In The Room
Short, sharp observations from Dan Kuss on how technically strong teams become aligned, accountable, and high-performing.
One insight. 75 words. Once a week.
What Is In The Room?
Most leadership problems aren't hidden. They're visible in every meeting, every conversation, and every decision that doesn't quite land the way it should.
In The Room is a weekly observation series for managers and team leaders who were promoted for technical excellence and now lead people. Each edition is short — under 75 words — and drawn from real patterns I observe inside leadership teams across defence, engineering, education, and professional services.
No theory. No frameworks dressed up as insight. Just what I'm actually seeing in rooms most consultants never get access to.
What the series covers:
Each week focuses on one observable pattern — the kind that's easy to recognise once it's been named. Recent topics have included why silence in meetings isn't agreement, how unclear decision ownership creates the same conversation over and over, why accountability breaks down even when managers genuinely want to do better, and what happens when a high performer gets promoted into a role that's actually a completely different career.
Who reads it:
Managers and team leaders who lead teams of 10 to 50 people. Technical specialists who've moved into leadership and are navigating the shift from doing to leading. Senior leaders who want a short, sharp read that connects to what they're already experiencing.
If you've ever left a meeting wondering why the same issue keeps coming back, or noticed that your team nods but doesn't quite commit, you're in the right place.
How it works:
One email. Once a week. Takes under two minutes to read.
Subscribe below and the first edition arrives in your inbox shortly after.
Why dan started this:
Even thoughtful leaders don’t have time for long reads.
Dan kept noticing the same patterns in Defence and school teams:
Brilliant people.
Committed people.
Subtle friction.
Unclear ownership.
Assumed alignment.
Conversations avoided.
So he decided to share one short observation each week.
No fluff. No theory. Just what he’s seeing in real rooms.
Who this is for
Managers and team leaders who:
Were promoted for technical excellence
Now lead teams of 10–50 people
Want alignment without micromanaging
Care about performance and people
If that sounds like you, you’re in the right place.
What Dan sees change in teams
When teams address these patterns together, three things typically improve within 30 days:
Self-awareness
Clear goals and practical plans
Visible accountability
Meetings shift.
Conversations become clearer.
Ownership strengthens.
Join In the Room.
One short insight each week.
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In The Room #26 – The year hadn’t changed. The story had.
One of the sales representatives in a workshop this week said this year had felt different.
Harder. Like something had shifted in the market. Customers were more difficult. Momentum felt slower. The whole thing just felt different in a way that previous years hadn't.
Then we looked at the numbers.
Same inquiry volume as the previous year. Similar conversion rate. Tracking consistently with prior periods. Nothing in the data suggested the year was meaningfully different from any other.
The year hadn't changed. The story about the year had.
And once that story had formed, it had the potential to shape everything. How they talked about prospects, how they approached difficult calls, how much energy they brought to the work. The narrative had become the operating reality.
That's not a frontline sales problem. I see senior leaders do exactly the same thing with team culture, market conditions, and organisational performance. A difficult quarter produces a story about a difficult organisation. One high-profile departure becomes a story about retention. A few hard conversations become a story about a team that's struggling.
Sometimes those stories are accurate. Often they're a feeling that has been mistaken for evidence.
The workshop was built around a deceptively simple idea: Locus of Control.
The concept, developed by psychologist Julian Rotter in the 1950s, distinguishes between what sits inside your sphere of control and what sits outside it. It sounds straightforward. In practice, most people give a surprising amount of attention to things they have no actual ability to change – and correspondingly less attention to the things they can.
The question that shifted the conversation was this: what can you actually control here? Not influence. Not wish was different. Actually control.
It's a harder question than it sounds. Because the honest answer is usually narrower than people expect. You can't control the market. You can't control what a customer decides. You can't control a decision made two layers above you, or another person's behaviour, or whether this year feels easier than last year.
But you can control your preparation. Your response. The clarity you provide. The conversation you choose to have. Where you direct your attention next.
And the distinction between what is outside your control and what sits squarely within it changes the quality of the choices available to you.
In The Room #25 – When everyone agrees but nobody means the same thing.
I was working with a leadership team this week and asked them a straightforward question.
What is the one behaviour you consider non-negotiable in this team?
Communication won by a landslide. Unanimous, immediate, and completely unsurprising. It's the answer most leadership teams give. I've heard it hundreds of times.
Then I asked a different question.
I went around the room and asked each person individually: what does good communication actually mean to you?
Six people. Six answers.
Transparency. Context. Listening. Honesty. Consistency. Being heard.
Every answer was reasonable. Every answer reflected something genuinely important. And none of them were quite the same.
The room had just done something that leadership teams do constantly, in organisations of every size and sector: they had unanimously agreed on an expectation while holding six different definitions of what that expectation actually required.
Nobody was wrong. Nobody was being difficult. They had simply never been asked to make their definition explicit — and so the assumption had formed, quietly and naturally, that everyone meant roughly the same thing.
They didn't.
This isn't a communication problem. It's a definition problem. And the distinction matters enormously for how you try to solve it.
If you diagnose it as a communication problem, you send people to a workshop, encourage more transparency, run a team-building exercise, and wonder why things don't meaningfully change. The behaviours remain vague. The expectation stays undefined. The same conversations keep occurring.
If you diagnose it as a definition problem, you do something different. You slow down and make the implicit explicit. You ask people to articulate, specifically and behaviourally, what the expectation actually looks like in practice. You surface the gaps between different interpretations before those gaps become conflict, confusion, or performance issues.
That's a harder conversation to have. It's also a far more useful one.
The pattern extends well beyond communication.
In The Room #24 – The Promotion Paradox.
Most organisations promote their best people into leadership for exactly the right reasons.
High output. Deep expertise. Trusted by peers. Consistently strong results. The kind of person you can rely on without checking in. Promoting them feels obvious, even overdue.
Then something shifts.
The person who was exceptional at the work starts to struggle with the work of leadership. They gravitate back toward technical problems because that's where their confidence lives. They find delegation difficult because nobody quite meets the standard they'd set for themselves. They become the person every question gets escalated to, and the team quietly stops making decisions without them.
The organisation wonders whether it misjudged the person. In most cases it didn't. It misjudged the transition.
Here's what actually happened: two completely different careers were disguised as one promotion.
In the first career, success was personal. Output, expertise, individual contribution. The measure was what you produced. Your strengths were your tools and the faster you worked, the better.
In the second career, success is collective. What matters is what the people around you produce, not what you produce yourself. The measure shifts from your output to your team's capability. Your job is no longer to be the best in the room. It's to make the room better.
Those are fundamentally different jobs. They require different instincts, different habits, and in many cases a deliberate unlearning of the behaviours that made the first career successful.
The instinct to solve, so valuable in an individual contributor, becomes the habit of taking over in a leader. The high personal standard that drove excellent work becomes the bottleneck when applied to everyone else's output. The expertise that made someone indispensable as a specialist makes them reluctant to delegate to people who are still developing theirs.
None of this is a character flaw. It's a transition that wasn't designed.
I see this across almost every sector I work in. Engineering firms that promote their best engineers. Schools that promote their best teachers. Defence organisations that promote their best technical specialists. Professional services firms that promote their best practitioners. The pattern is remarkably consistent regardless of industry, because the underlying dynamic is the same.
If This Feels Familiar
If you read these notes and think:
“This sounds like my team.”
That’s often where a facilitated session helps.
If you’d like to explore that, you can book a short 15-minute conversation here.