KCA Blog:

Lessons from a Team Day - leadership, self-management and decision-making

Anisha Gadhia, 29 January 2025

If you’ve ever heard me talking about leadership, you’ll know it’s the one part of my practice that I never claim to have mastered. For me, it’s always about ‘leadership practise’ - showing up, doing the work, making mistakes, apologising, learning, and then trying again. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from other leaders is that I don’t have to hold all the answers. Steve Jobs said it best: ‘It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do’. So, I commit to holding safe space (for collaboration), and I try to stay anchored in nurturing a culture where everyone’s unique knowledge, skills and experiences are valued and actively sought out.

The core aspiration for KCA is self-management and distributed leadership. These are values that many organisation’s espouse but they are challenging to bring alive, because it is so much easier to default to the safety of a familiar hierarchy. KCA’s restructure at the end of last year has created opportunities to examine how we operate. On a recent team day, we took time to reflect on our ways of working and how we can adapt, improve, and thrive in this new chapter. The conversation was honest, practical and energising. How do we enable a culture where people thrive and lead in areas where they have expertise and insight? Here are some thoughts from the day that have stayed with me.

My Commitment to Listening Better:
I’ve decided to speak less and listen more. I’m resisting the temptation to offer opinions. In turn this means that I don’t feel the pressure to have all the answers or to connect ideas. On our team day I committed to holding the meeting space, I summarised the conversation at various intervals, and I offered reflections on where we had got to. The team resolved concerns around ways of working and created their own actions for flow-down issues that need to be solved. All I had to do was trust the team dynamic, and model vulnerability - I need their expertise and support. The result: a super creative and productive day with none of my energy depleted.

The Power of Boundaries:
Our commitment to a four-day week has been a game-changer. The team told me that this was about wellbeing and about focus. By containing our working week, we’re creating space for flow, reducing the creep of busyness, and avoiding burnout. We have very low sickness levels at KCA and high retention rates.
The team agreed that this is not about rigid work practices – we’re flexible and adapt when needed - but it’s an important core KCA value; and so far, our partners and commissioners have not only been supportive, but they’re also inspired.

Managing the Inner Critic:
One of the most powerful reminders of the day was the value of supervision as a space to address the inner critic - that voice that says, ‘you’re not doing enough’ or ‘you should be working harder’.
I want my team to know that it’s okay to pause, reflect, and ask for support (and they told me that they want the same for me).

Trusting the Team:
We explored team decision-making within a lean management structure. How do we balance individual autonomy with shared responsibility? A big takeaway was the importance of trust. Whether they are Programme Managers, Trainer Consultants, or Partnership Development Managers, everyone is trusted to use their judgement to make real-time decisions.

The challenge, and the opportunity, is to ensure that the systems we’ve built keep supporting this. Clear processes, early collaboration, and good communication mean that leadership can be shared without losing coherence. On our next ‘Team Anchor day’ (we meet like this monthly), we will explore what happens when conflict arises, and consider strategies to resolve it in ways that preserve and strengthen the important relationships we’ve built.

Co-Creation:
We talked about co-creation, both internally and with commissioners. This is something KCA is deeply committed to. We want to get to know the settings and organisations we work with and ensure that our learning and development meets their needs. We decided that this is essentially about partnership: understanding what’s needed, building on what works, applying learning from previous programmes and staying open to new ideas.

When it comes to co-creation we are strongly influenced by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child’s 2016 paper called From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts. It defines co-creation as the combination of ‘multiple domains of knowledge, expertise and experience’ with the domains defined as science, practice, community and policy. With a knowledge base that is powered by these domains, KCA remains on the cutting edge of Trauma Informed Practice.

Experimentation and Flow:
Finally, we reminded ourselves that change is constant, and leadership requires experimentation. We are all learning, and expertise in a fast-moving world is not a static achievement. When adapting to new roles, trying out new business sectors and evolving our training content; curiosity and responsiveness are key.

Reflections and learning:
For me, the thread running through all of this is balance: balancing boundaries with flexibility, effort with ease, structure with flow; and my leadership must be dynamic, relational and ultimately human.

If anything here resonates or if you’ve created space for self-management and shared leadership in your teams - I'd love to hear what’s worked for you?

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