution pace shifted meaningfully within six weeks. The strategy had not changed. The team had not changed. The information available to the team had. **The invitation to challenge is not a vulnerability. It is a signal.** This is the part senior leaders often resist. Asking “What is wrong with this thinking?” feels, if you are not careful, like an admission that you are unsure, and there is a version of leadership culture that treats uncertainty as weakness. That instinct is expensive. In practice, the invitation to challenge a decision before implementation does two things simultaneously: it surfaces the genuine blind spots that the person closest to execution can see, and it signals to the team that their judgment is trusted enough to be heard. Both of these outcomes improve execution quality. Neither of them undermines authority. The executives I have worked with who moved the fastest were not the ones who decided fastest. They were the ones whose teams needed to ask the fewest clarifying questions, because the direction was clear, the reasoning was shared, and people had been given permission, implicitly, to use their own judgment within that frame. — The Implication If your team is busy and results are not moving, resist the temptation to reach for structural solutions first. Before you reorganise, reprioritise, or replace anyone, ask a simpler question: do the people executing our strategy understand why the key decisions were made? Not what was decided. Why. If the honest answer is that you are not sure, or that the reasoning lives only in a few senior heads and has never been made explicit, then you have found your bottleneck. It is not a talent problem. It is not a resource problem. It is a context problem, and context is one of the few things in organisational life that is both genuinely free and genuinely powerful. The teams I have seen operate with real speed and confidence share one quality: they are trusted with the reasoning, not just the instruction. That trust does not slow decisions down. It distributes the capacity to make them well. Context is not what you give people after they ask for it. It is what you owe them before they need to.
The silent killer in projects
The Space Between the Contracts 2021, I signed off on a data transformation project involving four vendors. Each was technically capable. Each came with credentials, references, and a delivery team that could hold a room. The contracts were tight-I spent considerable time with legal to ensure that. Milestone charts glowed amber-to-green across the programme dashboard. On paper and on screen, everything was moving. What I didn’t model was the space between them. I’ve spent twenty years in financial services-across risk, compliance, regulatory technology, and now AI infrastructure. In that time, I’ve seen projects fail for the reasons you’d expect: bad data, underqualified teams, scope creep, budget overruns. But the failure mode that has cost me and the organisations I’ve worked with the most is quieter, harder to name, and almost never appears on a risk register. It lives in the ungoverned gaps between parties who are each individually performing-and collectively, silently, coming apart. — The Situation By month four of the 2021 programme, something felt off. Not catastrophically off. Just the low-grade friction that experienced programme leads learn to read: slightly defensive status updates, meetings that ended without clear owners, a vendor delivery lead who had started cc’ing more people than necessary on emails. When I pulled the thread, this is what unravelled. Vendor A had been claiming credit in steering committee for work that Vendor B had actually delivered. Not maliciously-they genuinely believed the integration work fell within their remit. Vendor B said nothing, partly because they didn’t want to cause friction, and partly because they had problems of their own. Vendor C was six weeks behind schedule and had told no one. Not their internal team lead, not the programme manager, not me. They carried the delay quietly, hoping to recover it before anyone noticed. And Vendor D-the one I want to linger on-was waiting on a dependency that no one had formally assigned. That’s when it stopped me. Vendor D’s dependency wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t classified. It was simply sitting in the ungoverned space between two statements of work, belonging clearly to neither, assumed by everyone to be someone else’s problem. When I traced it back through the documentation, I could see exactly how it happened. Each contract had been written precisely. Each party had agreed to their scope. And in the clean borders between those scopes, this dependency had fallen, silently, into nothing. The programme wasn’t technically failing. Every individual status report looked reasonable in isolation. The programme was failing relationally-in the assumptions, the silences, and the incentive structures that made it easier for each vendor to manage their own position than to flag an inconvenient truth. I had governed each contract. I hadn’t governed the trust between them. — Three Things I Understood Afterwards **The risk register captures what vendors agreed to measure-not what is actually happening.** This sounds obvious when written down. It isn’t obvious when you’re twelve weeks into a programme and every RAG status is green. Risk registers in multi-vendor programmes are a product of negotiation. What gets tracked is what parties consented to track. What doesn’t get tracked-the informal dependency, the missed handshake, the assumption left unverified-is invisible to the register by design. The absence of a red flag isn’t the same as the absence of a problem. I’ve written about related blind spots in AI and data governance [in this piece on AI deployment challenges in banking](https://lakshvaswani.com/post-of-ai-deployment-issues-as-senior-banking-executive-in-grc-space-how-we-overcame-them-going-beyond-pocs-real-issues-and-solutions-humor-engagement-and-end-with-laksh-vaswani-so-it-will-com/). The pattern is consistent. Systems optimised to report compliance aren’t optimised to surface failure. **The greatest risk in multi-vendor transformation isn’t technical-it’s the misalignment of incentives.** Each vendor in a complex programme is optimising for their own commercial outcome. That isn’t a moral failing; it’s rational behaviour. Vendor A had every incentive to claim the integration work-it strengthened their renewal case. Vendor C had every incentive to stay quiet about the delay-admitting it early would have triggered penalty clauses. None of them had a commercial incentive to flag the problem in the white space between their scopes, because that white space wasn’t in their contract, and solving it wasn’t in their interest. The irony, which I fully appreciate, is that I spent months negotiating contracts to create accountability-and the contracts themselves created the conditions for strategic silence. Tighter legal language doesn’t solve a misalignment of incentives. It can make it worse, by giving each party more to protect. **The person with no commercial reason to flag the problem is your real early warning system.** This is what I’d tell my 2020 self. Before a multi-vendor programme begins, map the dependencies-not the technical ones in the architecture document, but the human ones. Who is relying on whom? Where does one vendor’s success depend on another’s delivery? Then ask, for each of those dependencies: who has a commercial interest in flagging a problem here, and who doesn’t? The person with no incentive to raise the flag is exactly the person you need to build a direct line to. That might be a junior integration tester. It might be a mid-level project manager on a fixed-price contract. It will almost never be a vendor account director. — What This Means for Your Organisation If you’re running a transformation programme-or sitting above one-the question to ask isn’t “are all vendors delivering against their milestones?” The question is: who in this programme has both the visibility to see a cross-vendor problem and absolutely no commercial reason to surface it? If you can’t name that person, you don’t have an early warning system. You have a reporting structure. Those aren’t the same thing, and in month eight, when the gap you missed in month three becomes impossible to ignore, the distinction will matter considerably. The same principle applies, by the way, to internal programme governance-something I touch on in a broader reflection on executive accountability [here](https://lakshvaswani.com/test-post-from-london/). The structure that makes you feel in control isn’t always the structure that tells you the truth. — The risk that kills programmes doesn’t live inside the contracts. It lives in the
36 Hours Straight: A Team Story in Financial Services
What Happens at Hour Thirty-Six There is a particular quality of silence that only exists when thirty-six hours of noise suddenly stops. Not peaceful silence. Not relieved silence. The silence of eleven people who have been in the same room since Thursday morning, across four time zones, held together by a shared problem and one very patient coffee machine – and who have just watched the fix land. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. For a full minute, we just sat with it. The kind of silence that a team earns, not one that settles on them by accident. I have been in enough war rooms to know that the technical resolution is rarely the moment that stays with you. What stays is the human texture of the hours that built toward it. This weekend gave me more of that texture than I expected. — The Situation We were forty-eight hours into what had started as a manageable incident on Thursday morning. I say “manageable” because that is what the first assessment suggested. It was not manageable. It was the kind of problem that presents politely, shakes your hand, and then halfway through the introduction mentions it has brought several cousins. You solve the first layer, and it introduces you to a second. You solve the second, and a third emerges with a quietly baffling root cause that nobody had a clean precedent for. At some point around hour twenty, I stopped asking “how much further?” and started asking “who needs a break and who needs coffee?” Here is the moment I will not forget: it was sometime around 2am on Saturday. One of our engineers – someone who had been heads-down for hours, barely speaking – looked up from their screen and said, flatly, “I don’t actually think this is the problem anymore. I think we’ve been solving the wrong thing.” The room went quiet in a different way. Not the good quiet. The kind where everyone does a rapid internal calculation of how much work that statement might just have invalidated. I felt it too – that brief, cold drop of “please don’t let that be true.” It was true. And saying it out loud was the thing that turned the corner. We had been six hours into a technically correct solution to the wrong diagnosis. The engineer who said it had known for some time, I think – had been sitting with it, testing their own certainty before naming it in a room full of tired, invested people. That moment of honesty, offered quietly and without drama, was worth more than everything that came before it. I have been in transformation programmes where that observation would never have been made aloud. Where the cost of being the person who says “we’ve been solving the wrong thing” is too high – socially, politically, professionally. This weekend, it cost nothing. That is not an accident. That is a culture. — Three Things I Have Carried Out of That Room **The teams that hold together under pressure have usually done the work before the pressure arrives.** There was no team-building exercise that produced what I saw this weekend. There was months of working alongside each other, small acts of reliability, the accumulated evidence that when you say you’ll pick something up, you pick it up. Trust is not built in a crisis. It is *revealed* by one. What the war room showed us was simply what had already been true. **Fatigue is an honesty accelerator.** By hour thirty, the energy required to perform competence – to manage your image, to frame your uncertainty carefully – is simply no longer available. People stop polishing their contributions and start handing each other raw information. The humour gets darker because it stops being a social tool and starts being a genuine release valve. The observations get sharper because there is no bandwidth left for softening them. I have sat in two-hour steering committees where less truth was exchanged than in the last six hours of this incident. Organisations should find this alarming and instructive in equal measure. **The people who show up at 3am are not doing it for the SLA.** This is the insight that sat with me longest, and it is not a comfortable one for anyone who has spent time building incentive frameworks, performance structures, or engagement metrics. The engineer who reframed our diagnosis at 2am was not motivated by a KPI. The colleague who quietly took over so someone else could rest was not making a career calculation. There is a category of professional commitment that exists entirely outside the reward architecture – and the organisations that understand this tend to be the ones that keep their best people. You cannot manufacture it. You can only create conditions where it survives. — What This Means Beyond This Weekend If you lead a team, or a function, or a programme of any meaningful scale, I would ask you one question: would your team tell you at 2am that you have been solving the wrong problem? Not hypothetically. Specifically. In the room. With six hours of work already on the board and an audience of tired, invested colleagues. If the answer is uncertain, that is the work. Not the governance framework. Not the roadmap. The thing that makes transformation either survive contact with reality or quietly collapse under it is whether the people in the room will tell you the true thing when it is inconvenient and late and expensive to hear. Technical incidents are, in a strange way, gifts. They compress months of organisational dynamics into hours. They show you – quickly, clearly, without the usual insulation of process – what your culture actually is. Not what it says it is. What it does when nobody is watching the clock. We updated the runbook. We scheduled the post-mortem. We will find the systemic gaps and we will close them, methodically, the way you are supposed to. But the thing I
The Unspoken Moment in a High-Stakes Board Meeting
What the Room Didn’t Say A particular kind of silence sounds like agreement. It fills the space after a decision gets made with confidence. It follows the dominant voice in the room when that voice doesn’t pause long enough for a reply. It shows up in the meeting notes as “team aligned” – and it’s one of the most expensive fictions in organisational life. I saw it again today. A decision made quickly. No visible hesitation from the person calling it. Twelve people in the room, or on the call – depending on how you count the ones whose cameras were off. The agenda moved through the moment like it was already settled. And in one sense, it was. I’d made the decision before the meeting started. The meeting was, functionally, a notification. But I was watching the faces. — The Moment I Started Watching Faces I learned to do this the hard way, in 2016, during a product review meeting I ran. We were eighteen months into a compliance platform build. I asked the room whether the data architecture would hold under the regulatory reporting load we projected for the following year. The room said yes. Nods. No objections. One person said, “I think we’re in good shape.” We weren’t in good shape. Six months later, the architecture failed exactly where I’d asked about. When I went back and had the honest conversations – the ones that should have happened in that meeting – I found two engineers had known about a structural problem. They hadn’t said anything because the project director had been emphatic, the timeline was fixed, and the cost of raising a concern felt higher than the cost of hoping it would work out. They’d done the math quietly, at the table, in real time. And they’d decided to stay silent. That’s when I stopped treating silence as neutral data. It isn’t neutral. It’s the sound of a calculation being made. — Three Things I’ve Learned About What Silence Actually Means **First: Silence in authority-heavy rooms is almost never passive.** It looks passive. It feels passive if you’re the one speaking. But the people not speaking are actively doing something – they’re calculating. They’re weighing the cost of saying what they actually think against the cost of staying quiet. In most senior meetings, in most organisations, the cost of speaking is higher. Not because people are cowards. Because they’ve learned, through experience or observation, what happens to the person who says the uncomfortable thing in front of the wrong audience. The decision gets logged as unanimous. The dissent gets filed internally, under “not my problem anymore.” **Second: The tell is almost never verbal.** In the meeting today, I noticed it first in a glance – two people who looked at each other for about half a second before looking away. That’s a full conversation. It means: *Did you just see what I saw?* It isn’t disagreement, exactly. It’s shared uncertainty that has decided, in real time, not to become a spoken objection. The person who looked at the table was different. That one is usually more specific. Looking down is often the body language of someone who knows something and has just decided not to say it. I’ve been wrong about this. But I’ve been right about it more often than I expected, in rooms across four countries and multiple industries. If you run meetings, watch for the people who disengage physically at the moment a decision lands. They’re rarely uninterested. They’re usually the most interested – and the most troubled. **Third: What gets swallowed does not disappear. It relocates.** This is the part that costs organisations the most. The concern that didn’t surface in the meeting doesn’t vanish. It shows up in execution, in the small decisions made by people who didn’t fully believe in the direction but went along anyway. It surfaces as slow drag, as low-grade resistance, as the compliance audit eighteen months later that reveals a risk everyone around the table vaguely knew about but never said out loud. I wrote about a version of this in a [different context](https://lakshvaswani.com/i-managed-a-team-of-500-and-felt-less-informed-than-when-i-managed-a-team-o/) – how managing a team of 500 left me less informed than when I managed a team of 5, precisely because the information architecture around me had become performative rather than functional. Silence in meetings is the same problem operating at the individual level. The information exists. It just never reaches the decision. — What This Means If You Are the One Making the Call There’s a practical version of this, and it’s not complicated. If you’re in authority in the room – if you’re the one whose confidence is calibrating everyone else’s willingness to speak – you carry a specific responsibility. You have to create the gap deliberately, because it won’t appear on its own. A two-second pause isn’t enough. A direct question to the person who looked at the table is uncomfortable and worth it. “You looked uncertain – what are you thinking?” is a sentence that has saved me from bad decisions more than once, and it has the added effect of telling your team that you actually want the real answer, not the performed one. It also changes the culture over time. Rooms where the leader has asked the awkward question a few times start to produce the awkward question organically. People calibrate to what is safe to say, and when they learn that honesty is safe – genuinely safe, not just stated in a values document – they use it. The organisations I’ve seen handle crises best aren’t the ones with the most rigorous processes. They’re the ones where someone in a room, months or years earlier, felt safe enough to say the thing that didn’t fit the narrative. — The Close Unanimity is easy to manufacture. Consensus that holds under pressure isn’t. The difference is almost always visible in the room – if you’re watching for it. Silence in a meeting is data. The question
Leading 500: When Scale Breaks Decision Quality
The Org Chart Lied to Me In 2017, I ran a division that had scaled faster than anyone planned. Headcount grew from a manageable team into something requiring its own organisational chart – the kind printed on A3 paper and still needing a magnifying glass. By most visible measures, things went well. Revenue targets were hit. The division performed. And I, apparently, led it. Except I kept getting ambushed in ExCo. Not by crises, exactly. By facts. Things that happened two, three, four weeks earlier that I only learned about at the worst possible moment – across a table from people who clearly assumed I had known. The pattern was consistent enough to embarrass me, and consistent enough to force a reckoning. — The Situation At first, I assumed someone was dropping the ball. A manager not escalating. A process failing. A gap in accountability. So I did what most executives do when suspecting a human problem – I looked for the human. I found none. What I found was more uncomfortable. My team wasn’t hiding information. They were curating it. Every layer of management between me and the actual work made thousands of small editorial decisions weekly. What to escalate. What to resolve themselves. What to flag. What was “not worth the MD’s time.” These weren’t acts of concealment – they were acts of care, professionalism, even competence. A middle manager who escalates every minor issue to the divisional head isn’t doing their job. I understood that. I’d told people that. The problem was structural, not personal. I’d built a reporting structure. I hadn’t built an information structure. The distinction sounds small. It cost me dearly to understand it. The moment I remember most clearly was a Wednesday afternoon in late 2017. We were thirty minutes into an ExCo session when a colleague raised a client situation I’d genuinely never heard of. Not a rumour of – never heard of. I held my expression with the kind of carefully practised neutrality senior executives develop for moments like this. After the meeting, I spent forty-five minutes tracing the thread. The issue had originated six weeks earlier. It had been managed well at the operational level. But at no point in six weeks had anyone considered I might need to know it existed. They’d handled it. Case closed. They were right. They’d handled it. But I’d walked into an ExCo meeting carrying a version of reality six weeks out of date, and no one – including me – had known. — The Analysis First, I realised information loss is proportional to management layers, not individual competence. You can have exceptional people at every level, and you’ll still lose signal. Each layer is a compression. Each compression is a choice. Each choice is made by someone who isn’t you, under pressures you may not fully see, with a read on what you need that’s necessarily incomplete. This isn’t a performance problem. It’s a physics problem. The second insight was harder to accept: I’d trained my team to protect me from complexity. Not through explicit instruction. Through signals that accumulate quietly over years – expressions of impatience at detail, cultural norms about what gets raised in a room, an organisation that visibly rewarded resolution over escalation. My team were good pattern-readers. They read me accurately. I just hadn’t understood what signal I was broadcasting. The third thing – one I find most executives resist – is that the solution isn’t structural in the conventional sense. Flattening the hierarchy is usually the wrong answer. It creates other costs. What needed redesigning wasn’t who reported to whom. It was what got to me, in what form, and through what channel – regardless of the formal reporting line. Not all information should travel the same path. Not all decisions warrant the same proximity. Once I separated those questions from the org chart entirely, the problem became tractable. What replaced the old model wasn’t elegant or immediate. It involved explicit conversations about categories – the things I needed to hear about within 24 hours, the things I needed to see weekly regardless of status, the things I specifically didn’t need and was consciously delegating. It involved awkward recalibration of what “escalation” meant in our culture. It involved, frankly, a few direct conversations with people who’d been making entirely rational choices based on an implicit brief I’d never actually given them. — The Implication If you lead a large team and feel well-informed, examine that feeling carefully. The sense of being in command is often accurate. Occasionally, it’s a by-product of surrounding yourself, unintentionally, with people who are very good at making things look resolved. The organisations I’ve seen fail most quietly aren’t the ones with bad information. They’re the ones where the information was perfectly fine, but the wrong people decided what the executive needed to know. That decision – what reaches the top – is one of the most consequential in any organisation, and it’s almost never explicitly designed. It just happens. Mostly it happens well. When it doesn’t, it tends to matter at the worst possible moment.
Final Reflections from the Front Lines of Finance
Final Reflections from the Front Lines of Finance The first time I truly understood risk, it wasn’t from a textbook. It was early in my career. I was shadowing a senior executive at a global bank when a rogue trading incident hit the front pages. Overnight, billions vanished. The mood in the office shifted from confident to cautious. You could feel the air tighten. I asked him quietly, “What happened?” He didn’t say much. Just looked up and said, “Someone somewhere believed it wouldn’t happen here.” That one line stuck with me. Because that’s how risk works – quietly, invisibly, and then suddenly, all at once. We All Work in Risk. Whether We Know It or Not. Over the course of this series, we’ve talked about operational risk, reputational damage, innovation, compliance, audits, MRAs and MRIAs, regulatory exams, even moments of crisis when resilience is tested on train tracks – literally. But here’s the truth behind all of it: Risk isn’t a department. It’s a mindset. It’s in every decision we make – from the new product we launch to the shortcut we consider, to the silence we allow in meetings when we should have spoken up. And if there’s anything I’ve learned in 20+ years navigating the world of financial governance and transformation, it’s that the most dangerous risk is the one we think we’ve already covered. Lessons in Humility (and Humor) Let’s be honest – no one wakes up excited to do a Risk Control Self-Assessment. No one dreams of drafting a Volcker Rule attestation. And when a regulator says “we’d like to discuss your resolution planning framework,” your heart doesn’t leap with joy. But these aren’t just check-the-box exercises. They’re stories. They’re scars. They’re proof that we’ve tried, failed, improved, and evolved. Like the time we submitted a 400-page RCSA and forgot to include cyber risk. Or when a junior analyst flagged an unencrypted server and saved us from a headline we never want to read. Or the time we got it all right on paper – only to fail the cultural test that no audit could catch. Risk, at its core, is human. And so the solutions have to be human too. Courage, Not Control, Is What Makes Great Risk Leaders In every story we’ve explored, from managing operational resilience to navigating innovation with regulators breathing down our necks, the leaders who stood out weren’t the ones who played it safest. They were the ones who were honest about uncertainty. They created space for hard questions. They told their teams, “I don’t know either – let’s figure it out together.”They resisted the urge to sanitize risk reports and instead exposed the real issues, even if it meant a tougher conversation with senior management. They understood that risk is not just something to “manage” – it’s something to lead through. So, What Do We Do Now? If you’ve read this far, you’re probably someone who takes governance seriously. Someone who knows that trust is built over time – and lost in seconds. So here’s what I’ll leave you with: If you’re building risk frameworks, build them with curiosity, not just compliance. If you’re leading through uncertainty, prioritize clarity over perfection. And if you’re mentoring others, teach them that risk isn’t something to fear – it’s a lens for better decisions. Because at the end of the day, whether you’re a risk officer, a CEO, a product lead, or a startup founder – you’re in the business of decision-making under uncertainty. That’s all risk really is. And that’s what makes it powerful. About the Author Laksh Vaswani is a global financial executive, transformation strategist, and best-selling author with more than two decades of experience helping organizations navigate complex risk landscapes. A mentor, thought leader, and recipient of the International Achievers Award, Laksh has led risk and compliance efforts at major global institutions across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Through The Risk Chronicles, he shares lessons from the trenches – not to preach, but to invite others into the ongoing conversation of building better, stronger, more ethical organizations. Share this article :