Shakespeare, I’ve realised, is not the fellow I should’ve turned to for life advice.

I’ve been doing a lot of leadership lately. It’s mostly involved biting my tongue, seeing things from both sides, and generally not telling people that they are being, right at this moment, dickheads. It’s involved fewer rolling speeches given on the eve of battle and a lot more “Yeah, you’re absolutely right. This situation really is absolutely awful. But we can’t get out of it by yelling at people. We’re going to have to talk to them. Even though they’re bastards.”

Shakespeare did not prepare me for this. I was geared up for my leadership journey to be a lot of keynote speeches, thundering monologues, letting loose a dog or two. Mind you, I was totally geared up for my first deep romance to end in death and actually it’s ended in an enduring friendship, so perhaps that should have been my first clue that Art merely does a decent sketched caricature of Life instead of a proper impersonsation.

In the day job, I’ve finally met the wider team I’ll be working in. It was a really exciting session, as we talked about the culture that we want to create and I got to nerd out about creating culture and how hard it is. Everywhere that I’ve worked that’s had a good culture, it’s been about a step away from a cult. It’s the kind of thing that Amazon excels at, and I believe that’s because they give it the level of importance that it requires. If you really believe that’s the enabling factor, then it’s right that you put it on the walls, and that your hiring process has people who are ‘stewards of the leadership principles‘, and that they come up in every pitch meeting, every mid-year, every design discussion.

And you’ve got to accept that other people are going to think you are weird. Other people are going to see this programme and think: those people are weird. They do things differently. They don’t do things like us.

And if we’re lucky, some of those people are also going to think: cool. Where do I sign up.

Leadership to me this week has mostly been gritting my teeth and biting my tongue and finding the compromise. But today I got to let loose with what a leadership culture could be, and I found that this week of finding compromise had convinced me that this is what it should be. A leadership culture where we are honest with each other and we find common ground…weird. Cool.

Awesome.