In this episode of Unleash Your Impact, Unlock Others, Rich and Dave explore one of the most common leadership bottlenecks in senior roles: when everything still comes back to the leader.

They discuss why shared leadership, emotional intelligence, and team coaching will define high-performance teams in 2026 and beyond

Drawing on research, real-world experience, and Zentano’s Connected Leadership approach, they unpack why traditional, hero-centric leadership models are no longer fit for purpose, and what replaces them. The conversation explores shared leadership as the emerging gold standard, where decision-making, ownership, and influence are distributed across the team rather than concentrated at the top.

Rich and Dave discuss the role of power, emotional intelligence, and team coaching in unlocking collective intelligence, reducing blind spots, and creating teams that adapt, innovate, and perform under pressure. Practical examples and clear takeaways help leaders reflect on where they may be unintentionally acting as a bottleneck, and how to shift toward a more connected, sustainable leadership model.

Key Talking Points

1. Why capable leaders often become unintentional bottlenecks
2. The shift from heroic leadership to shared leadership
3. Power, hierarchy, and mindset: what really needs to change
4. How shared leadership improves decision-making, agility, and ownership
5. The four Connected Leadership personas and their relationship with power
6. Why emotional intelligence is the “glue” that makes shared leadership work
7. The role of team coaching in building accountability, resilience, and performance
8. Practical ways to start embedding shared leadership without a culture overhaul

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership. We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders and leave you feeling inspired. Let's dive in.

Well, if so, this episode is for you.

Today, Rich and I are going to explore one of the most common leadership bottlenecks we see in senior roles, and one that almost no one has trained you to remove.

It's at that moment where being dependable and knowledgeable and involved in everything just quietly starts to limit team performance and your leadership impact. In this podcast, we'll unpack why this bottleneck forms.

More importantly, how it shows up in everyday leadership, and what research in our experience tells us unlocks the capacity, ownership, and better decisions across teams. This is effectively what we call the gold standard of leadership moving forward. Now, talking of leadership bottlenecks, I'm here with Rich. Hi, Rich.

How are you?

Hi, Dave. All right. Hopefully I'm not a leadership bottleneck in.

Santano, but, you know, but a serious point, though. Have you ever felt that you were a bottleneck in the teams that you've led in the past? Because none of us are perfect.

I'm sure we've all done it, whether unknowingly or knowingly. But do you ever feel, looking back, maybe you have been a bottleneck in the past?

Yeah, potentially.

I think the challenge that a lot of leaders find, and I'm not immune to that, is actually there's an ego side to telling people what to do, because we like to demonstrate our expertise, our knowledge, our experience, and we like to bring that to bear in decision makings.

And so sometimes being too ready to step forward and say, right, this is what we're doing, there are times where teams need that know sometimes actually that can limit the team's ability to grow, I think.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, we're going into an age, you know, where maybe the heroic leader, the person who's the center of everything, maybe that's, you know, already dying out, but it's certainly not going to be the way things operate in the future with, particularly with the world of AI that's coming our way, you know, things are going to change quite dramatically, I guess. We've also got these multi generational workforces now where people want different things. So I think there is a.

Is a cultural change happening in businesses, and what we want to talk about today is how can we tackle this challenge? How can we tackle these changes? And I want to talk to you specifically about something called shared leadership.

Now just to give you a quote to set that up. Leadership becomes something that the team does together rather than something that one person does to the team.

Yeah.

So I think in traditional leadership, leaders traditionally feel the pressure to be the person who makes all the decisions, who gives the direction, who makes things happen. So it's almost like all roads lead to the leader, if you like.

And sometimes leaders place on themselves that pressure to be the person who makes the decisions, to give clarity, to give direction, and to be sure, there are times to do that as a leader.

But I think teams are most effective actually when the leader is prepared to let go of some of that stuff and to integrate the different voices in the team, the different preferences, the different skills. And I think teams then can potentially be more effective if a good leader does that in a skillful way.

Yeah. And shared leadership isn't about having a leaderless team. It's the opposite.

It's almost leadership multiplied because you've got many more people involved. And I think if you configure it well, it can outperform maybe that old fashioned single leader model that you've just been talking about.

Especially I think in complex dynamic environments, but probably also in environments where there's a knowledge based team, a professional team, or where innovation and adaptive thinking are really vital to how the team operates.

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that probably act in tension here because, you know, I think we're naturally hierarchical creatures, animals or whatever you want to. We are however you want to phrase that.

Yeah, we are.

You know, I think that's true. And we have a tendency to set up and structure organizations in hierarchies.

Some organizations have deep hierarchies, some organizations have much shallower hierarchies, but fundamentally they're still hierarchical. Often they will have a leader or a group of leaders at the top in inverted commas, and the direction comes from that.

So you have the hierarchy which is built in, baked in, often into organizations, but tensioned against that is the leadership's attitude to power. So the danger for leaders is to see them as the power brokers in the context of that hierarchy.

So they're the one with the power and they have to tell people what to do and to give the Direction. I think really powerful modern leadership acknowledges the hierarchy, but the mindset around power is fundamentally different.

So to be sure, there are times to give and share power, but actually what we're talking about here is to create a context and a culture where people feel empowered and leadership is not seen as the purview of just a single person at the top of the team.

All people inside the team are seen to be leaders and need the emotional intelligence to self lead, to be proactive and to give all those people a voice inside the team. Those two things sit in tension. The hierarchy versus what I call the leadership mindset around power.

Around power. No, some really good points there.

I think there are increasing studies now showing that shared leadership correlates very positively with team effectiveness, with creativity, with innovation.

And teams where that there's distributed influence across the whole team, they adapt faster, they make better decisions, particularly in times of uncertainty, which is obviously very relevant to where we are at the moment. So why do you think this works? Why do you think. These studies are increasingly starting to show that shared leadership is the way forward?

So I'd encourage our listeners to think about what are the preferences that they have as leaders? You know, be that thinking preferences, personality traits, you know, behavioral traits. What are those preferences that you have?

And we all, we all have preferences. None of us are the perfectly rounded human being, you know.

So for example, you know, you might have a strong preference for left brain star thinking doesn't mean that you don't use all of, all of your brain. We all do. But we'll have preferences for the style of thinking that we're, that we'll perhaps go to.

So imagine you're a leader, say with a strong left brain preference that inherently will mean that you will have blind spots because there are styles of thinking that you perhaps don't as readily access as the left brain thinking doesn't mean you can't do the other styles of thinking. It's just your natural go to.

So really good teams that encourage multiple perspectives, encourage people with voices with different preferences to the leader at the top in inverted commas. I think that helps reduce blind spots in decision making.

And I think then the decision making becomes, it becomes more inclusive so people feel part of the decision making process because they've had a voice.

And potentially I think if it's done well and done skillfully, it can make decision making more agile because all roads don't necessarily lead to the leader.

People are empowered to make decisions and you know, so a team doesn't always have to second Guess or check in with the leader to say, you know, is it okay if I do this? And actually they feel empowered to do it. So multiple perspectives reduce blind spots. Decision making becomes more inclusive and agile.

And I think if decision making is more inclusive and people have a voice that creates psychological ownership, so people then feel, okay, so I've had a stake in that decision, so they're psychologically more aligned to that and they'll be more motivated to follow that through and take responsibility for that.

Well, I think that ties into that point you made just now about the leader's relationship with power and how they think about the use of power. Because actually that psychological ownership, I think is fundamentally important.

A skillful leader, a leader who understands that I don't have to hold and use all the power. In fact, actually in many situations I need to give it to other people.

I'm still involved in the conversation, but I don't have to lead every single time.

I think that actually creates massive benefits around psychological ownership inside a team, which, as you said, leads to all those other real positive things that we want to see.

Yeah. And actually just listening to you saying that, I think perhaps it can be freeing for the leader so they don't feel pressured to think.

All the decisions come to me, all the decision points sort of end with me. So it frees the leader actually to empower the team and all roads don't then lead to them.

So I think it can be quite freeing for a leader as well, actually.

It's a brilliant point. Yeah, absolutely right.

Yeah.

So I know in the past we've talked about our way of explaining this to people and how to be a leader who can lock into multiple perspectives, drive inclusive and agile practices, develop that psychological ownership in a team. We call it connected leadership. And we've talked about some of the natural Personas I guess, that leaders have.

It'd just be worth talking about those and how those play out in terms of creating a team where shared leadership is the way forward. So just want to explain that to me.

Yeah. So we've defined four connected leadership Personas, as we've called them, and each of those Personas have a different relationship with power.

So that power continuum that I described earlier, and they also have a different relationship between the other tension in leadership, which is about being people focused versus actually driving performance and holding people to account.

So the four leadership Personas, what we call the bold captains, so they're the ones who, you know, at the one end of the power continuum, you know, they take and manage power they give clarity, they drive. They're the ones who had the courage to push through and to get stuff done. So that's one set of voices, if you like, inside your team.

If you think about your team, the listeners that are listening in, who are the bold captains inside your team. And that doesn't have to be you, by the way.

No, no.

So the bold captain is one set of Personas. So the inspiring navigators are those that operate at the same end of the power and continuum as the bold captains.

But the subtle difference around inspiring navigators is they're the ones who want to connect with the people. So they're very people focused. So they have clarity of vision and purpose and want to drive.

But their primary concern is to energize the people, to engage the people and align the people in the organization with the vision and the strategy. So you will have inspiring navigators inside your team. And again, you might not be the natural inspiring navigator. And that's okay.

The two other Personas, one called the diligent builder, so that's the person that's very focused on being very structured, getting stuff done and delivering, you know, structuring, organizing, and you know, they're your go to people for, you know, organizing people, getting people behind the vision and, you know, just getting things delivered. So they're diligent builders. And again, you know, that might be your natural preference or style, but it might not be.

But hopefully you'll have some diligent builders inside the team. The final Persona is what we call the caring shepherd.

So perhaps in this context of shared leadership and empowerment, it might be the most important Persona that you might need to tap into. If you're a natural bold captain, flexing into being the caring shepherd can be quite challenging.

So the caring shepherd Persona is the one inside the team who nurtures trust, focuses on well being and focuses on, you know, getting people collaborating and working together. So, so the inspiring navigators and the caring shepherd, you know, they sit on the people side of, of our connected leadership and continuum.

And they're, they're quite important Personas in creating this culture where actually you can have this shared leadership approach and dare.

I say it rich, in many instances over the last few decades, there are people that maybe haven't been given enough airtime. So yeah, I think, yeah, it's seen as the soft and fluffy end of leadership.

And I'm not sure that's actually a relevant comment anymore because with the way the world is going, as you said, we need to nurture trust. We need to make sure that people, their wellbeing is being looked after.

Because if you do both those things, you'll get far better performance out of them.

Yeah. The key message here for leaders listening to this, you know, a connected leader will be flexible and adaptable.

So in other words, you will have a natural preference for one of those Personas. Probably, you know, for some people it might be stronger than others.

So for example, if you have a very strong preference to be a bold captain, your challenge is to do two things.

Either to flex to the other styles and or to compensate for the fact that you're a strong, bold captain by empowering the people in your team, the other Personas, to have a voice and to balance your input, your bold captain input into the team.

Yeah. And for shared leadership to work, you have to leverage all those four Personas that you've just been talking about situationally, don't you?

So if you imagine an example, so think about a project team where they're facing some rapid market changes. A single leader cannot hold all the answers, as you've said in that team. It's just not something that one person ideally should be doing.

Shared leadership, if we use it in that scenario, allows the strategist and the relationship builder and the technical expert and whoever else is in that team to lead in their areas of strength.

And I think that's a really important way of looking at this, is for the given situation that we're in, who is best to lead this part of the conversation? So the second topic I wanna talk about, Rich, is how do we glue all this together? Because I think it's okay saying yes.

We need to tap into multiple perspectives. We need to park our egos and we need to manage power sensibly. We need to drive psychological ownership within the team.

And it makes sense on one level, but actually, how do we do it? I think, and we've talked about this before, the glue is the emotional intelligence being developed within the team.

Not just the team leader, the leader of the team, as it were, but all the members of the team as well. So I'd like you to talk about that a bit. Really?

Yeah. So in connected leadership, we have this idea that we call the connected center.

So the connected center embodies this idea of leaders being flexible and adaptable and, you know, and willing to sort of shift and change situationally, as you've just said. Now, in order to be able to do that, that requires self awareness around what are your natural preferences.

So in the context of connected leadership, that will be what will be Your natural Personas or behaviors that you go to in terms of your leadership style.

So a good leader will have awareness around their preferences, their thinking preferences, their values, and they have an understanding, hopefully a deep understanding of how those preferences and values drive their behaviors and their star and the way they engage with their team.

So a really emotionally intelligent person has that self awareness and that they're able to use that self awareness to really effectively to self manage.

So you would expect an emotionally intelligent person in a team to be self aware, to be able to self regulate under pressure, and to use their ability to be empathetic and make connection, to be open to different perspectives because they'll understand. Actually, other people have different perspectives. This is my perspective.

So perspective taking is part of self awareness, and being open to other people's perspectives is part of emotional intelligence as well. And also you bring all of that together and in a way where you demonstrate you have the social skills to engage in constructive dialogue.

And when I talk about constructive dialogue, that involves not just being nice to each other, but the ability for a team to engage in healthy debate. And I think that that's really important.

They're able to debate the key issues and pressures facing the team, but they're able to debate that in a way where they remain the adult.

They don't have their identity tied to the positions that they're taking, and they're able to use that perspective that they have to engage in a healthy, adult way in those difficult conversations. So all of this, I think, essentially creates psychological safety and people have the ability to speak up without fear.

But you need to develop emotional intelligence in you as a leader and in your team members. It doesn't just magically happened this.

No.

Well, I think the research backs that up, Rich, is that the research evidence is saying that if you have high levels of emotional intelligence, both at the leader level, but also at the team level, that improves trust, it improves communication, it improves coordination, all of which will mediate and drive the performance outcomes that you're trying to achieve. So the research, I think, backs up what you're saying.

Going back to the Personas that you were talking about, that connected leadership link, are there any particular Personas you think that are critical for embedding emotional intellig into team culture?

Probably the caring shepherd and the inspiring navigator. So on the connected leadership compass, as we call it, those two Personas are mapped against the people side of the connected leadership compass.

So the inspiring navigator will, to be sure, have clarity of vision and want to drive, but importantly, they will want to engage the people and give the people the voice in that and align people with the vision. So they're about actually selling the vision and engaging the people.

The caring shepherd probably is the person who forms the deeper relationships and is really keen to empower people and their natural leadership style. They do that through coaching and adapting a coaching approach to that, and we'll come to that in the next section.

So, Inspire Navigator and Karen Shepherd, I would encourage the people listening to the podcast to think, actually are those two Personas.

What do I need to do either to raise the level of the voices inside the teams who embody that Persona, or what do I need to do to flex and adapt, to make sure that actually I do enough to create the culture around being an inspiring navigator and a caring shepherd, to really engage my team and to give them a voice.

Yeah.

You'll know from your experience of us working together on some of the programs that we run, whether it be our Pathfinder or pioneer programs we run, we often in the past have seen leaders who score very high on technical competence.

Maybe they've been promoted because they've got technical competence, but actually what they initially struggle with is the emotional regulation, the emotional management, all the things that sit under emotional intelligence. But if they can develop, develop some emotional intelligence, their team dynamics can shift quite dramatically.

And then trust rises, innovation follows, maybe conflict is reduced. I'm sure you've seen that several times in the past.

Yeah.

And this is why our leadership programs in Zentano, this is why we focus so much on mindset and developing emotional intelligence alongside the tools and the techniques that we give leaders and managers.

Because if you don't get this right in leadership and in the teams, actually, this idea of shared leadership, which sounds fantastic in theory, is not going to gain traction if you don't shift the culture through developing emotional intelligence in people.

It's spot on.

Yeah. So I think people listening to this podcast think about the leadership training that you're doing with whichever provider that you're doing.

You know, hopefully those providers in some way are working at the mindset, emotional intelligence level of your leaders and people in your team, because that's the way to shift culture.

Absolutely right.

So let's take it into the third and final part of this conversation then, and I think you alluded to it earlier on, is if we're going to get this sort of optimal, sustainable performance using shared leadership, one of the things we need to make sure we're doing is, is team coaching. And we'll explain what we mean by that in a minute. Now, coaching isn't just a role, I think. Come back to the point that you've just made.

It's a mindset.

It starts from a mindset, but it's a mindset that accelerates learning, accelerates resilience, and all sorts of really positive things you want to see in a team. So do you want to pick up what we mean by team coaching, Rich, and why it's so important?

Yes.

So if you think about what team coaching does, as opposed to traditional leadership, what a coaching approach would do inside a team is it will encourage people to think for themselves, to learn for themselves, to problem solve for themselves, to come up with their own answers for themselves, to be flexible and adaptable and take responsibility for their performance. So you imagine you get a whole team doing all of that or all of that. That takes such a pressure off the leader, doesn't it?

Absolutely.

Think about it.

Absolutely.

Because so, you know, if people are learning for themselves, making decisions for themselves, they're not always coming to you knocking on the door and you think, oh, here we go again, you know, so actually they're taking responsibility and doing it for themselves. So I think really good coaching takes a leader from tell mode into coach mode.

So and the other thing I think inside a team is not just about the leader of the team coaching team members.

No.

So one of the teams I worked with recently, you know, we had quite some in depth conversations around peers having peer coaching conversations. Okay. And I think that's really important to do, you know, so.

So the team take responsibility for holding each other to account and for supporting and challenging each other by having coaching conversations. So those conversations go a bit deeper. They're not so transactional.

And the peer conversations are not about, you know, just telling people, you know, I think you should do this or do that and be a very advice based conversations, but they go much deeper. So I think you get better integration and better team working if you encourage a coaching approach throughout the team.

And it's not just focused on team leaders.

Yeah. Well, I think again, the research backs this up, Rich.

What it's basically saying, I think, is that team coaching, it will strengthen team processes, it will enhance learning, it will drive reflection, it will enhance problem solving, all of which drives adaptability in a team, which we need to see in the modern world, and ultimately performance, which is what everyone's looking for. But there's probably other benefits apart from just the faster integration of team members. What other benefits do you think this will show people?

So I think if team Members coach each other, they're more likely to engage in healthy conflict resolution. So you, as a leader, don't always have to be involved in resolving conflict between the teams.

By adopting the coaching approach, they'll be able to coach each other to resolve resolutions effectively. I think also the really good thing about the coaching approach is it drives a continuous improvement culture.

So, you know, really good coaching encourages people to take responsibility for their own learning, to think about how they could do things differently, and to drive that idea of continuous improvement. We spoke to the ex head of engineering in the Alpine F1 team the other day. Do you remember that conversation we had?

Yeah, I do.

And.

And one of the things that they do inside F1 is to continuously challenge people, you know, to wake up, you know, in the morning and think, what's the little thing that I can do to improve something in my role in my job today?

And if everybody woke up every day and thought, what's the one thing I can do today just to make my job a little bit easier and a little bit more efficient and effective?

Think about the cumulative effect of that inside a team, and then add to that team members supporting and challenging each other to continuously improve as well. That is the recipe, I think, for high performance.

Yeah, and what we're trying to do in our programs is instill a mindset and use some toolkits as well to help people adopt coaching as a lever for transformation. So it becomes you move away from that transactional way of leading into a much more developmental, transformational way of leading.

And I think that is the future. That is where we need to go. Imagine if you've got a team who's hitting a big roadblock.

Traditionally, a directive leader, particularly one under pressure, might just say, let's push harder, let's push harder. The coaching orientated leader, the one you've just described to us, will just ask questions. They'll say things like, what's getting in the way?

What options do we have? And questions like that unlock collective intelligence.

And let's face it, in our teams, there's probably lots and lots of collective intelligence in our teams.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So, Rich, that's it for today. Just a few practical takeaways really, from the discussion we've had that people can sort of start using.

So just a couple of things, I would say start small.

So, you know, if you like this idea of shared decision making and shared leadership inside your team, a good way is, you know, pick a project that that's coming up soon and, you know, when you initiate a Project, project.

It's a good opportunity when you talk to people about the project to say, right, let's, let's do this slightly differently than how we've done before. So it gives you a good way in to, to introduce this, this new way rather than, you know, treating it as some big sort of culture exercise.

So yeah, so do it, do it, do it in small steps. I think building emotional intelligence is a challenging thing to do. So you can do that through good leadership programs.

Come to Zentano if you want to talk about that.

But actually from a practical perspective, inside teams, couple of things I would encourage listeners to do is to encourage people to take time to reflect, take time to reflect yourself.

And what I mean by that is critically reflecting, you know, so it's okay for us to make mistakes, but the key thing is to reflect on those mistakes and think about what you could do differently next time. So build in reflection naturally into the way you work and the conversations you have.

I'd also encourage you to create a feedback culture inside your team and to encourage people to give feedback and to be open to feedback and that builds self awareness if people are open to feedback and perspectives from other people. And the final thing to embed coaching, I would just say just ask more questions rather than giving answers. It's as simple and as difficult as that.

Our ego gets in the way because we like to give the answers and be the font of all knowledge. Stop yourself from giving them the answer and have a coaching conversation.

We just ask really good questions to get them to think about the answer for themselves.

Yeah, some brilliant, brilliant, practical takeaways there, Rich. So that's it for today's conversation. Just a little bit of a pause for you as we close this conversation.

Most leadership bottlenecks don't exist because the teams aren't capable. They exist because experienced leaders are carrying more load than they should, often without realizing it.

And removing that blowblock, that bottleneck isn't about stepping back and doing less. It's about leading differently.

And that's the point, I think, Rich, you've been trying to make create clarity, create ownership, create shared responsibility so that performance doesn't depend on that one person. This is exactly the kind of shift we explore with leaders.

On our programs, our Pathfinder and Pioneer programmes, we help leaders move from being the center of everything to enabling strong leadership across the whole ecosystem of the place where they work.

And I think today, if today's conversation has resonated with anybody listening here, take a moment, as Rich said, to reflect on where leadership might be unintentionally concentrating all around you and what could change if it didn't have to? Shared leadership, emotional intelligence, and team coaching, they're not buzzwords.

Yeah, I'd agree with that.

So thank you everyone for listening. Please share this episode with your peers, your colleagues, or anyone you know who wants to avoid being a bottleneck.

But for today, Rich, thanks for your time. Thanks as always for your thoughts. And we'll be back next week.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you.

Bye.