Where it started
I joined the shop floor at 16. Nearly 30 years later, I still lead teams at one of the UK's most loved, most successful retailers — full P&L responsibility, and a stint leading talent and performance strategy at head office along the way. I hold a Level 7 Senior Executive Leadership qualification from Imperial College London, with distinction, and I'm a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute. The thing I'm proudest of: driving 75,000 goal adoptions across the business in six months — not through pressure, but by rebuilding how people actually engage with being asked to improve.
What I actually believe about performance management
Most performance systems are built backwards. They start with a rating — a number, a label, a box on a form — and then try to attach reward to it. The trouble is, a single annual score can't hold the complexity of a year's work, so it ends up measuring how memorable your last quarter was, not how good you actually were. Worse, the moment you tie pay or progression directly to that score, you change what people optimise for. They stop trying to do great work and start trying to manage the rating — sandbagging targets, playing it safe near review time, quietly avoiding the harder projects that carry more risk of a lower mark. The system built to drive performance ends up quietly suppressing it.
I've spent a career trying to close that gap from the inside. The organisations that actually get better aren't the ones with the cleverest rating scale — they're the ones that treat "getting better" as something that happens in small, frequent, unglamorous moments, not once a year in a review meeting. Real performance management isn't a verdict delivered after the fact. It's a constant, low-stakes conversation about what's working and what isn't, happening so often that no single moment carries the weight of an entire year's pay rise.
That's the gap I keep coming back to: people find out they're underperforming constantly — a missed target shows up on a dashboard within days. They almost never hear, in the moment, that they did something well. Recognition gets saved up for the annual cycle, by which point it barely registers. Flip that ratio — catch people doing well as often as you catch them falling short — and you don't just get a nicer culture. You get better results, because people are busy trying things instead of protecting a score.
What actually changed how I see it
I've had five surgeries since 2021. My son has Crohn's disease. Somewhere in those years of hospital corridors and middle-of-the-night phone checks, I noticed what it had done to me — a nervous system that never properly switched off, at work or at home. Always scanning. Always braced for the next thing.
That's not overwork in the abstract. It's what happens when "always on" stops being a turn of phrase and becomes a literal description of how your body runs.
What I build with it
I've built and shipped digital products entirely on my own time: a short book on giving less of yourself away for free, a goal-setting framework drawn straight from that 75,000-adoption project, and Time Billed — a free tool that does the maths on exactly what unpaid hours are actually costing you.
I also stood for local office a couple of years ago, and got the best result that seat had ever seen for a party that doesn't usually trouble the scoreboard there. Not because I had to. Because I think people who've actually carried the weight of a demanding job and a hard few years, and kept building anyway, are worth listening to on this subject.
If you're reading this wondering whether to reach out
I'm not selling a fantasy where you fix work-life balance with an app and a nice quote. I'm someone with a genuinely full plate — a demanding leadership role, a complicated few years health-wise, a young family, a small business built in spare hours — who's still standing, still building, and trying to hand other people something that actually helps, rather than something that just sounds good.