High-stakes conversations for Senior Leaders
About Gail Page
In professional services, relationships are made and broken by conversations.
The conversations that cost firms the most are rarely the loudest. More often, they are the ones avoided for too long.
Sometimes it is a behavioural issue people have adapted around for years. Sometimes a leadership team is so focused on managing each other that nobody is actually leading. Sometimes a senior leader is carrying more pressure than anyone around them fully realises. Sometimes all three. Say the wrong thing, and it escalates. Say nothing, and it compounds.
And if you're the one addressing it, you still have to walk back into the room afterwards.
That is typically when I'm brought in. Into situations that are politically sensitive and commercially exposed. That trust is not something I take lightly.
For 27 years, I've worked with professional services firms. Always the same patterns. My background in mental health and social work lets me quickly see what others in the room are reacting to but cannot yet articulate.
My role is not to make people comfortable. It is to help leadership teams deal with what has become untouchable.That means getting Partners who have been at odds into the same room. Getting senior leaders to agree on the standards the firm is going to hold. Bringing the whole firm together around what is expected and what will not be tolerated.
Not as policy. As behaviour.
People often say afterwards that what surprised them was not how direct the work was. It was how safe it felt to finally say the thing that had been sitting in the room for months.
Decisions get made. Standards get held. The people who had gone quiet start contributing again. Leadership capacity returns to where it belongs. The firm starts feeling like the place people chose to join.
Where we start depends on where the situation sits and how widely its effects are being felt.
The first conversation is confidential, direct and without obligation. You describe the situation. I tell you honestly whether I can help, and how.
I had doubts Gail could achieve the results we needed with such a diverse group. She more than delivered, and the group came out significantly stronger.
Russell Bailey | General Manager, Aon, Central Region
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