Twenty-Two Years in HR, Forty Years Fascinated by People

Why I finally stopped carrying it all in my head and wrote the Trusted Leadership Series instead.

My working life did not start anywhere near an HR department. In the mid-80’s, I was managing bookshops, stores of varying sizes, up to thirty people in the biggest of them, and it was a secondment into the personnel department, of all things, that first properly hooked me on this world of people and leadership, long before I had a name for what I was feeling.

I went off and did something completely different for a while. A politics degree, as a mature student at thirty, because apparently once you have caught the bug for understanding how people behave in groups you cannot quite put it down. I came back into work at the start of the new millennium in the world of learning and development, training people to work in retail stores, then working with young people who had left education with little or no qualifications and were struggling to find work because of it. I ended up managing the apprenticeship and training function, which is where I properly cut my teeth on developing people rather than simply managing them.

By 2004 I had moved into managing the HR and admin function for that same training provider, and I have been in an HR leadership or consultancy role ever since. So depending on how you count it, this is either twenty-two years in HR proper or forty years of being fascinated by why people at work, do what they do. Either way, I have spent a long time working with, alongside, and sometimes very gently trying to redirect, leaders. Financial services, education, construction, and now the freelance world, where you get to work with all sorts and nothing quite prepares you for the variety. Different sectors, wildly different cultures, but honestly? The same handful of leadership challenges showing up in every single one of them, wearing slightly different clothes depending on the postcode.

The trust issues. The performance conversations nobody wanted to have. The leaders who cared genuinely and deeply about their people but had somehow ended up managing spreadsheets and sitting in meetings instead of actually leading anyone. The ones who knew something was wrong with their team culture but couldn't quite put their finger on what, or where to start. The organisations where the values were beautifully framed on the wall and had absolutely nothing to do with what happened when things got difficult.

For a long time, I just carried all of that. Which is fine when you're coaching someone one-to-one, because you can adapt and respond in real time. But I kept noticing that the same frameworks I was drawing on the back of a notebook in a coaching session in a glass-walled meeting room were the same ones I'd used the previous week, and would probably use again the following Tuesday with a leader who was convinced their situation was entirely unique. It never is, and that's not an insult. Leadership is profoundly human, which means it's profoundly universal.

The move from senior HR leadership into freelance coaching was the thing that really crystallised it for me. When you're internal, you have context. You know the history, the politics, the battles that have already been fought. When you go freelance and start working across a much wider range of organisations and sectors, you notice the patterns even more clearly because you're not inside the wallpaper anymore. You can see the common threads. And the common thread, almost every time, was trust. Or the quiet absence of it.

Not always dramatic, trust-broken-by-a-scandal absence. Often just the slow, unremarkable kind. The leader so afraid of dropping the ball that they'd started picking up everyone else's. The team that had learned not to raise problems because raising problems had historically not gone well for them. The manager who thought they were being supportive but whose team experienced them as someone who never quite let go. These are not bad people. They are, almost always, people who care a great deal and haven't had access to a framework that helps them do something different.

Leadership is profoundly human, which means it's profoundly universal.

Why I finally wrote it down

That's what made me sit down and write the Trusted Leadership Series. Not because I believed the world was short of leadership books (it absolutely isn't), but because I wanted to create something practical and honest that a real leader with a real job and a real team could actually use. Something grounded in what I've seen, not what looks good in theory.

Six books, covering the things that come up most consistently in my coaching work: trust and innovation, ethical leadership, people-first performance, organisational storytelling, purpose-led practice, and leading through uncertainty and turmoil. All the frameworks I've been drawing on whiteboards and scribbling in notebooks for over two decades, finally written down properly and put somewhere people can find them.

Every book includes self-assessment tools and reflection exercises because I have a deep professional suspicion of leadership content that tells you what to think without giving you anything to do. Leadership development that doesn't lead to changed behaviour on Monday morning is just expensive philosophy. The whole point is that you put it into practice with the actual human beings on your actual team.

Leadership development that doesn't lead to changed behaviour on Monday morning is just expensive philosophy.

I'm proud of these books in a way I didn't entirely anticipate. They feel like a genuine distillation of everything I've learned from coaching leaders across very different sectors and levels, and I think they'll be useful to people trying to lead well in a world that keeps getting more complicated. Whether you pick up one book because it speaks directly to a challenge you're facing right now, or you work through all six as a personal development programme, I hope you find in them what I always tried to give my coaching clients: practical support, honest reflection and the occasional gentle challenge to do things differently.

They're available now on Gumroad (link here). Individual titles start at £25, Book 6 is £35, and the complete six-book collection is £125. If you want to know which book to start with, drop me a message at ljfconsulting@outlook.com or find me at @ljfcoaching on Instagram. I'm always happy to talk about this stuff. All these years in, I genuinely still am.