Mike Drayton

Today I facilitated the National Archives' 'Leadership Skills: Confidence, Communication and Influence' event, built around a simple idea... 👉 You don't lose confidence at work. You lose access to it under pressure. We explored this through panel discussions and case material. My role was to frame the day psychologically and make sense of what drives confident communication, difficult conversations and influence. The conversations kept coming back to three practical leadership challenges: 👉...

I spent this morning with a group of senior public leaders exploring a simple but powerful idea: We all lead two teams. 👉 There’s the 'external team'. The real people we work with every day, with all their different personalities: the enthusiastic ones, the cautious ones, the loud ones, the tired ones. 👉 And then there’s the 'internal team'. The different parts and voices inside our own head. They’re remarkably similar: the enthusiastic voice, the cautious voice, the “just get on with it”...

I’m very pleased to share that The Emotional Life of Organisations has been shortlisted for the 2026 Business Book Awards. I wrote this book because I think we often misunderstand what organisations really are. We talk about strategy, culture, structure, performance and change, as if these things exist separately from the people inside them. But they don’t…. Every organisation has an emotional life. 🔴 You see it in the meeting where everyone knows the real issue, but nobody names it 🔴 You...