Sahar.

I learned about leadership the hard way — first as a soldier with the Gordon Highlanders, and then as an officer with the Parachute Regiment, leading to the Advanced Command and Staff College.

In that environment the questions were not academic. What makes a team resilient enough to hold together under genuine adversity? What builds the relationships that allow people to perform at their best when the stakes are real? How do you lead in conditions where the cost of getting it wrong is not a missed quarter, but something far graver?

I spent years asking those questions, and the answers I worked out then have stayed with me through everything since.

Into business — and what changed.

Moving into business, many of those leadership truths held. But new questions opened up. How do you define a strategy in a complex and competitive environment, and organise a team to execute it? How does change — transformation, post-merger integration, growth at scale — either accelerate or destroy what an organisation has built? And what is the lasting truism that sits behind it all: how does leadership directly link to success or failure?

I held senior executive appointments — President, Chief Operating Officer, Senior Vice President of Strategy, Senior Vice President of Sales — with organisations including the De Beers Family of Companies, Rio Tinto, Aon, Sigma7, GardaWorld and Constellis. I led teams of more than 6,000 people, held P&L responsibility in complex international businesses, and worked across more than forty countries. At board level I have served as Chairman of a SaaS business, Chair of a Joint Venture Board, NED for SaaS companies post-investment, and Senior Advisor to executive teams.

Why I do this work now.

I will be honest with you about something. Through parts of my executive career I had a huge desire to have an effect, and yet I sometimes failed to make the impact I wanted. I lacked the self-awareness I needed. I drove teams in ways that made me less effective, not more, when complexity rose. The cost of that landed not only at work but in the relationships at home that mattered most. It made me a lesser leader, and at times a lesser man, than I knew I could be.

I did the work on myself. And I have spent the years since trying to help other leaders make that same journey faster, with less cost to themselves and the people around them.

I run Sahar Partners because I get a depth of satisfaction from supporting others reach their full potential — at work, and in the lives they live outside it — that I could not get from running a business where money came first. If, in some small way, I can have a positive influence on the lives of the people I work with and the world they touch, that is enough.