The Reflective Lead

Author: James

  • Embracing Radical Candour: Honest Feedback with Heart

    Embracing Radical Candour: Honest Feedback with Heart

    In the quest for authentic and effective leadership, few concepts are as powerful as radical candour. Coined by Kim Scott, this philosophy blends direct, honest feedback with genuine personal care.

    What is Radical Candour?

    Radical candour encourages leaders to challenge directly while caring personally. It’s a delicate but vital balance — too much criticism without care leads to “obnoxious aggression,” while too much care without feedback results in “ruinous empathy.” Striking the right tone builds trust, strengthens communication, and accelerates team growth.

    Why it Matters

    Radical candour doesn’t mean being unfiltered or harsh. It’s about offering feedback that is both challenging and kind. A key component is creating an environment of psychological safety — which links closely with shielding your team from unnecessary external pressure so they can thrive.

    How to Practice It

    • Start with care: Get to know your team as individuals. Demonstrate genuine interest in their well-being.
    • Be specific with feedback: Avoid vague praise or criticism. Instead, name behaviours and outcomes clearly.
    • Invite challenge: Radical candour is a two-way street. Encourage your team to give you honest feedback, too.

    Further Reading

    For a practical overview and tools to apply radical candour in the workplace, Atlassian offers a great resource: What is Radical Candor and how can you practice it?

    Final Thoughts

    When practiced with care and consistency, radical candour builds stronger, more resilient teams. It pushes us to be better leaders — and better humans — through clarity, compassion, and courage.

  • Taking the Blame, Sharing the Glory: The Quiet Strength of Accountable Leadership

    Taking the Blame, Sharing the Glory: The Quiet Strength of Accountable Leadership

    One of the most powerful — and paradoxically understated — traits of effective leadership is the willingness to quietly shoulder responsibility when things go wrong while shining the spotlight on the team when things go right. This principle of accountable leadership isn’t about martyrdom or ego suppression — it’s about creating a culture where trust, psychological safety, and collective achievement thrive.

    The Leadership Philosophy of Personal Responsibility

    Taking personal responsibility for a team’s failure isn’t always easy. It means standing up in front of stakeholders and saying, “I didn’t get this right,” even if the mistake wasn’t entirely yours. But when done with sincerity, this practice builds enormous credibility. It signals to the team that their leader has their back — and to the wider organisation that leadership isn’t about passing the buck.

    Accountability is more than damage control. When the team succeeds, great leaders don’t say “look what I achieved,” they say, “look what they achieved.” This builds motivation, ownership, and loyalty — and helps develop the next generation of leaders from within.

    Related: Shielding Your Team: The Quiet Power of Leadership Protection

    Research and Insight

    Research supports this approach. A 2022 scoping review in *S African Journal of Human Resource Management* found strong evidence that servant leadership and compassionate leadership foster increased employee well‑being, engagement, and happiness — while significantly reducing burnout and stress. Read the open-access review.

    Moreover, accountable leadership contributes directly to psychological safety, a critical element in high-performing teams. Research from Google’s Project Aristotle showed that teams where members feel safe taking risks without fear of blame outperform those that don’t foster such safety.

    In Practice

    In my own leadership journey, I’ve seen how stepping forward during tough times while stepping back during celebrations nurtures a resilient, empowered team. It doesn’t mean avoiding accountability or failing to address mistakes. Instead, it means embracing mistakes as shared learning opportunities, and treating successes as team triumphs.

    Accountability isn’t just a leadership skill — it’s a leadership stance. And in a world where pressure is often pushed downward, being the buffer for your team can be an act of quiet heroism.

  • Shielding your team

    Shielding your team

    Shielding Your Team: The Quiet Power of Leadership Protection

    One of the most underrated forms of leadership is also one of the quietest: shielding your team. It doesn’t show up in KPIs, sprint demos, or performance reviews — but its impact is foundational. Shielding is about taking the heat so your team doesn’t have to. It’s about being the buffer between your developers and the storms that come from above: shifting priorities, unreasonable expectations, and political noise.

    I’ve had the privilege of working under leaders who did this brilliantly. They protected the team’s focus and energy, absorbing pressure so we could thrive. At the time, I didn’t fully realize the importance of what they were doing — but I felt it. I had space to think, solve hard problems, and grow. Now, as a team lead myself, I try to pass that gift on.

    Shielding isn’t about secrecy or control — it’s about intentional filtering. It’s knowing when to pass something through and when to intercept it. In a remote-first team, this is even more critical. Without the context cues of an office, pressure can arrive via Slack or email like a lightning bolt. A good leader makes sure it’s grounded first.

    As servant leadership teaches, your role isn’t to direct from above — it’s to support from below. Shielding is part of that. It creates psychological safety and stability, which lets developers focus on what they do best: building great things.

    Research supports this approach. A 2023 article in Harvard Business Review highlights that compassionate leadership can significantly reduce employee anxiety and enhance engagement. By acting as a buffer against organizational chaos, leaders foster a more resilient and focused team environment. Read the article.

    Shielding isn’t flashy. It often goes unnoticed. But it’s one of the clearest signals your team can trust you. And in the long run, that trust compounds into something powerful.

    — James

  • Leading Through Service

    Leading Through Service

    Leading Through Service: Embracing Servant Leadership

    In today’s fast-moving, remote-first tech landscape, leadership is no longer about command and control — it’s about support, empowerment, and trust. This is where servant leadership stands out. Originally coined by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s, the concept emphasizes that the best leaders are those who serve first. They focus on the growth and well-being of their teams, rather than their own authority.

    Recent research reinforces this connection. A 2025 case study published in Procedia Computer Science examined the role of servant leadership in agile organizations, showing how it supports autonomy, adaptability, and trust-based team dynamics. These findings are especially relevant to remote and tech teams. Read the full study.

    In my 30+ years in tech — and particularly in the past six years leading remote teams — I’ve seen how adopting a servant leadership mindset fundamentally changes a team’s dynamic. It encourages autonomy, psychological safety, and accountability. When people feel supported, not scrutinized, they do their best work.

    Servant leadership means flipping the traditional pyramid. Rather than positioning yourself as the one in control, you act as the foundation. Your job becomes clearing obstacles, buffering pressure from above, and creating a stable, encouraging environment. In practice, this can look like shielding your team from unnecessary meetings, advocating for them in leadership discussions, or simply checking in to understand how they’re really doing.

    In remote settings, where informal support is often absent, servant leadership fills a vital gap. It helps replace the lost “osmotic” communication of physical offices with intentional structure and presence. By checking in regularly (without micromanaging), encouraging open discussion, and explicitly valuing psychological safety, you create a space where junior and senior developers alike can grow.

    That concept of psychological safety — the ability to speak up, ask for help, or admit mistakes without fear — is critical. It’s especially relevant in distributed teams where misunderstandings or silos can easily form. Servant leadership fosters that safety by replacing fear with trust, and ego with empathy.

    In future posts, I’ll explore how this mindset informs practical decisions: how we structure meetings, how we handle failure, and how we distribute credit. But it all starts here — with the decision to lead through service.

    — James

  • Welcome to The Reflective Lead

    Welcome to The Reflective Lead

    Reflections on Leadership, AI, and Tech Teams

    Welcome to The Reflective Lead — a space for reflection on human-centered tech leadership, remote teamwork, and personal growth in software development. After 30 years working across tech sectors like finance, energy, and healthcare, and six years leading remote teams, I’ve seen how the right leadership approach can transform not only projects — but people.

    This blog is a space for reflection: on leadership, on personal growth, and on building resilient, connected teams in a remote-first world.

    I’ll be sharing a series of articles exploring servant leadership, psychological safety, mentoring in remote teams, deep work, and the intersection between human-centered leadership and emerging AI, among other topics

    Whether you’re a team lead, an aspiring leader, or simply passionate about building better workplaces and thinking deeply about the future of tech — welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

    — James