The Leaders We Surround Ourselves With

A moment that stayed with me

Some years ago, I had the privilege of attending a London Business Forum event where I saw Rene Carayol speak. I remember it clearly. He was electric. Provocative. And he said something that has never left me, and that has since run as a quiet but insistent thread through everything I do.

He spoke about the idea of the ‘spike’ – the premise that the most powerful teams are not built from people who are broadly competent across the board, but from people who are brilliantly, distinctly, even uncomfortably themselves. His book, Spike, has become one of the most well-thumbed on my shelf, and one of the most frequently recommended to clients over the years. Because the challenge it poses is not a comfortable one.

It asks leaders to confront a deeply human instinct: the pull towards the familiar.

The most dangerous team isn’t the one that argues. It’s the one that always agrees.

Let’s be honest about why we hire the same people

I want to be straight with you here, because I think there’s something important in acknowledging what’s true before we talk about what’s better.

Hiring people who think and work like you? It’s genuinely enjoyable. You know how they’ll react. You laugh at the same things. Decisions feel faster because there’s an unspoken shorthand. You build trust quickly, because fundamentally you’re all operating from the same playbook. There’s a warmth to that. A comfort. And in the relentless pace of running a business or leading a team, comfort is not nothing.

I’m not here to dismiss that. What I am here to do is ask you whether that comfort is serving your organisation, or quietly limiting it.

Because here’s what homogenous leadership teams often share, beyond the camaraderie: the same blind spots. The same assumptions about what customers want, what markets look like, what risk is worth taking. The same instinct about which ideas are worth pursuing and which aren’t. And those shared blind spots do not announce themselves. They just quietly shape every decision you make.

Similarity creates speed. But difference creates strength.

What diversity in leadership actually means

Let me be clear about what I mean when I talk about diversity here, because I think the word has been flattened by overuse. I’m not talking about ticking boxes. I’m not talking about what I call performative representation. I’m talking about the deliberate, intentional cultivation of genuinely different thinking, experience, background, and perspective at the level of leadership.

That means the person who has led through a financial crisis sitting alongside the person who has only ever scaled. The introvert alongside the extrovert. The person who came up through operations alongside the one who came up through sales. The person whose lived experience of the world looks nothing like yours.

It means the voices that will push back. The ones that notice what you miss. The ones that ask the question you hadn’t thought to ask, because the world looks different to them than it does to you.

Rene Carayol’s framework cuts right to the heart of this. The Spike is not about everyone being good at everything. It’s about building a team where the strengths are real, distinctive, and complementary. Where the sum is dramatically greater than its parts precisely because those parts are so different.

That kind of diversity is not just a moral argument, though it is also that. It is a commercial one.

The cost of the echo chamber

When leadership teams think alike, they make similar decisions in similar ways. That can look like efficiency. But when the market shifts, when a crisis hits, when a competitor does something genuinely unexpected – the team that has only ever been tested by consensus is the most fragile.

I have worked with leadership teams who could articulate their values beautifully and had hired people who reflected those values back at them perfectly. The difficulty was that those teams often struggled with the questions no one was asking. With the perspectives that weren’t in the room. With the customers they didn’t fully understand because no one on their team had ever been one.

Diversity of background, experience, and thinking style is not just an asset in a crisis. It is the mechanism by which strong organisations stay sharp. It is how you keep seeing the world as it actually is, rather than as you assume it to be.

Questions for you as a leader

1. When you look around your leadership table, how many people think, work, or lead in fundamentally the same way?
2. When you last hired for a senior role, were you drawn to the candidate who felt most familiar, or the one who offered something genuinely different?
3. Can you name three distinct perspectives or thinking styles that are actively present and valued in your team?
4. Where has comfort and familiarity in your team come at the cost of challenge, creativity, or growth?
5. What would your team look like if you hired deliberately for difference, not just for competence?

Questions for your leadership team’s next meeting

1. What types of thinking, experience, or background are missing from this team, and how is that absence costing us?
2. When we last faced a significant challenge, whose voice shaped the solution? Whose was absent?
3. Do we make it genuinely safe for people to think and contribute differently here, or do we default to consensus?
4. If we could add one ‘spike’ in competency to this leadership team, what would it be and why?
5. Are we hiring for culture fit, or are we hiring for culture add?

Building diversity with intention

None of this happens by accident. Diverse, high-performing leadership teams are built deliberately, and sustained with the same intentionality.

That means examining your hiring criteria honestly – and asking whether ‘culture fit’ has become a proxy for familiarity. It means creating structures that genuinely amplify different voices, not just invite them into the room. It means being willing to sit with productive discomfort when someone challenges your thinking – and recognising that discomfort as a sign that something important is being said.

It also means investing in the development of your people, not just their skills, but their understanding of how to work and lead across difference. Because having diverse perspectives in the room is only valuable if you have built the conditions in which those perspectives can actually be heard.

This is the work. And it is some of the most valuable work a leader can do.

The richest teams I have ever seen are the ones where people bring their whole, distinct selves. Not their best impression of the person sitting next to them.

A final thought

Rene Carayol didn’t change my thinking overnight when I first heard him speak. But he planted something that took root. The idea that we are each most valuable when we are most fully ourselves. And that the task of a leader is not to replicate themselves, but to find and champion the people who see the world differently.

The leadership table should not be a mirror. It should be a window.

Victoria Buckenham 2026