Here in the northern hemisphere, August arrived with the kind of heat that slows everything down. I know not everyone reading this is in summer. Some of you are turning towards autumn, others already deep in winter. Wherever you are, the season shapes how we lead. Here on the South Downs the landscape has turned a bleached, parched shade of yellow. n the evenings I have been finding shade rather than sunshine, and walking at the start and the end of the day. This year I have consciously chosen to take all of August to recharge my energy, to slow down and to take time to think. There is one exception, which is a ‘Three C’s Workshop’ for a client who has also been a guest on my podcast Leaders in Conversation. You can listen to the episode here

For those of you reading my blog, or meeting me here, for the first time, you may be wondering: ‘What are the 3 C’s? ’ They are Curiosity, Care and Courage. The three mindsets and behaviours that facilitate open conversation, deepen human connection, and drive collective success. In our work, Lucy Kidd and I help leaders co-create a safe environment in which people feel seen, heard and valued by practising the mindset and behaviours of real Curiosity, Care and Courage, which lead to teams working together and leading with Collaborative Edge. If you are curious to find out more, please do get in touch with me https://www.annitownend.com/contact

The hazel, quietly developing

The tree that has caught my attention this month is the hazel. It rarely draws the eye the way an oak does, or a horse chestnut in full candle. It gets on with things without fanfare. Its catkins came and went back in late winter, easy to miss if you were not looking. Now, in August, the nuts are forming along the branches, starting out a soft green colour; some of them are already hardening to a warm brown. Hazel has long been associated with wisdom, not because it announces itself, but because it keeps going, season after season, without needing to be the tallest thing in the hedgerow. The leaders I most admire are those who work this way too. Steady. Unshowy. Present with what is actually happening rather than performing, quietly developing and growing their leadership and supporting others to do the same.

A whole country, looking up together

On 12 August, much of the UK experienced partial solar eclipse, close to ninety per cent of the sun covered as it set. It was the most striking eclipse seen from here since 1999. I set out to watch from the South Downs. Earlier in the afternoon I had experimented with a colander, watched a YouTube video on how to make a view box, and made one. In the end I decided not to take them with me, to walk empty-handed and to experience the light and shadow shifting; and to let the energy of the eclipse pass through me.

That is what I noticed. Not the eclipse, but the pausing, standing and then sitting on the ground. I did look up, not at the sun but to the top of the South Downs, to what is known as Kingston Ridge where I saw a group of people far in the distance, standing and watching. A shared stillness. I wondered if one of them was the photographer Sarah Weal, who most Summer Solstices stands in the same position and takes her annual photographs of the Downs from the ridge. Imagine my joy when the next day she posted her photographs on Instagram, taken from on high, and seeing myself a tiny speck on the harvested, bleached yellow field!
Most of our days are so full that even the idea of collectively stopping feels like a small act of rebellion. I have been wondering since what it would mean for teams to make time, deliberately, to stop and notice together. What are you noticing, right now, in your team?

Where two things meet

The eclipse was, in the truest sense, a lesson in edges. It happens at the boundary where light and shadow meet, that thin, particular line where one thing becomes another. The hazel knows something about edges too. It is not really a tree of open fields or deep woodland. It grows best at the margins, in hedgerows, along the line where field meets wood and sun meets shade. It does its work in the in-between.

Again, I think about edges often in my work with Lucy Kidd, not least because the word gave its name to the podcast we host together, Finding Your Collaborative Edge. The concept of edge is drawn from permaculture, in which ‘growth happens at the edges’. Edges are where there is the most biodiversity. It is where old certainties end, and something new has not yet fully formed. But it is also where the interesting work happens. Teams do not usually find their way forward in the safe, well-trodden middle. They find it at the edge, in that uncomfortable, generative space where curiosity, care and courage are actually required rather than simply admired.

When things heat up

Heat is not only a summer weather pattern and one which in the UK we are going to need to adapt to. It shows up in organisations too. A restructure lands. A team merges with another. Someone leaves, or has to reapply for the job they thought was theirs. The pressure rises, and what a leader does next tends to set the tone for everyone around them.

I am not alone in noticing how often the instinct, when things heat up, is to move faster, to fill the silence with any action rather than sit with the discomfort of not yet knowing. But speed under pressure rarely produces good judgement. It produces reaction. The leaders who hold their teams best through a hot stretch are usually the ones who can do the opposite: slow the pace just enough to think clearly and let trust do the work that urgency cannot.

Building team trust does not happen only in the calm periods. It is tested, and often built, in exactly these hotter moments, when a team is watching to see whether their leader stays rooted under pressure or gets swept along by it.

A to-do list, and a to-be list

This month, alongside whatever is on your to-do list, I would invite you to keep a to-be list too. Rooted. Curious. Present with your friends, your family, your team, yourself. Like the hazel, quietly developing even when nobody is watching closely.

Writing this summer

Alongside the walking, and time to be quiet Lucy and I have spent the early part of August writing together. been working on our book for some time, a chance to set down, properly, what we have learned through working with leaders and their teams for over 30 years about working together, about effective collaboration and its edges. It has been its own kind of edge work, sitting with an idea until it becomes a sentence, and sitting with the sentence until it becomes a paragraph, and then a book entitled: Leading with Collaborative Edge.