Some days, you’re tired in a way that has nothing to do with how much you slept or how many steps you took. After seventeen years of HSC cycles, I know the feeling well. It is not the tiredness of a long term, a difficult week, or the sort of exhaustion that can be solved with an early night and a coffee strong enough to qualify as an intervention. It is the tiredness that comes from finishing something you have cared about deeply, particularly when “finished” does not quite mean what you thought it would.
The HSC provides a useful metaphor for something I increasingly recognise as a much broader leadership experience: the strange space between one thing ending and the next thing demanding your full attention. It happens when a major project finally reaches implementation, when a strategic priority is replaced, when a restructure settles only to be followed by another shift, or when an initiative you have spent months or years building is no longer the thing the organisation needs. Sometimes you are ready to move on. Sometimes you are not. Sometimes the organisation has moved on before you have.
Leaders like to talk about agility, adaptability and responsiveness as though they are purely strategic capabilities. They are certainly that, but there is a much more human reality underneath them. Strategic flexibility can require emotional detachment from our own ideas, and that is considerably harder than it sounds.
The longer I lead, the more I think one of the hidden costs of leadership is attachment. We become attached to the idea, the project, the solution we fought for when nobody else could quite see it yet. We become attached to the team we built around it, the political capital we invested, the difficult conversations we navigated and the small breakthroughs that only those closest to the work will ever really understand. We know why something matters because we have lived inside it. That is also where the risk begins.
The person who has invested the most in an idea is not necessarily the person best placed to decide whether the organisation should continue with it. Commitment is a virtue, and we rightly encourage leaders to persist, back themselves and see things through. There comes a point, however, when persistence can quietly become attachment, and attachment can begin to masquerade as strategy.
One of the least celebrated leadership capabilities may be the ability to say, “This was the right decision then, but it is not the right decision now.” That requires humility and perspective, but it can also require something more uncomfortable: accepting that an idea you genuinely believed in has reached the end of its useful life. Caring deeply about something does not make it strategically immortal.
Projects rarely end as neatly as the project plan suggests they will. Some finish too early. Others continue long after their original purpose has expired. Some achieve their intended outcome while the harder work of embedding it is only beginning. Sometimes the context changes so substantially that the original problem is no longer the problem you are trying to solve.
This is where leadership becomes less about project management and more about judgement.
A project plan can tell you what was supposed to happen, but it cannot tell you when you have outgrown the original idea. A milestone can tell you that something has been delivered, but it cannot tell you whether the thing delivered is still solving the problem you set out to solve. A strategy can tell you where you intended to go, but it cannot guarantee that the landscape will still look the same when you arrive.
Good leadership therefore requires a tolerance for untidy endings. Some things need to be deliberately closed. Others need to evolve beyond our ownership. Some need to stop altogether. Others need to be handed over before we feel entirely ready to let them go. For people who care deeply and lead with a strong sense of responsibility, that last part can be particularly difficult because we can easily confuse ownership with responsibility. They are not the same thing.
I have become increasingly interested in what happens when leaders become wedded to concepts. It usually begins innocently enough. You identify a problem, develop a response, persuade others, build momentum and invest in making the idea work. You defend it when it is challenged, refine it when it needs refinement and eventually become its translator, advocate and institutional memory. Somewhere along the way, the idea can become intertwined with your professional identity, which makes questioning it feel strangely personal.
The strategic discipline is to keep asking an uncomfortable question: If I encountered this idea for the first time today, knowing what I know now, would I still choose it?
The answer cannot be determined by how much we have already invested. It cannot be determined by how difficult it would be to explain a change in direction, nor by what people might think if we stopped. It certainly cannot be determined by the fact that we have always done it this way. The question is whether we would choose it again.
Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes it will be no. Sometimes the most honest answer will be, “Not in this form.” That third answer may be the most strategically useful of all.
There is also a tendency to frame abandoning an idea as failure. I am increasingly convinced that we need to become much better at distinguishing between giving up and letting go. Giving up says, “This is too hard.” Letting go says, “The context has changed, and continuing would no longer be the best use of our energy.” One is avoidance; the other can be stewardship.
This matters because organisations are exceptionally good at accumulating things. Projects, committees, initiatives, processes, traditions, dashboards, working groups, pilot programs and improvement strategies have a habit of surviving long after their original purpose has been achieved or overtaken. We are much better at adding than subtracting.
Every new strategic priority can sound reasonable in isolation. Organisations do not experience priorities in isolation, however. They experience the accumulated weight of everything we have decided is important. At some point, leadership becomes less about asking, “What else should we do?” and much more about asking, “What are we prepared to stop doing so that this can matter?”
That is a much harder conversation because subtraction is rarely emotionally neutral. Someone built the thing you are removing. Someone championed it. Someone became very good at it. Someone may have staked part of their professional identity on its success.
The strategy may be changing, but the humans inside it do not necessarily change at the same speed.
That is why I keep coming back to the idea of the start line. In education, one cohort finishes and another begins. In organisations, one strategic cycle closes and another opens. A major project reaches implementation and suddenly the organisation is expected to move to the next priority. A restructure settles and the next strategic question arrives before everyone has finished processing the last one.
There is always another start line. The difficulty is that humans do not operate on the same timetable as strategy. A strategy can change overnight. A person’s relationship with the old strategy cannot.
When we ask people to move on, we are not simply asking them to change a task list. We may be asking them to relinquish something they have spent years becoming good at, something they believed in, something they built, or something through which they understood their contribution. That requires more than communication. It requires leadership that acknowledges what is being lost without allowing loss to become resistance to what needs to come next.
Seventeen years into my career, I no longer think resilience means becoming unaffected by endings. I think it means becoming better at understanding them. It means recognising the emotional tax without allowing it to dictate the strategy, being able to feel disappointed when an idea you championed does not survive while still asking whether the organisation is better served by letting it go, and being willing to celebrate something you built without needing to own it forever.
Perhaps the most difficult discipline is beginning again without requiring the new thing to justify the ending of the old thing.
We often want the next initiative to prove that the previous one was worth replacing. We want the new strategy to be demonstrably better, immediately. We want the new structure, team or approach to reassure us that letting go was the correct decision. Leadership rarely offers that kind of certainty. Sometimes the next decision has to be made with incomplete information, knowing that the wisdom of the judgement may only become obvious in retrospect. That is not poor strategy. That is strategy in the real world.
I think about this whenever I stand at another starting line. There is always something behind me that I have invested in: something that worked, something that did not, something I desperately wanted to work but didn’t, something that changed shape, or something I was not quite ready to relinquish. The temptation is to carry all of it forward because carrying it feels like honouring the investment.
Leadership is not the art of carrying everything. It is the discipline of deciding what comes with you.
Some things deserve to be carried because they contain hard-won learning. Some should stay because they represent values we refuse to compromise. Some need to be handed to someone else. Some need to be left behind. Leaving something behind does not make the work wasted. It means the work has done what it needed to do.
Perhaps that is the lesson I am still learning, after seventeen HSC cycles and many strategic initiatives: an ending does not invalidate the investment that came before it. Sometimes the most mature thing a leader can do is acknowledge that something mattered, acknowledge what it taught us, and then have the courage to stop protecting it simply because we once believed in it.
The next starting line will rarely arrive at exactly the moment we are emotionally ready for it. I suspect that is as it should be. Leadership is not about waiting until we have neatly processed the last chapter before opening the next one. It is about closing one chapter honestly, carrying the learning forward, leaving the attachment behind and stepping into the next one with enough humility to know that we may need to change our minds again.
The heels go on. The strategy comes with me. The ego stays behind. Then I start again.
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