Who can challenge you—and what happens when they do?
People around a leader may have much at stake: their role, your approval, a shared investment or a longstanding relationship. Concerns can be softened and disagreement withheld. A warning that remains unexamined can become a decision made on incomplete information.
I work outside your organisation’s reporting relationships. We can examine a preferred course of action, evidence that contradicts it, and the personal investment that may make reconsidering it difficult. You can expect understanding and direct challenge. My interpretations are open to challenge too.
We look closely at your response to disagreement: whether you become defensive, hear disloyalty, or move too quickly to explain. We consider how to invite candour, take concerns seriously and show people what happens as a result. The work should help honest conversation become possible beyond this room.
Think rigorously. Understand deeply. Discern what matters.
IQ, EQ and SQ are shorthand here for three dimensions of our conversation.
IQ — intellectual scrutiny. What do the facts support? What evidence would change your mind? Which commercial assumptions need testing, and where is specialist advice needed?
EQ — emotional understanding. How are trust, power, loyalty, rivalry and personal history shaping the situation? What is being felt but left unsaid, including by you?
SQ — spiritual discernment. What do conscience, purpose and responsibility ask of you? What might acting with integrity cost—in approval, advantage or control? We explore these questions in the language of your own beliefs and values.
These dimensions meet in the same decision. A founder considering succession may need to assess a successor’s competence, examine their own difficulty relinquishing authority, and decide what responsible stewardship now means.
Bring the missing perspectives into view.
We examine the challenge from several positions: yours, the people affected, the organisation’s needs and the consequences for your personal life. We distinguish what others have actually said from what we imagine they think, and identify perspectives you still need to hear.
Where another person’s view is missing, we consider how you might seek it directly. We attend to organisational pressures and other people’s conduct as carefully as your own reactions. Understanding your part need not mean assuming all the responsibility.
We turn that understanding into a next step: a conversation with your chair, a clearer agreement with a co-founder, an appointment to reconsider, or a concern to bring to the board. In continuing work, we revisit what you did, what changed and what still requires attention.
Depth of attention. Freedom to question.
My approach brings together Jungian analytic training, theological and contemplative formation, and experience of founding a specialist practice and holding clinical leadership responsibilities. Across thirty years of work with people through crisis and change, I have attended to the difficult relationship between what we understand, what we feel and how we live.
At Northstar, this informs individual private advisory. We stay close to your actual responsibilities while making room for questions of identity, meaning and conscience. The work supports how you exercise leadership alongside your board and specialist advisers; formal oversight and accountability remain with those responsible for them.
What needs a more candid conversation?
Send a few lines about the relationship, challenge or decision you are considering. Our first conversation is free and lasts ninety minutes. We explore what you want from the work and whether the fit is right.
If we continue, a Northstar Day gives us uninterrupted time to examine the situation, test competing interpretations and consider the choices ahead. Ongoing individual advisory offers continuity as you act and circumstances develop. We agree the format and fees beforehand.
In person in Surrey and London, or privately online across the UK and internationally. We agree confidentiality and its limits at the outset.