Why The Natural Leader began— and why I think most leadership development is solving the wrong problem.
I’ve spent my career representing people. PR, marketing, communications — twenty years of sitting close enough to organisations to see what actually holds them up, and what quietly brings them down. Stakeholders, behaviours, values, culture, communication – internal and external.
I soon found myself questioning why PR was media relations, when surely it should be a profession responsible for reputation? So, I got curious and focused on personal and corporate reputation. What exactly was it? What did it compromise? What was the latest thinking and best practice? All while working in the real world, seeing and hearing how reputation – the collection of perceptions and beliefs held about an organisation or leader, by those with an interest in them – affected the ability to bring about change. I learned the value of reputation, the fragility of it and what it took to be understood by others, in a way that you wish to be understood.
A striking moment was walking into a large financial insinuation in Canary Wharf, where six foot tall, glass letters of the company’s values stood proudly in reception. Only to have a meeting, fifteen minutes later, with a senior leader where my lived experience of those values was quite the opposite.
I learned and experienced, as a consultant to large brands that trust in an organisation doesn’t come from the strategy paper. It comes from whether its leaders can do three things. 1. Be themselves; the practice of aligning personal and professional values, in every moment, not just the convenient ones. 2. Be vulnerable; actively care about finding the common ground and a common purpose, then being genuinely curious about how best to connect others to it. 3. Be in service of something better, to hold that belief and the responsibility for creating the conditions where people, the purpose and the system can thrive.
When these are in place, communication comes naturally, healthy and strong reputations are built and maintained, culture, individuals and organisations thrive.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And almost nobody was teaching it.
What I saw from the inside
I went on to hold senior positions myself, which meant I got to see leadership development from the buying seat, not just the observing one. And something struck me.
Leadership development or training was — is still— mostly an outside skill offered as a suite of interventions. Some bought communications skills, some bought coaching, some bought resilience. Rarely was one way of being, one language of leadership, one common path of leadership development stages defines for differing levels and differing people across a whole organisations.
Executive education and senior leadership, too often, practiced the intelligence exercise of leadership, frameworks you could recite in a meeting, models you swap with peers, powerpoints and pictures that could be put in board papers. What it wasn’t, almost ever, was a practice in how to be a leader. Nobody was teaching that. I kept waiting to find someone who did. Nobody did.
At the same time, I watched organisations perform a version of themselves on the outside that they weren’t living on the inside. Values on the website. Something else in the room. And here’s the thing about stakeholders — employees, customers, boards, communities — they always know. They feel imbalance, they feel mis-alignment. Without felt, authentic connection behind a shared purpose, communication doesn’t persuade anyone. It just confirms what people already suspected. When the lived experience doesn’t match the manufactured promise, it falls on deaf ears. And eventually, it fails.
It came clear that, whether a leader, a team or an organisation, if you haven’t done the work on what you actually stand for, you’ll fall for anything. Leaders do. Teams do. Whole organisations do. And I did, for a while.
Then it clicked
Someone suggested I train as an executive coach. I didn’t fully know why at the time. I do now.
Coaching showed me the internal world I’d been missing. The starting point for outstanding leadership. The leaders who did the deepest work weren’t the ones chasing the next framework — they were the ones who’d got curious about how to connect with themselves better, first, so they had something real to lead from. Vision, drive, a genuine mission to serve —not themselves- but others.
I watched it, again and again, begin with the individual. Not the org chart. The person. Another striking experience was, as the most junior person in a meeting of financial CEOs in London, I watched the host – also a CEO – who hardly spoke, but listened to his peers and their discussion. When he did speak, others listened. When he spoke he represented everyone’s voice and took the meeting forward in leaps and bounds in one, simple statement or purposeful enquiry. At lunchtime, I experienced how comfortable, at ease and welcoming he was as he stepped back at the buffet to invite me forward and offer me a place. What did he have that others’ didn’t? The answer was a complete sense of ease, someone who rooted in his values and acted from deep authenticity. At the natural leader we’ve come to term this as ‘ the natural state’ – intellectually calm, emotionally open and physically at ease.
Then came the piece that finally tied the outside and the inside together: heading up the leadership portfolio at a world-respected drama academy in London, where professional actors worked with senior executives — national and international — on leadership presence. Not presentation skills. Presence. How the body is used. How breath is used. How voice, words, emotion and physicality combine to actually engage someone, inspire someone, connect with someone, move someone toward change. Skills that shape every leader’s impact, every single day — and that, again, almost nobody teaches.
And yet seeing that taught or ‘coached’, without executive coaching qualification, without hands-on leadership experience also felt empty. How can you claim to build ‘confidence in communication’ simply by teaching communication skills techniques and without having the professional coaching skills needed to actually address with the mindset of ‘unconfident’?
But, put all those pieces next to each other and you can see the shape of the gap and the real need in leadership. The market mostly teaches the doing, OR teaches the communication, OR coaches the person — rarely all three, and rarely from those who have actually sat in the boardroom, the P&L conversation, the restructure, the hard call at 6pm on a Friday. Lived experience, translated into practice. Personalised and experiential learning. That’s the rare thing. That’s the missing thing. That’s where the natural leader is placed.
The why. A Saturday morning at 8am…
I’m at the best in the morning and on this particular Saturday, the final piece clicked. What had been a constant influence underneath all of it was one that has lasted longer than any of my career — nature.
Camping as a child on the Isle of Wight. Sitting in a field, in a haystack, watching the sun go down. Swimming the open water, walking in the Lake District hills, skiing in the mountains, a run round the block with friends, noticing a leaf, pausing to watch a butterfly, being taught the names of flowers by my parents while out on a walk (this still happens, I now have greater appreciation of it) . Nature, it’s been the thread through my whole life, long before I had language for why. When we think about it, I believe the moments we all remember or feel most alive involve nature.
One Saturday morning, around 8am, it properly landed. Nature isn’t a nice-to-have.It’s not something we step into but something we are part of already. It’s not separate from leadership, it’s the reason for leadership. Nature is not a wellness afternoon or a nice backdrop for a team photo. It’s something that we are. It’s the largest, most intelligent living system there is — the original expert in how living things grow, adapt, self-regulate and endure. It is, I’d argue, our greatest teacher, our greatest resource, and our biggest single shared stakeholder — whether we act like it or not. Seeing Nature as the grounding for leadership transforms how you lead.
Nature isn’t just where I find my own clarity. I’ve come to believe it’s our single greatest reason to serve, and to lead. We learn from it. And we lead in service of it. There is no greater role of a leader than to lead for nature.
Twenty years, one philosophy.
That’s where The Natural Leader comes from. Not a marketing angle — twenty years of lived experience, of watching the same gap from every side of it: communications, senior leadership, executive coaching, presence work with actors, and a lifelong pull toward the natural world that I stopped trying to separate from the “serious” work a long time ago.
I believe that you can’t, truly, discover how ‘you’ lead from theories or intellect, you can’t learn ‘your unique’ way of being a leader through just communication skills or training. Leadership is a unique, lived experience and an intentional, embodied practice.
Nor can I stand here and believe that we only lead for profit and that financial returns are still the single measure of success in a world where mass displacement, floods and drought are becoming common place. There has never been a more vital time to lead for nature.
The Natural Leader philosophy is simple, even if the practice is rigorous: leadership lives across three living systems — the individual leader, the organisation, and the natural world — and they succeed or fail together. Healthy. Optimal. Enduring. That’s what we’re building leaders toward.
If this is landing with you
If you’re a Head of Leadership Development and any of this is uncomfortably familiar — the training that changes nothing after week three, the values statement that doesn’t match what your people actually experience, the sense that something’s missing but you can’t quite name it — you’re not wrong, and you’re not alone. It’s the gap I’ve spent twenty years trying to close and that our World-class ecosystem of amazing people in The Natural Leader team have spent two years creating programmes to take leadership forward to where it should, actually, be. Please know it can be different.
And on a more personal note: if any part of this story is your story too — if you’ve felt that same pull toward something more honest, more embodied, more real than the leadership development you’ve been handed — I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Comment, message me, or just say hello. This work only gets better in great company and real connection.