This is Issue 4 of The Monthly Edge, my monthly newsletter. One email a month, the stuff I actually use. If you’d rather get it straight to your inbox, you can subscribe here. You can also read and share this issue on Substack.

Here’s a thing nobody warns you about when you start leading people. The feedback doesn’t stop. It just stops being true.

Think about the last time someone who works for you told you that you’d got something badly wrong. Not a gentle “have you thought about”, an actual straight “that was the wrong call and here’s why”. If you’re struggling to remember it, that isn’t because you’ve stopped making wrong calls.

It’s because you’ve got the one job where honest feedback costs the person giving it something.

The thing I’ve been building

Last month I said I had something nearly ready and couldn’t say much yet. Well, here it is.

It’s called Sportivity 360, and it’s a proper 360 degree feedback tool built for leaders in normal-sized businesses. Not a £15k consultancy programme. Not a survey tool you have to bend into shape. You pick who feeds back on you, they answer honestly and anonymously, and you get a report that tells you the gap between how you think you lead and how it actually lands.

It’s £75 for one person. Cheaper per head if you’re doing a team.

Here’s why I built it, and it’s the whole point of this issue. Eight years of consulting and the same conversation keeps happening. A good leader, running a decent business, genuinely trying. And a team that has quietly decided which things aren’t worth raising with them. Nobody’s being difficult. Everyone’s being sensible. And the leader is the only person in the building who doesn’t know.

I got fed up of watching it and having nothing practical to hand them. So I built the practical thing.

I’ll stop selling now. The rest of this issue is useful whether you ever click that link or not.

Why the truth dries up

It isn’t that your people are cowards. It’s arithmetic.

Telling the boss they’re wrong has a real cost and a vague benefit. The cost is immediate and personal: awkwardness, a wobble in the relationship, and a small nagging worry about the next pay review. The benefit is that the business runs slightly better in six months, which is nice but doesn’t feel like theirs. So most people, most of the time, do the maths and say nothing. Then they go and say it to a colleague in the car park instead.

And it gets worse the better you’re doing. Nobody wants to be the one who punctures a good run. The more successful you look, the more expensive it is to disagree with you.

So if you’re waiting to be told, you’ll wait. You have to go and get it. Three things actually work.

Ask about a thing, not about yourself. “How am I doing?” invites a compliment. It’s a horrible question and you’ll get a horrible answer. Try “what’s the bit of how I run these meetings that annoys you?” Specific, low stakes, and it gives them permission to say something small. Small is where it starts.

Shut up and count to five. Ask the question, then say nothing. Most leaders fill the silence within two seconds and answer their own question, then wonder why nobody tells them anything. The honest version of an answer usually arrives after the polite one, and only if you leave a gap big enough for it.

Say thank you and then do nothing else. The single fastest way to kill honest feedback forever is to explain why they’re wrong. Even gently. Even correctly. If someone tells you something hard and you defend yourself, you’ve just taught the whole team what happens when you tell Andy the truth. Take it, thank them, go away and think. Defend it next week if you still want to.

None of that costs anything. All of it works. And if you want the anonymous, no-flinching version of the same thing, that’s what the 360 is for.

What’s caught my eye: the 6% problem

Now the number that’s been rattling round my head since I read it.

The Chartered Management Institute published research on 8 July that found only 6% of managers think young recruits are ready for the workplace. Six. Meanwhile 45% of 18 to 24 year olds reckon they turned up with the skills they needed. That’s not a gap, that’s two groups living in different countries. (The full findings are here.)

Predictably, most of the coverage ran with it as another kicking for Gen Z. Not motivated enough, not resilient enough, can’t turn up on time.

But there’s a second number in that research and almost nobody quoted it. 82% of managers are “accidental managers”, promoted because they were good at the job, never trained to lead anyone. And of the ones who did get training, 89% said it made them better at developing younger staff.

So read the two together. We take our best doer, promote them, give them no training whatsoever, hand them a 22 year old fresh out of education, and then we’re surprised when it doesn’t go well. And we blame the 22 year old.

And since I first wrote that paragraph, it got harder. From 1 September the funding stopped for new starts on the main leadership apprenticeships. Team Leader at Level 3, Operations Manager at Level 5, Chartered Manager at Level 6, and the Coaching Professional route a lot of my own sector leaned on. Team Leader alone had over 12,000 starts last year. If your plan for the accidental manager in your building was a funded course, that door has shut.

I’d have more time for the “kids these days” argument if we were doing our half of the deal. Mostly we aren’t, and the excuse has just gone with the funding. If you’ve promoted someone this year and the sum total of their leadership development is a congratulations email and a new job title, you already know which of the two numbers is your problem.

One AI trick worth stealing

Same theme, different angle. If the humans around you have a reason to be nice to you, use something that hasn’t.

I use AI as the person in the room who’ll disagree with me. Not to write the thing. To attack the thing before someone else does. Copy this, fill in the brackets, and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT before your next big call:

You are a sceptical, experienced managing director. You have no stake
in my feelings and you are not here to encourage me.

The decision I'm about to make: [decision]
My reasoning: [your reasoning, messy is fine]

Give me:
1. The three strongest arguments against this
2. The assumption I haven't questioned
3. The one question a good chair would ask me in a board meeting

Be blunt. Do not reassure me.

Two bits of hard-won advice on this.

Do it before you’ve decided, not after. If you’ve already made your mind up you’ll skim the objections, feel briefly clever for having considered them, and carry on. That’s not challenge, that’s a rubber stamp with extra steps.

And when one of the three answers makes your stomach drop a bit, that’s the one. Don’t scroll past it. The whole reason this works is that a machine has no career riding on keeping you happy, so it says the thing your operations manager has been chewing on for a month.

It’s not a substitute for people telling you the truth. It’s what you use until they will.

If any of this is live for you

If you read the bit about the car park conversations and recognised your own business, that’s genuinely my favourite conversation to have. No pitch, no deck, just a straight half hour on what your team probably isn’t telling you and what to do about it.

Grab a free half hour with me here.

And if it’s the 82% that landed, if you’ve got good people you’ve promoted and never properly developed, that’s the same conversation. Come and have it.

One favour

If this was useful, send it to one person who leads something. Ideally one who’s just been promoted and is quietly winging it. That’s how this thing grows, one forward at a time.

And if someone forwarded this to you, you can get it every month here: sportivityconsultants.substack.com

Go and ask somebody a question you might not like the answer to. Then say nothing for five seconds. It’s the cheapest bit of leadership development there is.

Feet on the floor. You are here.

Andy