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.