For most of my career I have been the one in the chair. Director, group manager, systems manager, project manager, leading teams of people whose work I felt genuinely responsible for. I have tried, always, to be the kind of leader who puts the people around them first. When I was eventually made redundant from one of those roles, a member of my team told me they wanted to chant Maximus, Maximus from Gladiator as I was marched ignominiously out of my office past dozens in my teams. It was one of the most moving things anyone has ever said to me, and it has never left me.
I say this not to make this piece about me, but because it matters for what follows. I know what good leadership costs. I know how rare it is to do it without pretence, without keeping score, without making your generosity visible so that others can admire it. I know because I have tried and sometimes fallen short, and I recognise the real thing when I see it.
I have been fortunate, over a long career, to work alongside and for some remarkable people, and to have some remarkable people work for me.
Mark Recht was the first manager I genuinely admired. He held a senior position at Total and yet retained an encyclopaedic command of technology that would have distinguished him as a specialist at any level. Conversations with Mark had a quality that I can only describe as slightly clairvoyant. He seemed to know where your thinking was going before you arrived there yourself, and he met you at the destination rather than waiting for you to catch up. It was intellectually exhilarating and, at times, gently intimidating in the way that genuine brilliance sometimes is.
Craig Lennox was something else again. A ferocious intellect and an inspirational leader who rose from CIO, when I reported to him, to later becoming CEO of several businesses. Nobody I have encountered before or since understood true business value the way Craig did, the connection between technology and commercial outcome, between investment and return, between what an organisation says it wants and what it actually needs. He could be a formidable presence. Many people found him frightening. I never did, though I always understood why others might.
James Grant worked for me as a Manager when I was Technical Director and went on to become CIO of several companies. He was a brilliant and kind man, and we became friends. He had a particular gift for seeing people clearly and responding to what he saw with a thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit that I have rarely encountered. He used to congratulate me each year on being the same age as him, right up until his birthday, when he would reclaim the title. He called me number one. He was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. James received devastating news and died within weeks, far too soon, at nearly the same age as me. I miss him.
These were extraordinary people. Each shaped how I think about leadership, about character, about what it means to move through a career and through a life with both intelligence and integrity.
But what I remember most, when I think about the finest leader I have personally worked for, is a meeting with Phil, who is now also one of my closest friends.
I arrived having not done what I had promised to do. There were reasons, good ones, but reasons are not results, and I sat on that Teams video call knowing I had let people down, including Phil, who had trusted me with something important. When my turn came to report, I braced for it.
Phil summarised my update. Fluently, accurately, completely, as if reading from notes I had prepared. He had done the work himself, without being asked, without telling me, without making me feel the weight of what he had done. Nobody else in the call knew. Nobody else needed to. And when it was over he moved on without a hint that might have drawn attention to what had just happened.
I have thought about that moment many times since. Not because it saved me from embarrassment, though it did. But because of what it revealed about the kind of person Phil is. He had looked at a situation, understood it completely, decided what needed to happen, and acted. Quietly. Generously. Without keeping score.
That is rarer than it sounds. Most people in positions of authority, even good ones, even well-intentioned ones, cannot help making their generosity visible. The supportive word offered in front of others so that everyone can see the support being given. The praise delivered in a way that reflects well on the person offering it. Phil’s generosity was different. It operated without audience. It asked for nothing. It left no debt.
He shares something with James that I have come to think of as a kind of sight, the ability to actually see the person in front of them, not the role, not the performance, not the version of yourself you’re trying to project, but you. It is not a common quality. I have met it twice in a long career, and I was lucky both times.
He was, in my experience, the finest leader I have worked for. Not because he was the most senior, or the most strategic, or the most impressive in a room, though he was all of those things. But because he understood, intuitively and completely, that his job was to make the people around him better, and he did it with a kind of quiet, consistent, utterly genuine care that I have never seen equalled.
I am writing this because Phil deserves to know how he is seen. Not how he might judge himself in any given moment, but how he actually is, measured across years of real moments with real people who were better for knowing him.
The world needed more people like James. It still has Phil.