What if the most helpful thing you can do as a leader is not step in?

In this solo episode of Leading Well with Steph Edusei, Steph explores the instinct to fix, why being useful can become so closely tied to our sense of worth, and what changes when we learn that leadership does not always require us to have the answer.

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Drawing on her years working in the NHS, Steph reflects on how comfortable she became with problems that needed solving. Someone is struggling, something isn't working, there is a difficult issue to untangle, and her instinct is to find the route through.

But not everything in leadership is a problem to be solved. People aren't problems. Emotions aren't problems. Discomfort isn't necessarily something we should rush to remove. Building on her recent conversation with Dr Asha Patel about trauma-informed leadership, Steph asks whether understanding what someone is experiencing always means taking responsibility for making it better.

She also considers what happens when our identity becomes wrapped up in being the person who can sort things out, and whether some women carry wider expectations about helping, caring and keeping everyone happy into their leadership.

This isn't an argument for stepping back from genuine leadership responsibility. Sometimes we need to intervene, challenge unfairness, remove barriers or make the decision. It is an invitation to notice the difference between supporting someone and carrying them, and to ask whether stepping in is genuinely what they need.

In this episode, Steph explores:

• Why the instinct to fix can become part of our leadership identity
• What her NHS background taught her about solving problems and taking action
• Why understanding somebody does not automatically make their difficulty ours to solve
• The possible gendered expectations around being helpful, caring and keeping everyone happy
• Why compassion is not the same as rescuing people
• The difference between supporting someone and carrying them
• Why saying “I don't know yet” can sometimes be an honest leadership response
• How asking “What do you need from me?” can create space for others to think and act for themselves

Leading Well is a podcast for people who want to lead with clarity, care and integrity, without losing themselves in the process.

Leading Well - leadership support: https://www.stephedusei.co.uk/leading-well

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What might someone’s behaviour be communicating that we haven’t yet been curious enough to notice?

In this episode of Leading Well with Steph Edusei, Steph is joined by Dr Asha Patel, clinical psychologist and founder of Innovating Minds, to explore trauma-informed leadership and what it can teach us about behaviour, compassion, accountability and workplace culture.

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Asha shares how her work in forensic mental health led her to question why people were reaching services after years of trauma without having been able to access effective support earlier. That frustration eventually led her to set up Innovating Minds and focus on changing systems, rather than only supporting people once they had reached crisis.

Steph and Asha explore what trauma-informed leadership actually means. Asha explains why it is not an approach reserved for people with a particular diagnosis or known history of trauma. Instead, it involves being curious about people’s experiences, recognising that behaviour is a form of communication and paying attention to how workplace processes and leadership behaviour can affect people.

They also talk about compassion and accountability. Trauma-informed leadership does not mean avoiding difficult conversations, ignoring poor performance or removing boundaries. It can mean being honest about what has to happen while continuing to treat the person going through it as a human being.

And the conversation turns to leaders themselves: the temptation to hold everybody else, the importance of recognising our own capacity, and why creating safer workplaces also requires leaders to notice how they are showing up.

In this episode, Steph and Asha explore:

• What trauma-informed leadership actually means
• Why trauma can affect the body as well as the way we think
• What behaviour may be communicating beneath the surface
• Why leaders can be too quick to move into fixing rather than staying with someone
• How compassion and accountability can exist together
• Why workplace systems and processes deserve scrutiny too
• The effect a leader’s own stress and emotional state can have on others
• Why leaders need to recognise their own limits and create space for themselves too

Leading Well is a podcast for people who want to lead with clarity, care and integrity, without losing themselves in the process.

Leading Well - leadership support: https://www.stephedusei.co.uk/leading-well

Find out more about Asha’s work: innovatingmindsgroup.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashalpatel/

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When does leadership stop being hard and start becoming harmful?

In this solo episode of Leading Well with Steph Edusei, Steph explores what happens when leadership gets heavy, drawing on periods in her own career when she was still functioning, still making decisions and still getting things done, but was struggling far more than she recognised at the time.

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Steph reflects on particularly difficult periods while working at Healthwatch and earlier in the NHS, when responsibility, long hours, personal pressures and her own determination to keep going became too much. She considers how easy it can be for capable people to mistake the ability to cope for evidence that they should simply keep coping.

The episode explores some of the patterns Steph carried between roles: the need to deliver, taking responsibility for things that were not entirely hers and being the person others relied upon. These qualities had helped her throughout her career, but without boundaries they could also become liabilities.

Steph considers the difference between leadership being hard and becoming harmful, and the familiar promise of “after this”: after this deadline, after this project, after this difficult period, then I will rest. But leadership rarely runs out of things that need doing.

This is not an argument that leadership should always feel easy. Responsibility will sometimes be uncomfortable and demanding. It is an invitation to notice when continuing to function is no longer the same as being well, to question what we are carrying, and to recognise that how leaders treat themselves also teaches other people what is expected of them.

In this episode, Steph explores:

• Why capable people can mistake coping for evidence that they should keep taking on more
• How burnout can sometimes look surprisingly productive from the outside
• What happens when our identity becomes tangled up with being capable and reliable
• Why strengths without boundaries can become liabilities
• The difference between leadership being hard and becoming harmful
• How “after this” can become a way of postponing rest indefinitely
• Why looking after ourselves as leaders also has a cultural impact
• What we might need to stop carrying rather than simply become better at carrying

Leading Well is a podcast for people who want to lead with clarity, care and integrity, without losing themselves in the process.

Leading Well - leadership support: https://www.stephedusei.co.uk/leading-well

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