As we move towards the end of 2025, a year that has had its fair share of challenge for me personally, I decided to take a look back across the conversations, coaching sessions, team development, and moments that have stuck with me.
One of the privileges of the work that I do, is that you get to experience a broad spectrum of leadership showing up in a wide range of situations and environments. You start to notice certain patterns that keep surfacing across different roles, sectors, and personalities. When I thought about the year generally, three themes seem to have shown up more consistently than anything else from my perspective.
This is just my view, based on my experience of working with what must be close to a 100 leaders in 2025.
1. Alignment is something teams keep losing and recreating
If there’s one thing I’ve seen/heard on repeat this year, it’s that many leadership teams believe they’re aligned, until they reflect on how they act together.
On the surface, conversations look clear, there’s nodding, everyone agrees. Then, when it comes to checking in on progress, it appears to have stalled. When you start to dig into this you find, different assumptions, interpretations, and expectations begin to surface.
What I’ve noticed is this….Leaders often assume alignment happens in the discussion…But alignment is actually tested in the action that follows…And when pressure increases even lesser degrees of alignment seem to appear.
I would say this is nobody’s fault, it’s just how teams work when everyone is busy and things are moving fast. Everyone knows I’ve spent my fair share of time in water companies and this is evident in an incident rich environment.
The teams that make progress are the ones who slow down long enough and learn to check for real clarity, not just agreement. A habit they have is that they tend to revisit decisions. For example if I heard “What exactly do we mean by that?” type questions, that would be in this ball park.
A question for reflection: Where does alignment tend to drop in your team? What conversation might help close that gap?
2. Leadership behaviours aren’t always the root, the conditions leaders are operating in often are
This has been the strongest theme in my coaching work this year.
Most leaders know what “good leadership” looks like. They can describe the behaviours and they understand the expectations. They don’t really need more information.
What they’re struggling with is something more subtle….The conditions around them often make good leadership difficult to sustain.
Some variations of what i’ve heard:
“I want to coach more, but I’m in back-to-back meetings.”
“I want to delegate, but I don’t have time to support the handover.”
“I know I should think strategically, but the system keeps pulling me back into the operational stuff.”
When I hear leaders talk like this, I don’t perceive a lack of ability, I hear a lack of space, support, or structure, coming from the wider system.
What this year reinforced for me is that leadership isn’t an individual thing, it sits within a system. We can look at an individual and their impact, but we need to remember they are part of some more interconnected. The system can either amplify or undermine the behaviours organisations say they want, often without realising it.
The shifts happen when leaders start taking more control and shaping the conditions around them. When they do that, leadership behaviours start to feel more natural, not forced. I’ve done a lot of work with leaders around links between leadership identity and operating environment and its crazy how many times this is off.
A question for reflection: What is the one environmental factor that, if changed, would make good leadership easier for you right now?
3. The most valuable thing leaders gained this year wasn’t advice, it was space to think
Across almost every coaching session in 2025, there has been a moment where a leader has said something like:
“This is the only time I stop and actually think.”
When you consider that for a second, it doesn’t support leadership optimum leadership development of either individual or team.
Modern day business is 100 miles an hour and has pushed many people into constant reaction, planning, solving, responding, producing, moving on. Strategic thinking and reflective practice all suffer under that amount of demands.
Regardless of this, I noticed something very clear this year:
When leaders create genuine space to think, even for 30 minutes, I see/hear more clarity, reduced pressure, renewed energy and genuine confidence improve.
Its easy to consider thinking time as being indulgent. It’s not, it’s productive. Leaders need….
• Space to see what’s really going on and the bigger picture
• Distance from the noise
• Making sense of what they’ve been feeling
• Perspective that simply isn’t available in the middle of the day-to-day
I seriously believe that most leaders don’t need more leadership content (some do of course). They need better thinking conditions, which may require different environmental factors such as a coach to aid that thinking.
A question for reflection: Where can you identify and sustain some thinking space in the next few weeks?
Looking ahead to 2026
So, these three themes, alignment, conditions, and thinking space, are definitely shaping how i’m approaching Facilitation & Coaching in 2026.
Hopefully these reflections offer you a moment to pause and consider what this year has taught you, and what you might want to take into the next one.
All the best for Xmas and New Year