What is your leadership responsibility?

As the week begins, is it worth pausing on what leadership really asks of us?

Leadership isn’t a title. It’s a responsibility.

You don’t get to choose when to wear it, like a jaunty hat or a birthday badge.

It isn’t a line in a job description you can point to when it suits you.

Leadership is full-time.

How you show up. How you react.

How you set the tone when things are uncomfortable, messy, or inconvenient.

Staying alert to when you may be part of the problem, rather than assuming your team is.

Because when a leader opts out of their responsibility, the impact rarely stays contained.

Small ripples become deep fractures across trust, culture, systems and relationships they are meant to be the custodian of.

Maybe you’ve felt it.

I’ve seen it in businesses I’ve worked in.

I hear it repeatedly in coaching rooms with senior leaders and teams.

It often shows up as some combination of:

• ‘I don’t have time for the drama. They need to sort it out themselves.’

• Private side conversations that feel supportive in the moment, but quietly undermine the group.

• Favourites and hierarchies that are never named, yet everyone can feel.

• A belief that stepping back equals empowerment, when in reality it’s abdication.

What’s interesting is its very rarely malicious.

Lots of leaders are busy, capable, well-intentioned.

And often, they genuinely don’t see it.

But by the time a team or business says ‘the leader is the problem’, the system has usually already adapted:

• People stop giving direct feedback

• Silence is mistaken for stability

• Conversations move underground

• Energy goes into preservation, not creation.

Your best people leave.

From the leader’s seat, things can look calm.

The system is compensating. And calm is often mistaken for healthy.

The work I do in these situations is rarely about mediation or motivation.

It’s about slowing the system down enough to see what’s actually happening:

• Where responsibility has blurred into avoidance

• Where good intent is being experienced as absence

• Where private reassurance, framed as support, replaces public leadership

Once those patterns are named, behaviour can start to shift .

Not because people are told what to do, but because impact becomes visible.

If this is your reality, assume positive intent.

But don’t abandon yourself in the process.

Trust what you’re noticing.

Looking for clarity in how you’re led isn’t drama.

Naming patterns isn’t disloyalty.

And leadership doesn’t get to pause just because it’s uncomfortable.

The leaders who change cultures often aren’t the loudest or the most charismatic.

They’re not too busy trying to prove they’re the smartest in the room.

They’re the ones willing to notice the impact they’re having and take responsibility for where it lands.

If you’ve noticed this around you, you’re not overreacting. You’re noticing the impact.

And noticing is where leadership starts.

I often come back to one question:

What is my responsibility in this situation?