Leaders, Climate Makers or Breakers?

Our view on everyday leadership

There is a lot of noise out there about leadership.

Some of it is thoughtful. Some of it is useful. A surprising amount of it sounds like it was written by someone who has never had to calm down a tense meeting on a Wednesday afternoon while three people are overwhelmed, one person is fed up, and somebody has just said “let’s take this offline” for the fourth time.

That is partly why we keep coming back to a simpler view.

We believe leadership is not just about direction, decisions, authority, or getting results on paper. It shows up much earlier than that, and much closer to the ground. You can feel it in the way people are spoken to, in the quality of conversations, in whether feedback builds someone up or quietly flattens them, and in how a team behaves when pressure starts creeping in.

Over time, those moments create a pattern. That pattern becomes culture. And culture is often just the accumulation of what gets role-modelled, what gets rewarded, what gets avoided, and what people learn to expect from those leading them.

That is why we think of leaders as ‘Climate Makers’.

Leaders shape the atmosphere around the work. They influence whether a team feels steady or unsettled, clear or confused, trusted or tightly controlled. They help create the conditions people work inside every day, which means their impact goes far beyond targets, updates, and whether the quarterly dashboard has enough green on it to keep everyone happy.

We’re interested in leadership that feels human, useful, and real. Not leadership as theatre or as a polished performance. Not leadership as whoever can repeat your company values most confidently while standing near a flipchart.

We are interested in the kind of leadership that helps people do good work without losing themselves in the process.

So what matters most in leadership?

Well, quite a few things obviously, so here’s our take. Communication matters, a lot. We’re not saying leaders need to become motivational speakers, but we believe unclear, cold, over-engineered communication has a habit of making everything harder than it needs to be. When people are left to decode what is really being asked, where priorities have shifted, or whether anyone is actually going to say the difficult thing out loud, energy gets wasted very quickly.

“Communication is not about saying what we think. Communication is about ensuring others hear what we mean.” – Simon Sinek

The leaders people remember well are usually the ones who can communicate with clarity and honesty. They do not hide behind jargon. They do not confuse sounding senior with being useful. They know how to say what matters in a way that people can actually hear, understand, and act on. Better still, they know how to do that without sounding like they swallowed a leadership podcast.

For us, strong leadership is also about holding two things together that often get pulled apart: respect and results.

Too often, organisations behave as though they need to choose. You can be kind or you can be high-performing. You can care about people or you can get things done. You can create a decent working environment or you can maintain standards. It is a deeply uninspiring false choice.

The best leaders know that respect and results belong together. They expect good work and are clear when something is not good enough. They address issues and they make decisions. They do not avoid accountability because they want to be liked. At the same time, they do not treat pressure as an excuse to become abrupt, careless, or impossible to work with. They understand that how results are achieved matters. Not just morally, though that should be enough, but practically too. People do better work when they are trusted, respected, and not constantly bracing for impact. (HBR – The Power of Healthy Relationships at Work)

That is one of the reasons we think the Beluga 6 matters: a simple way of describing some of our human intelligences that help everyone (and particularly leaders) create the right climate around them.

This is not us trying to launch a grand new theory of leadership and slap it on a poster. It is simply our way of describing six human intelligences that seem to matter again and again in everyday leadership.

There is the ability to understand emotion, both your own and everyone else’s, without letting it run the whole show. There is the capacity to stay constructive under pressure, especially when your inner saboteur is having a field day and would quite like to make everything worse. There is the social awareness to read a room properly, build trust, and handle situations with empathy rather than blunt force. There is the creativity to think differently when the obvious answer is not working. There is the digital good sense to use systems, tools, data, and AI in ways that help rather than hinder. And there is the customer instinct to notice what people need, where friction sits, and what would make the experience better.

Taken together, those intelligences say something important about how we see leadership. We do not think leadership is built on authority, charisma, or polish alone. We think it has much more to do with the human intelligences that shape everyday leadership: awareness, emotional insight, communication, creativity, and how you make people feel around you.

That effect matters because leadership always leaves a footprint.

You can see it in teams that have become more confident and open over time. You can feel it in teams that have learned to stay quiet, keep their heads down, and save their real opinions for after the meeting. You can see it in the energy people bring to the start of a project, in the courage they have when something is going wrong, and in the level of care they bring to customers, colleagues, and the work itself.

And increasingly, that footprint is not just human. It is environmental too. It really matters about the everyday behaviours and choices leaders normalise. Pace. Waste. Travel. Materials. Time. Energy. Whether people are encouraged to think carefully or just produce more. Whether ‘fast’ automatically means inefficient and exhausting and whether sustainability is treated as a side conversation for another department, or as part of how good decisions get made in the first place.

We think good leadership should be sustainable in the fullest sense. Sustainable for people, because burnt-out teams are not a sign of brilliance. Sustainable for culture, because fear and confusion are expensive ways to run an organisation. And increasingly sustainable for the wider planet too, because the habits we build at work should not stop at the office door.

So no, we are not especially interested in leadership as image management. We are interested in what leaders make possible. What they reinforce. What they leave behind. Whether people become more capable, more honest, more energised, and more connected because of the climate around them, or in spite of it.

That feels like a better place to start than a lot of leadership advice tends to gives us. Less performance, more substance. Less swagger, more awareness. Less “how do I look as a leader?” and more “what is it actually like to be led by me?”

That question is uncomfortable, which is usually a sign it is worth asking.

Because leadership leaves a footprint. The interesting question is whether yours helps people flourish or simply teaches them how to cope.

Leaders can be climate makers or climate breakers...

If you are ready to invest in leadership that creates the right conditions for people to grow, perform, and thrive, we would love to talk.

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This piece reflects our own perspective on leadership, informed by our work, our values, and what we see playing out in real teams every day