A quarter can look bad simply because you are comparing it with the wrong past. I’ve spent enough time around recruitment, staffing and contingent workforce businesses to know how quickly peaks, troughs and one-off shocks can distort the picture. Good leaders look beyond the headline number, challenge the baseline and ask what the direction of travel really tells them before making the next move.

Growth has a habit of exposing weaknesses that were easy to ignore when a business was smaller. Scaling successfully means changing how the organisation leads, decides and operates.

Culture is shaped less by values statements and more by everyday decisions, behaviours and what leaders are prepared to tolerate. What you allow quickly becomes what your organisation accepts.

One of the more surprising lessons I've learned throughout my career is that organisations rarely suffer from a complete lack of awareness. In fact, most leadership teams have a remarkably good understanding of the challenges facing their business. They know where customers are becoming frustrated. They know which processes have become inefficient. They know where communication breaks down, where decision-making slows and where opportunities are being missed. The difficulty i