The Three Things That Quietly Break Leadership and What to Do About Them
- Apr 12
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 19
Written by Mark Proctor, Leadership and Success Advisor
Mark Proctor is a success advisor, leadership coach, and former elite military leader with over 30 years’ experience developing high-performing teams worldwide. He empowers leaders to build courage, clarity, and lasting impact through values-driven action.
Picture a meeting. Everyone is there. The agenda has been circulated. The leader opens with energy. And yet, twenty minutes in, you can feel it, the room is going through the motions. People are present but not quite with it. No one is saying what they are actually thinking. Questions are polite. Answers are safe. And when it ends, nothing has really moved or changed. That is not a bad meeting. That is a symptom.
The previous article in this series asked what consistently goes wrong when we misunderstand the purpose of leadership. The answer was already forming. But here it takes shape properly.
In my experience, thirty years of military leadership and the advisory work that followed, most leadership problems do not arrive with a fanfare. They arrive gradually and silently. They settle in and get comfortable, and they show up again and again, in different organizations, different sectors, and different sized teams.
Three things. Almost always these three things. Intent. Presence. Communication. Get these right and everything else has a chance. Get them wrong and no amount of strategy, process, or restructuring will save you.
1. Intent
Intent is the why. The purpose. The direction of travel. Surprisingly, in many of the organizations I have worked with, it is either absent altogether or so vague that it has become functionally useless.
When I ask leaders to tell me their intent simply and clearly, not the strategy document version, not the PowerPoint version, just the plain human version, many can’t. This is not usually down to them being poor leaders, but rather because the intent was never worked out properly in the first place. Or it was worked out by someone else and handed down. Or it exists, but only on paper, and no one has made it live.
This really does matter, and it is critical to put the time and energy here because getting this wrong will skew everything else down the line, and I mean everything. When intent is not clear, effort goes to the wrong things. Priorities become a negotiation rather than a given. People spend energy on activity that feels productive but is not pointed in the right direction. And the deeper cost, without clear intent, you cannot empower people. You cannot trust them to use their initiative. Because initiative without direction is just noise.
I have seen talented teams work enormously hard and achieve very little, regardless of how capable they are, because no one had told them simply and honestly where they were going and why it mattered. Intent needs to be three things, simple, memorable, and, wherever possible, inspiring. If people cannot repeat it back to you without looking at a document, it has not landed. And if it does not mean something to them personally, it will not motivate them.
A note from experience, if you ask your team to describe the intent of the organization and you get five different answers, you do not have an execution problem. You have an intent problem.
2. Presence
The leader is rarely around. Their diary is full, I do not doubt that. Full of meetings, reviews, calls, external commitments, governance, and admin. But full of the wrong things.
Presence is not about being busy in a visible way. It is about being with people in a way that matters. There should be an energy and a buzz that comes from seeing your leader. From watching them walk into the building in good spirit. From catching a glimpse of their humanity, that they are not just a title, but a person, a normal one, with good days and harder ones. That signal alone, that things are okay, nothing to panic about, the ship is steady, has a stabilizing effect on teams that cannot be replicated by any communication plan or all-staff email.
A leader's ability to show calm is, in my view, a genuine superpower. Not false calm. Not performed composure. Real steadiness. The kind that comes from having thought things through, from trusting your team, from knowing that uncertainty is not the same as crisis. When leaders show calm, teams feel it. When leaders show anxiety, teams feel that too, and often amplify it.
But presence also gives you knowledge. You get to know people when you are with them. Not the person they perform in a formal review, but the person they actually are. You learn who is struggling. Who is quietly brilliant. Who needs to be challenged and who needs to be steadied. You cannot learn that from a desk or a screen. You learn it from being in the room, the corridor, and the informal moments.
Presence also creates permission, the space for people to ask, to clarify, and to raise things they would not put in an email. Those conversations are often where the most important information lives. Ask yourself honestly, is your diary working for your leadership or against it?
3. Communication
You cannot subcontract leadership. This is the line I come back to more than any other when it comes to communication. And yet I watch it happen constantly. Difficult news delivered by email. Change communicated through a formal paper. Sensitive messages cascaded down through layers until they arrive stripped of tone, stripped of nuance, and stripped of the human being who sent them.
There is a reason people feel disconnected from leadership. Often, it is this. Face-to-face communication, especially for the difficult stuff, carries something that no written format can replicate. It carries tone. It carries honesty. It carries the leader's willingness to stand in front of something uncomfortable and own it. When people can see you say it, they can judge whether you mean it. That matters. Trust is built or broken in moments like these. And being present makes communication better. The two are not separate, they reinforce each other. When you are with people, communication becomes two-way. Questions can be asked and answered in the moment. Confusion gets resolved before it calcifies into assumption. Energy can be read in the room and responded to.
An email cannot do any of that. A paper cannot do any of that. There is also a timing issue. Communication that arrives late, especially about change or challenge, gives uncertainty room to fill the gap. Rumor is faster than most internal comms. The antidote is presence and directness, not polish. The medium is not neutral. How you communicate signals what you think of the people you are communicating with.
Three questions worth asking
Before you challenge someone else's performance, try these on yourself:
On intent, could every member of your team tell me your intent clearly, in their own words, right now, without preparation?
On presence, when did you last have a conversation with someone in your team that was not about a task, a problem, or a meeting?
On communication, think of the last difficult message you delivered. Did you show up in person, or did you send it?
The answers are not always comfortable. Mine weren’t, for a long time.
What you can do today
None of this requires a restructure. Here are three things you can do in the coming days or weeks:
Write your intent in one sentence. Not a strategy statement. One sentence that your team could repeat over coffee. If you cannot do it, that tells you something important.
Block thirty minutes this week, not for a formal conversation, but to walk around and be with your team. No agenda. No output. Just presence.
Identify the one conversation you have been sending by email that deserves to happen face to face. Have it.
Small moves. But moved consistently, they change the temperature of a team.
Where to go next
This article is the third in a connected series on leadership for Brainz Magazine. The next article builds on this. If intent, presence, and communication are the foundations, what are the non-negotiable behaviours that hold them in place? Those are the three tenets. We will look at those next.
At Green & Scarlet Leadership Advisory, this is the work we do, helping leaders move from good intentions to deliberate leadership practice. Through coaching, facilitation, or tools such as The Ultimate Leadership Journal, our focus is on leadership that is human, grounded, and built to hold under real-world pressure.
You can find more at Green & Scarlet, including the Ultimate Guide to Leadership. Leadership does not begin when everything is clear. It begins when it is not, and someone chooses to step forward anyway.
Takeaways
Most leadership problems come back to three things, unclear intent, absent leadership, and communication that avoids the hard conversations.
Intent must be simple, memorable, and inspiring. If your team cannot say it without a document, it has not landed.
Presence is not about being busy, it is about being with people in a way that steadies them, builds trust, and creates permission to speak.
You cannot subcontract leadership. Difficult communication must be delivered face to face, in the moment, by the leader.
Presence and communication reinforce each other. When you are with people, messages land differently.
All three can be improved this week with small, deliberate actions. No restructure required.
Read more from Mark Proctor
Mark Proctor, Leadership and Success Advisor
Mark Proctor is an internationally recognized success advisor and leadership coach with more than three decades of elite military leadership experience. He specialises in helping leaders overcome self-doubt, elevate their confidence, and translate values into measurable action. After a distinguished global career, Mark founded Green and Scarlet Leadership to develop courageous, principled, and high-impact leaders. His work blends strategic insight with deep human understanding, empowering clients to think to the finish, act with purpose, and unlock their full potential. Mark’s mission is simple: build confident leaders who change their world for the better.
