Straight Talking: The Conversations You've Been Avoiding

May turned out to have a theme running through it, even though I didn’t plan it that way.

I started the month writing about the CEO and MD relationship, which is probably the most under-designed structure in most SMEs. Two capable people, genuinely aligned on values and direction, but operating without a shared map of who owns what. Nobody has ever sat down and said: these decisions are yours, these are mine, these we make together. So they circle the same territory and quietly erode each other’s confidence without intending to. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I thought that was yours to decide”, you are not alone, and it is fixable. It just requires someone to start the conversation.

From there I moved into sales accountability, and specifically the difference between an activity culture and an outcome culture. If your sales team is reporting on calls made and proposals sent, they are getting better at reporting. The measurement problem is almost always a leadership decision that hasn’t been made yet, and that sits firmly with the CEO.

Midway through the month I shared Roger Martin-Fagg’s economic update with my own lens on it. Roger is the behavioural economist I trust to cut through the noise, and his read this month was sobering in a particular way. Not catastrophic, but not comfortable either. UK growth forecast at 1%, inflation heading toward 4.3% in the autumn, and confidence rather than cash as the real constraint right now. The point I kept coming back to was that a grinding uncertain middle is actually harder to lead through than a crisis, because a crisis demands action and this demands patience, nerve and clarity. The SMEs navigating it well are the ones who have stopped trying to control what they can’t and got ruthlessly focused on what they can: their people, their pipeline, their margins and their positioning for when the investment tap turns back on.

Then came burnout, which got the quietest but most consistent response. High performers are the last people to raise their hand when they are struggling, because they keep delivering until the cost becomes visible, and by then it is usually already a retention risk. Protecting your senior team is not an HR responsibility. It sits with you, not because you caused it but because you are the only person with the visibility and authority to do something about it before it becomes serious.

And the month closed on AI, which I wrote about not as a technology question but as a behaviour one. Most businesses have access to the tools and most are not really using them, and the reason adoption stalls is almost never the team. It is that the CEO has not changed their own habits first, and culture flows from the top whether you intend it to or not.

Four different topics, but the same question underneath all of them: what are you, as the person at the top, actually responsible for, and what are you letting slide because nobody has pushed you on it yet?

If anything this month landed for you, or didn’t, I would genuinely like to hear it.

Nicola