What Makes a Leader ‘Whole’? I’m Still Figuring It Out.
This weekend I think I had a breakthrough in my thinking about what makes a ‘Whole Leader’. That said, let’s see where I am in another 12 months time.
It’s about a year since I first started thinking seriously about doing a podcast, and several months since I began recording and publishing conversations. The idea arrived at a moment of transition. I’d recently turned fifty. Life in my late forties had changed shape — the work I was doing was shifting, the kids were starting to grow up, my parents were getting older, and my own sense of what matters had begun to reorder itself. Call it a gradual but necessary rebalancing.
I’d spent the best part of a decade building a business, always looking ahead to the next milestone. When you’re in that mode, the future becomes the air you breathe. Only afterwards (and this may just be me) you realise you should probably have enjoyed the journey more. That awareness crept in over time and asked a simple question: What have I actually learned? And how do I keep learning from here?
The podcast grew out of that question.
Why I Started the Whole Leader Podcast
One way to look at it is this: I’ve spent a long time working on leadership, first as an entrepreneur and now as a CEO again. And the more I look around at the complicated world we’re operating in, the more I feel that strong leadership role models are in short supply. There are brilliant people out there and I’ve met many, but the public examples we see from world leaders and business leaders often leave a lot to be desired. That’s my view, at least.
So the idea of the Whole Leader emerged. Not perfect leaders. Not heroic leaders. Just leaders operating with more of the “full stack” of what makes someone effective in the real world. I didn’t know what belonged in that stack. I had some intuitions — habits, disciplines, ways of conducting yourself, ways of working with others — but nothing close to a finished picture. It felt obvious that the best way to explore it wasn’t to sit alone and sketch a framework; it was to go and speak to people doing leadership in different ways, in different contexts, with their own stories and scars.
The conversations this year have been rich. I think they’ve taught me far more than I expected. And they’ve pulled me back into the thing I really enjoy: making sense with other humans, in dialogue, in real time, without pretending to have the answers.
The Logo and the Logic Behind It.
Early on I wanted a logo, partly for fun and partly because I needed an anchor. The design I ended up with is a traditional northern European symbol — three arms, almost like a windmill — representing wisdom and knowledge. It’s a symbol from the deep past, and in some ways the Greeks would call it a logos: the direction, the pattern, the thing the work is pointing towards.
The function and structure of the Whole Leader Podcast is simple: look for leadership wisdom in places where it actually lives — in human stories, habits, failures, and choices. Not in the polished abstractions.
But a logo alone doesn’t explain what the project is. And as the year unfolded, I could feel a small pressure building to articulate what the podcast is really exploring. Not as a slogan — just a clearer line of sight.
What this Means at Powerverse
In my day job at Powerverse, we’ve been trying to build a business with an entrepreneurial spirit at its core. It’s the thing that has always animated me; creating something out of nothing. Even with good backing, you still have to respect every penny. That discipline shaped my last company and it shapes this one. You do more with less, you punch above your weight, you solve real problems with real constraints. That’s where the energy comes from.
A realisation that’s grown stronger for me over the years is that founders and CEOs shouldn’t try to do so much by themselves. Obvious, maybe, when said aloud, but far less obvious in the heat of execution. To create anything meaningful, you have to work through others, not around them. You have to treat the people in the business as the actual engine of creation, not a set of resources to marshal.
So at Powerverse we’re building a simple set of principles around: Curiosity. Connection. Creation.
They’re becoming the spine of how we work.
Curiosity is the willingness to slow down and use our minds properly — to understand the market, the technology, the user, the constraints and importantly, ourselves.
Connection is how we relate to one another and to the data. It’s building trust, working together cleanly, and reducing friction.
Creation is the human part; the entrepreneurial spark, the making-something-out-of-nothing that teams can only do when the first two are in place.
These principles started as operating ideas inside the company. But as the year went on, I realised they were also pointing me back towards the Whole Leader work. Human-centred leadership — whatever that phrase ends up meaning — is probably rooted in those same movements: understanding, relating, making.
Four Types of Power
Recently I was listening to Diary of a CEO. Stephen Bartlett was talking to Brené Brown, who offered a frame I found unexpectedly useful. I’m going to give you my summary of it and you can decide for yourself if it works for you too.
She described four kinds of power:
Power Over
The traditional model: authority, hierarchy, the “do this or else” version of leadership. It’s everywhere, and in my view we’re seeing more of it, not less. It breeds fear. It constrains agency. And it’s deeply unhelpful in the world we’re walking into.Power Within
This is the work of internal understanding of ourselves, noticing when we’re on track or off track, catching the ego before it runs away with us, seeing when stress or future-focus is distorting how we show up, making us disconnection to the present. I think many of us are conditioned this way. Social norms, media, family patterns — they pull us into imagined futures and away from the moment. Power within requires real curiosity about ourselves.Power With
The relational field between people. The mutual, dialogical space where trust is built and something larger than the sum of its parts can emerge. Co-creation lives here.Power To
The ability to connect and so give others the conditions to act. As a leader, it’s granting agency, clarity, and trust through that connection, and not withholding.
As frames go, it’s not complicated, but I like it. These four forms of power map almost directly onto the principles we use at work. And that mapping helped me see the podcast through a new lens.
Mapping Power to Practice
I’m going to put this down as a draft for now and perhaps the next year of The Whole Leader will help shape it more.
Power-Within ↔ Curiosity
Curiosity is the process. Power-within is the outcome. One leads to the other. When you stay curious — about yourself, about the problem, about the dynamics — you build real internal capacity. That’s what enables better choices.Power-With ↔ Co-Creation (Creation)
Co-creation is the process, and power-with is the outcome. When you bring people together with trust, transparency, and shared focus, the group becomes capable of things no individual could do alone. This is where the entrepreneurial spark actually lives.Power-To ↔ Connection
Connection is the process. Power-to others is the outcome. When you understand people, when the relational trust is real, you can give power away cleanly. You can let others lead. That’s how you build something that scales.
As I’ve played this through in my head, it’s helped me see The Whole Leader idea with more clarity. And maybe this is the golden thread I’ve been circling without quite realising it.
The podcast is about power in a very human sense and what we choose to do with it.
What this Means for the Podcast
If I step back, The Whole Leader idea starts to look something like this:
Understand yourself well enough to have power within.
Relate to others well enough to generate power with.
Trust others enough to give power to.
And avoid slipping unconsciously into power over — which is always lurking.
This isn’t a finished model. It’s not even a model in the formal sense. It’s more like a set of coordinates I’m using to navigate.
When I look at the guests I’ve spoken to this year, many of the stories fall into these spaces. People who rebuilt themselves (power within). People who built teams that function as real creative units (power with). People who created huge arcs of impact by empowering others (power to).
There’s something universal about it. And, slightly to my surprise, it’s given the podcast a clearer sense of purpose. The logo pointing to wisdom now has a frame around it: we’re exploring leadership through the lens of power that is shared, internal, relational, and generative — not dominant.
Reflections From This Year’s Conversations
I won’t rewrite the interviews here, but a few themes that are memorable to me:
The leaders who stay grounded tend to have some form of inner practice, not in a mystical way, just in the sense of paying attention to themselves with honesty.
Almost everyone has a moment when they realise the old way of leading no longer works, usually because it burnt them out or it shut others down.
Creativity shows up more in the leaders who leave space for surprise, not in those who stick rigidly to their ten-point plans.
And the most effective leaders aren’t the best at directing others; they’re the best at framing problems cleanly and then letting people get on with solving them.
Again, these aren’t conclusions. They’re patterns I’m noticing. You may see something different.
Where This Leaves Me Now
So what does all of this mean for the coming year?
I think it gives me a cleaner sense of what I’m actually trying to do — both in the podcast and in my leadership at Powerverse. I’m trying to understand the movement from curiosity to co-creation to connection, and how those movements create healthier forms of power.
It also reminds me not to drift back into the future-fixated mode that defined my earlier career. The irony is that when you’re always chasing the future, you get worse at noticing what’s happening now. And the “now” is where all the leadership signals are — in how you show up, how you treat people, how you hold stress, how you pay attention.
I expect my thinking will shift again. It always does. That’s part of the process. But capturing this moment of clarity feels useful — at least to me.
Closing Thought
If the Whole Leader Podcast has a purpose, it’s probably this: to explore leadership not through abstractions, but through the lived texture of how people are, how they relate to others, and how they create things that matter.
If the work at Powerverse has a purpose, it’s to build something meaningful in an honest way — using curiosity, connection, and creation as the actual levers of progress.
And if being in my fifties has taught me anything, it’s that leadership isn’t a skillset you master. It’s something you keep returning to, adjusting your posture, noticing where you’re acting from, and staying open enough to be changed by the things and people you encounter.
Thanks for reading and for listening.