C-suite Archives - Goldcrest Partners

Leading through adversity

When the Soviet Union began to break up in the early 1990s, the Americans coined the acronym VUCA to describe the situation. It stood for:

Volatile
Uncertain
Chaotic
Ambiguous

It was a good way to describe how things felt to ‘Kremlin Watchers’ during those times and perhaps more widely understood today. A post-pandemic global recession, war in Europe, disruption to food and energy supplies, runaway inflation, rising interest rates threatening the viability of mortgages, and that’s before we talk about climate change!

If ever there was a VUCA world, this must be it.

It’s easy to look at what’s going on and get distracted, worried or upset. As current or aspiring business leaders, part of leading through adversity is about knowing how to focus when times are tough. From my military background, there are two key principles we can apply to the business world that effective leaders should keep in mind in this type of situation.

Plan, prepare, and practise

During the 2020-2021 Vendée Globe non-stop around the world yacht race, the French sailor Kevin Escoffier was about 800 nautical miles off Cape Town when his yacht quite literally folded in on itself.

It sank in two minutes.

This race is for yachts crewed by just one person, so Escoffier was on his own. He had just 120 seconds to radio a message to his onshore team and get into his life raft with a grab-bag of emergency rations and a personal AIS beacon which transmitted his position to rescue crews.

Escoffier completed all these urgent tasks and survived. He sent the radio message, set up his life raft, grabbed his emergency rations and beacon. All in a frighteningly short time window.

This was no accident. Escoffier had planned for just such an emergency. He knew what he needed to do, he knew where to find everything and he practised his response many times.

Plan. Prepare. Practise.

These are the three Ps that can save your life when you’re in choppy waters and serve as a valuable template for how we can navigate a VUCA environment as business leaders.

When times are good it can seem pessimistic to be scenario planning for disruptions that are distant risks rather than immediate realities, but you will be grateful when it matters.

Don’t panic!

When things go wrong, you may want to scream, or cry, or punch the wall in frustration and those who advocate for “authentic leadership” can interpret this as being unfiltered with our personal emotional experience. However, in leadership as in life, there is a time and a place for everything. Sometimes our authentic desire to be professional and the best leader for our people may best be fulfilled by giving others confidence and support when they are concerned, rather than fully expressing our own vulnerabilities.

Another sailing story to illustrate the merit of this more stoical approach is personal to me. I can tell you in no uncertain terms how it felt captaining a yacht around the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland through a strong tide and bad weather. On the inside I was panicking that we were in serious trouble and angry at myself for leading my crew into a dangerous situation, but I needed to maintain my composure.

We were quite literally in stormy waters and the expression “worse things happen at sea” was providing very little comfort.

The crew were asking if everything was all right. I needed to be honest about the reality of the situation. It was important they knew to take safety seriously and generally be at a heightened state of readiness. But it was also important for them to know that I had this under control, was confident in my ability to deal with the situation and that they could trust me and focus on the task at hand.

The very fact I am writing this now is proof that we made it.

Once we were safely back on land, I disclosed how I had been feeling at the time and reflected on some things I thought I could have done differently. I believed that was the right time and place for me to share my vulnerability with my crew.

As a leader in business, when you’re in metaphorical stormy waters, your people will look to you. When times are tough, it is vital to be honest about the realities of the situation. Your people want to know what’s going on and it builds trust. it is also important how you convey your emotions. If you’re panicked, flapping like a windsock, they will rightly have cause to worry. Only now they’re not just worried about a bad situation, they’re also worried about whether you’re the right person to lead them through it.

It’s all about the context

The common theme for both these principles is context. We plan, prepare and practise for situations that are not current but are important for us to know how to manage when the time comes. How we lead is also contextual. There are times to be authentically emotional and honest and there are also times when a display of confidence and in yourself and others is what is needed. Balanced leaders understand the context and how to respond.

Shaping company culture in a hybrid-working world

Everything that leaders say and do reveals something about their organisation’s culture. Every business has a company culture. You can’t choose not to have one. You just do. The question is, “Is it a culture that you’ve proactively shaped? Or is it a culture that has evolved because you’ve left it to its own devices?”

What is an organisational culture?

There are many ways to define culture. At its simplest, some say culture is just behaviour. However, we think there’s a lot more to it than that. Another way to define it is to say that culture is the underlying assumptions, values, beliefs and expectations shared by an organisation’s members. It can be positive or negative, proactive or reactive.

There are many models of organisational culture. The Johnson-Scholes model suggests that a culture is built on the following six factors:

• Control systems

• Rituals and routines

• Stories

• Symbols

• Organisational structures

• Power structures

We’re going to explore these factors to discuss how leaders can shape culture to achieve effective hybrid working.

Control systems

Organisations use different means to control employee behaviour, from pay to training to disciplinary systems, and many more. When employees work from home, this reduces the amount of direct control leaders have over them.

Leaders can either choose to trust the individual, give them clear boundaries and expectations, and let them get on, or not. If your people aren’t engaged and motivated enough to work productively, trying to micro-manage them won’t improve the situation.

Indeed, showing that you trust them will go a long way towards increasing their motivation. Most of us extend this level of trust regularly. When we hire a babysitter, for example. Or when we have a builder working on our house. So why wouldn’t we do the same for our people?

Rituals and routines

Hybrid working creates huge opportunities to change pre-existing rituals and routines. Many employees are now unfamiliar with the old routines or are new and never knew them in the first place. This enables leaders to establish new ones that would be more suited to the culture they’d like to develop.

At the same time, the continuation of full or part-time remote working brings with it the need for fresh approaches to how we work together. For some employees hybrid working materially improves their work-life balance and offering this flexibility is critical to attract and retain the best talent. If an employee values pausing work from time to time to attend to other activities e.g. exercise, family, domestic and then make up later on, then that too could be a valuable ‘benefit in kind’.

However this needs to be a two-way street. There is increasing consensus that certain actives are best performed in-person, together (Amazon – 3 day week) and variable hours are ideally a win-win for all parties concerned. Give and take is the name of the game. If it isn’t working then there are probably underlying cultural issues to address.

Stories

Stories are important because they tell us about who we are, where we come from, where we are going and why we are going there. Post-Covid, we have the opportunity to create new stories. However, this means consciously creating them, deciding who are the ‘main characters’ of the stories, and what morals, messages and questions do we want those stories to offer.

Stories are most effective when based around shared experiences. Look at Automattic Inc, the owner and operator of WordPress which supports this website and millions of others like it. Almost all of their 2,000 employees in 97 countries work remotely. In light of this geographic dispersion, founder Matt Mullenweg recognised the need to periodically bring the company together, create connections and, most importantly, make stories.

A few times each year all employees gather in one location for a meaningful amount of time. When they do, the company makes sure that alongside strategy presentations, project meetings and a multitude of business discussions, they create stories – because that’s what people remember. In this way, Automattic creates a cultural narrative based on a shared experience.

Symbols

In this sense, symbols are artefacts that hold the power of something important to the culture of the organisation. They act as a tangible resource that enables us to connect with something that is intangible. They can represent a memory, an idea, a value, a hope that is part of the organisational story.

The question here is – ‘What are the symbols of your organisation and what do they mean?’

Nations have flags, officials often have uniforms, sports teams have mascots. In our homes we have sentimental items that represent moments that matter to us. Symbols remind us of our place in the family of things.

Most corporations could do more to leverage the power of symbolism. As a result, many confuse symbols with their company logo and miss an opportunity to communicate the company culture.

At Goldcrest Partners, we believe that symbols are more important than ever with dispersed working habits. Since an office building is no longer the thing that binds us, finding other ways to share symbolic common ground is more important than ever.

Organisational structures

These are the formal structures and hierarchy of an organisation, as well as the informal routes to get things done. In our experience, many organisations can get bogged down looking to update or change their formal structures while not paying enough attention to the informal.

Formal structures are important to provide the infrastructure of an organisation, however they are by definition rigid, can take time to build and it can be disruptive and expensive to change them. They are well complemented by informal channels that fill in the gaps and get things done quickly.

Culture is a great way of encouraging informal engagement to support hybrid working. Things are changing more quickly than formal structures are able. Therefore we need to adapt and to get things done in the meantime.

Power structures

This refers to how people have the power and influence to get things done. Again, it is useful to consider both formal power, which accrues to a specific role, and also informal power, which is a more about influence and often described as “soft” but is no less effective.

Informal power structures reflect the non-hierarchical relationships that are valuable in communicating messages and accomplishing tasks. They are more important than ever when hybrid working and benefit from being nurtured and cultivated to align efforts and motivate others.

Another phrase to describe the most influential people within an organisation is “culture carriers”. If you can identify your “culture carriers” they can help you influence across your team or the organisation with their impactful voice.

Culture is key to effective hybrid working

Ultimately, organisations either have a culture the leadership consciously craft or ended up with one by accident. We believe that culture is key to effective hybrid working and will be on the agenda for all successful organisations of the future.

Confidential advisory for leadership succession planning

The Brief

Our client, the CEO of a significant global real assets investor, engaged Goldcrest Partners to provide confidential advisory support during a period of strategic transition. With a long-term view toward leadership succession and organisational clarity, the CEO wanted a trusted external partner to help them navigate complex governance questions and refine executive role definitions to prepare the business for future leadership shifts. The brief required a blend of strategic counsel, sounding board support and practical input on people and structure – all delivered with discretion and deep contextual understanding.

Our Delivery

Through a series of one-to-one advisory sessions, we supported the CEO in shaping the evolution of certain Executive Committee roles, helping to clarify boundaries and responsibilities in anticipation of a future leadership handover. By acting as a confidential thought partner, where the CEO tested ideas and scenarios, we provided feedback on draft role specifications and advised on governance implications.

The Impact

Our work helped the CEO bring greater clarity and confidence to a sensitive and strategically important transition. The roles were successfully redefined and socialised with key stakeholders, laying the groundwork for a smooth succession process. The CEO valued the ability to think aloud and pressure-test ideas in a trusted, external setting. The relationship has since evolved into an ongoing advisory partnership, with Goldcrest Partners continuing to support the client’s leadership agenda across a range of people and organisational topics.

Execution drag usually begins in unresolved decisions

A strategy offsite goes well. The priorities are sensible, the ambition feels credible and the senior team leaves the room believing it has real alignment. Six months later, the organisation has moved, but not with the pace or coherence people expected.

This is usually described as an execution problem. Though often, it is something slightly different.

In large organisations, execution drag rarely begins with a bad strategy. More likely is that it begins with decisions that were discussed, but never really settled. Priorities were named, but not made exclusive. Trade-offs were recognised, but not owned. Authority looked clear in the room, but then became blurred as the strategy travelled through regions, functions and reporting lines.

That is where momentum leaks away.

So, while the strategy may be sound, the problem is that the decisions around it are too soft. What has genuinely become less important? Which activities are losing resource so others can gain it? Who decides when two parts of the business optimise for different outcomes? Which choices are closed, and which are still open? If those questions are not answered firmly enough, people further down the organisation start having to guess.

That guessing is expensive. Teams try to honour the new direction while also keeping legacy expectations alive. The result is effort without enough movement. Everyone feels busy, but fewer things actually shift.

There is also a human side to this. Senior teams often underestimate how much energy change actually consumes. A strategy can feel clear at the top because a small number of people have spent a concentrated amount of time shaping it. Lower down, it lands as another addition to an already crowded agenda. If the supporting decisions are not clear, the organisation absorbs the strategy as pressure rather than direction.

This is why execution depends so heavily on decision quality. Good strategy creates direction, but only clean decisions create enough coherence for the system to move. Which tensions are likely to reopen? Where will exceptions start to creep in? Which stakeholders will interpret the priorities differently unless someone keeps restating them?

This is not glamorous work, but it is where strategy either becomes real or slowly frays.

When execution feels weaker than expected, it is worth asking not only whether the plan is strong enough. It is also worth asking whether the surrounding decisions were made firmly enough for the business to act without having to infer what the senior team really meant.

Driving alignment through a strategic growth offsite

The Brief

Our client approached us to design and facilitate a full-day offsite aimed at aligning their asset management business around a refreshed five-year growth ambition. With a mandate to double AUM, while preserving margin and culture, the brief called for a session that would challenge assumptions, foster cross-functional dialogue and galvanise the team around a shared narrative. The event needed to balance strategic clarity and practical next steps.

Our Delivery

We curated a highly interactive agenda that blended strategic framing with team-led content and live polling. Working closely with the CEO and ExCo members, we helped shape and refine individual sessions to ensure consistency and coherence across the day. The use of Slido polls and QR-enabled feedback mechanisms encouraged real-time engagement and gave valuable insights. We also supported session leads in sharpening their messages and facilitated transitions to maintain momentum. The day culminated in a collective synthesis of key themes and commitments, with a clear pathway for follow-up.

The Impact

The offsite was widely praised for its clarity and cohesion. Participants noted a stronger sense of shared purpose and a clearer understanding of how their functions contribute to the firm’s strategic goals. The use of live polling and interactive formats helped surface honest feedback and fostered a more open culture of dialogue. The final deck cascaded across the business, reinforcing alignment and accountability. Our client has since expressed interest in extending this approach to other leadership forums, signalling a shift towards more participatory and purpose-driven engagement.

High-impact executive offsite for a UK PE Fund

The Brief

Our client, a UK Mid Cap PE fund, sought to create a high-impact offsite experience for its Executive Committee, designed to foster strategic alignment, deepen team cohesion and provide space for reflective thinking away from the day-to-day. The brief called for a setting that balanced professional focus with informal connection, enabling senior leaders to engage in open dialogue around future priorities, leadership dynamics, and organisational culture.

Our Delivery

Goldcrest Partners curated and facilitated a two-day offsite in London, blending structured strategic sessions with informal moments that encouraged candour and creativity. We worked closely with the whole leadership team to shape an agenda that combined forward-looking business planning with leadership development themes. Our team managed all aspects of delivery – from venue sourcing and logistics to session design and facilitation – ensuring a seamless experience. The offsite included a mix of plenary discussions and breakout workshops, in addition to reflective exercises, all tailored to our client’s unique culture and strategic context.

The Impact

The offsite delivered tangible outcomes: renewed clarity on strategic priorities and stronger alignment across the leadership team. Importantly, the offsite resulted in a shared commitment to key initiatives for the year ahead. Feedback from the leadership team highlighted the value of the space created for honest conversation and deeper connection. The setting and structure enabled the team to step back to think differently and return with renewed energy and focus. The success of the London offsite has since informed the design of future leadership gatherings across the organisation.

Solving the transfer problem: making leadership development stick

Leadership development has long been recognised as essential to organisational performance. Yet many programmes struggle to deliver lasting change. Participants leave workshops energised and full of ideas, only to find that, once back in the pace and pressure of daily work, new habits quickly fade.

This challenge is often described as the “transfer problem”: the difficulty of translating learning into sustained behaviour change in the workplace.

The reasons are understandable. Leadership programmes typically take place away from the realities they are meant to influence. Participants spend time reflecting on ideas, discussing frameworks and practising skills in controlled settings. But when they return to the office, they are met with competing priorities, time pressures and established organisational dynamics. Without structured support, the gravitational pull of old habits is strong.

As a result, any newly created development is at risk of becoming an isolated event rather than a process of genuine growth. Organisations need to recognise, therefore, that leadership capability develops differently from technical expertise. It is not simply acquired through knowledge transfer or occasional training. Instead, it evolves through a cycle of action, reflection and feedback applied to real situations over time.

Accountability also plays a critical role. When leaders share their development goals with sponsors, line managers or peers, learning becomes more visible and purposeful. Conversations about progress move from abstract ideas to observable shifts in behaviour and decision-making.

Equally important is relevance. Leadership challenges rarely exist in isolation from the context of an organisation or sector. For the financial services, it’s essential that programmes draw on real-world organisational challenges, such as leading through change under regulatory scrutiny, integrating new teams after acquisitions or leading across distributed functions.

For organisations investing in leadership development, the implication is clear. When programmes are designed with real-world factors in mind, they are more likely to resonate with participants and prompt meaningful change. Because the real measure of success is not how compelling a programme feels in the room, but what happens afterwards. When learning is embedded in everyday work, development becomes something more durable: a process that gradually reshapes how leaders think, act and guide their teams.

With that in mind, the Goldcrest Leadership Pathway was designed specifically to tackle transfer head‑on. And because the GLP is sector‑specific, the scenarios, tools and conversations mirror the realities of financial services.

Explore the Goldcrest Leadership Pathway to see how we design for impact from the start and keep it growing throughout the year.

Instilling trust in a team

Trust: Defined

Within a team, trust is characterised by a mutual understanding and knowledge of each member’s skills and abilities. Crucially, that involves knowing what other team members can and cannot do. For that reason, it is a purely neutral concept that can be earned through shared experiences among team members. Over time, a person’s belief and trust in another team member’s abilities can change and evolve, based on new evidence and behaviour.

Why instilling trust is vital between team members

Trust is essential to any high performing team. Patrick Lencioni’s seminal work “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” places trust at the foundation of a functional team for good reason. Many of the most serious challenges to an effective team functioning optimally derive from its absence.

But the formation of trust is a complex and gradual process, established through ongoing interactions. By its very nature, it is something to be granted rather than made during those interactions. Individuals cannot insist someone trusts them. However, individuals can establish the conditions, which make them more trustworthy.

The same is true within teams. Instilling trust within a new team demands proactive encouragement. Largely based on exchanges between team members, over time it evolves and develops. It is galvanised by shared experiences, wins and losses. Teams are rarely static and the high performing team is critically aware of the varying capital within the group as members change, relational bonds tear and repair, and reputations are built.

Trust as an enabler

Effectiveness of action is critical to high performance and trust is crucial to enable this.

When strong trust exists within a team, the division of labour can be clearer because there is confidence in the reliability of others to perform their roles. When we trust fellow team members implicitly, it allows us to focus on our own activity without double guessing and inefficiency. It means we don’t have to seek assurance, as we simply know and trust how another team member will perform.

It is vital, though, to dispel misconceptions about instilling trust. It should not be mistaken for blind faith. It must be justifiable either to demand it or extend it. Trust must be given and earned appropriately, but it must also be given genuinely and sincerely.

How Goldcrest Partners Can Help

Over time, most people will have developed the critical capacity to evaluate the triggers, cues and data to help decide whether to trust or not trust. However, this becomes more difficult when we encounter novel situations. Conversely, though, a high performing team is able to calibrate the context much more quickly and accurately than an individual.

Goldcrest Partners can help your team become capable of navigating and interpreting trust with other team members. With our experience of improving team performance, we can support leaders striving to establish a better environment for trust to flourish – at pace.

Given the benefits that can be reaped when trust is strong within a team, it can be one of the most significant actions a leader can make. Recognising the value of trust and how to cultivate it, to create a high performing team, is a vital first step in achieving team goals.

7 conditions for a high-performing team

At its essence, a high-performing team is one where the whole is more than the sum parts.

But achieving this status doesn’t happen by happy accident and requires dedicated attention.

So what if we applied the same strategy, research and analysis to optimising the operation of our teams as we do to the service of our clients? How would that look?

Goldcrest Partners co-founder, Tim McEwan, using his experiences of teamwork during his career in the British Army, has identified 7 conditions that he believes are essential to success. They are:

Altogether, the conditions offer a systemic framework to pull together individual brilliance into collective power, allowing each team to define for itself what high performance looks like and the journey to get there. As a process, it’s intensive, but the results are compelling.

To begin implementing the high performing team framework, read our series of pieces exploring each condition, starting with trust – which you can read here.

Harnessing healthy conflict for team growth

Healthy conflict: Defined

Healthy conflict enables teams, with many perspectives and opinions, to debate and challenge viewpoints openly. When effectively managed, healthy conflict can then help generate innovative ideas and be a constructive way for groups and individuals to problem solve effectively. While it may involve disagreements, healthy conflict can encourage motivation, drive progress, and ensure issues are addressed without personal animosity.

Why healthy conflict is useful

Having multiple opinions and diverse perspectives can help teams find the best solutions to problems and issues – helping them become more productive. As a result, high performing teams are able to move forward far more quickly, because they actively seek out those differing opinions – never shying away from them.

Conversely, poorly performing teams will stop asking questions, and therefore not be able to identify all possibilities and solutions on the way to achieving aims. As a result, if a team eschews and avoids conflict, they can never be as high performing as they potentially could be.

At first, encouraging conflict and debate may sound counterintuitive. Surely a team that never argues just gets on with the job in hand with no drama? That won’t be the case, though, as the opposite of conflict is not sheer, blind agreement. When it comes to teams, the opposite of conflict is, in fact, disinterest, detachment and distance.

Healthy conflict on the other hand shows passion and drive. When both are present, they help create a stronger team that is motivated to achieve its aims and targets.

The art of healthy conflict

Encouraging conflict does not mean doing away with sensitivity and empathy. It is possible, and essential, to keep conflict healthy by striking the right balance – a feat not as daunting as it sounds.

While it may seem hard at first, it is entirely feasible by leveraging the trust and connections between team members. A team’s social glue should provide a cushion which enables everyone to explore differences. It will offer comfort and confidence to explore issues, while also allowing a team to depersonalise any challenges thanks to pre-established mutual understanding.

Directing conflict with purpose

Team members must also remember to focus on the issues at hand to ensure that healthy conflict prevails. Maintaining focus relies on another condition for a high performing team: clarity of vision and alignment. These must absolutely be kept in mind so that every team member can understand what any debate is trying to achieve. It also ensures that debates do not drift into other areas, potentially causing a disagreement to become a far bigger beast than it needs to be.

The difference a leader can make here is vital – in any team. Sporting teams are a great example. After a loss, the instinct might be to blame a player for a missed pass or forgotten set play. While these issues need discussion, it’s equally vital for a captain and team members to avoid spiralling into listing all of a person’s weaknesses. Doing so becomes demoralising for them and could potentially foster a toxic atmosphere.

Nurturing healthy conflict with Goldcrest Partners

The benefits of healthy conflict are therefore far-reaching, but it can be tough to move a team from one that nervously voices opinions to actively seeking out better ways to work.

It’s important to remember that conflict cannot be artificially engineered – in fact, trying to do so makes the conflict far more likely to descend into personal clashes, moving away from any debate based on the issues at hand. Plus, also remember that conflict is not the end in itself, merely a route to greater clarity.

Goldcrest Partners can help leaders introduce healthy conflict into their teams more effectively. We have worked with countless teams before, helping them work towards a more efficient way of identifying solutions to problems. Through constructive debate, teams evolve into a closer knit circle, with an enhanced alignment. With our support, teams are thus much better placed to become high performing, by leveraging their differing perspectives and opinions, as opposed to simply agreeing to keep the peace.