Great Teams Start With Great Leaders
Be The Leader People Want To Do Their Best Work For.
I have seen first hand the difference a great leader can make in one of the most challenging and pressurised situations in the world, on board a UK nuclear submarine.
I has several skippers in charge during my service, but in 2 consecutive patrols I had 2 different skippers – one a poor leader, the other awesome.
Guess who people wanted to go to sea with? Guess who people worked hardest for? Guess who the team would want to go to war with?
Our “Abraham Method” of Leadership is named after one man. One incredible skipper called Paul Abraham (RIP Sir.)
YOU can be the skipper of your business that people WANT to go to sea with.
Leadership Is Everything
If your organisation feels stuck—if decisions crawl, teams hesitate, and potential stays just below the surface—it’s not your people, it’s could be your leadership system.
At Shadow CEO, we’ll help you replace control with clarity, supervision with empowerment, and exhaustion with momentum.
We’ll work alongside your leaders to turn bottlenecks into catalysts: people who create conditions where talent thrives, ideas move, and accountability feels energising, not heavy.
Our programs don’t just teach leadership—they transform how leadership happens day to day. The result is an organisation that learns faster, decides smarter, and scales trust as easily as it scales results.
If you’re ready to unlock the capability already inside your teams, we’ll show you how to light the fuse—and lead as a catalyst.
Great Strategy, Average Results? Blame Your Culture!
Organisational culture is basically “how it feels to work here” – the attitudes, behaviours and unwritten rules that shape everyday life in a business. You can’t see it on a spreadsheet, but it drives almost everything: how people show up, how decisions are made, how problems get solved, and how your clients experience your brand.
When culture is healthy and intentional, people know what’s expected of them beyond their job description. They feel safe to speak up, take ownership and make decisions. Leaders are consistent in how they behave, not just in what they say. There’s a clear sense of “this is how we do things” that helps everyone move in the same direction.
When culture is weak or toxic, the opposite happens. People start to play it safe. They hold back ideas because they’re worried about how they’ll be received. You see more blame and politics, and less accountability. Teams get busy but not necessarily effective, because energy is going into navigating the environment rather than doing their best work.
Over time, a poor culture shows up in very tangible ways. Your best people leave first. Engagement drops, and those who stay often mentally check out. Collaboration becomes harder, small issues turn into recurring problems, and decision-making slows down because no one is quite sure what’s really valued. Customers feel the impact too, even if they can’t name it—they just experience inconsistent service, mixed messages and a lack of ownership.
The important thing to remember is that every organisation has a culture, whether it’s been designed or just allowed to evolve on its own. Ignoring it doesn’t keep it neutral; it usually lets unhelpful patterns take root. Being deliberate about culture—defining it, living it, and reinforcing it—gives you a powerful lever to improve performance, retain great people and create an environment where both the business and the humans in it can thrive.