Lovely story from a new colleague Nicola Collister (who also runs the marvellous  Jestique.) In her time as a call centre leader, she was in the middle of a big shift in how the centre ran, with multi-skilling and new technologies being introduced.  One of her best performers, a 15 year veteran, came into her office, nearly in tears about the changes. You don’t understand, she said. I know this job and I can do it really well, but I also need, in the afternoon, to be thinking about what the kids are doing that night, what other plans are and what I’m cooking for tea, because my husband needs his tea when he gets in at 5.30. And there’s no room to do that anymore.

We sometimes forget that change in organisations can unsettle the very way in which people experience themselves. Their anxiety is rarely heard publicly: it burns away inside their  heads or is fetched up in gossip, rumour and various forms of persecution. Good managers, I suspect, are capable of paying attention, even holding this anxiety. Which requires, in turn, that they have earned the trust of those they manage. Without that, they have no right to engage in the conversation. Nicola had that woman’s trust, but it’s rarer than we like to think.