GP receptionists and front-of-house staff are the backbone of patient access, yet they leave at alarming rates. This article explains the real causes - burnout, workload creep, poor progression and culture - and outlines what NHS primary care leaders can do to improve retention and patient experience.

You’re not burned out. You haven’t quit. But you’ve gone quiet.
Not because you don’t care—because you care so deeply it hurts to get it wrong.

This is the paradox of high performance. The mind that sees around corners is also the mind that spins itself into stillness. You run mental simulations ten steps out. You weigh consequences others don’t even perceive. And while others are busy moving, you’re paused—perfecting, preparing, predicting. Until the motion stops altogether.

In today's tech landscape, the path to explosive growth isn't about working harder—it's about working smarter. Yet many promising companies find themselves trapped in cycles that silently cap their revenue potential.

Is your talented team stretched too thin, leading to costly delivery overruns? Are missed billing cycles piling up because developers are coding beyond scope? Perhaps your QA bottlenecks are forcing you to choose between hitting deadlines and maintaining quality, while technical debt continues to mount.

The business world can often feel like a complex and multifaceted puzzle. It demands more from you than just the traditional management capabilities. As leaders, you are the catalysts of change, the architects of resilient cultures, and the advocates for sustainable practices. It's no small task, right? And to balance these elements - people, planet, and profit - you need a specific set of skills.  

As a business change expert, I am often confronted with the statistic that c.70% of business change projects do not deliver the value they set out to achieve.  At first glance this can be disheartening, especially for business leaders, CEOs, or founders who need to align their businesses behind a vision.  But before we decide that we just can’t afford that level of project failure, we need to look at why business change projects fail to deliver and then explore how we can create the highest IRR (Internal Rate of Return) for any investment in our businesses.

Whilst we might reflect on apocryphal stories of shoe salespeople discovering untapped markets, the reality is that to win in the second half of 2023 we need to nurture what in LEAN terms is called our ‘unfair advantage’.

Let’s be clear, an unfair advantage is not an unethical approach to the market, nor is it something that seeks to manipulate customers. It is an approach or culture that we have within our business that creates for us a winning element that is difficult for our competitors to copy.

I have read a lot about imposter syndrome, primarily as a desire to leave that ghost behind me, but now increasingly to help my clients who express this condition as something they too want to be free from.

For me, I wanted to be free of the need to constantly check that I hadn’t made a mistake. It was something that would be a little debilitating and held me back in school, work, and my relationship with my kids. 

The subject of goal setting is an important part of the human psyche.  We set goals all day long, some are habitual, some are thoughtful, some are intended to help us avoid suffering, some intended to make us better people.  Still some are associated with our own ego, whilst others are about needs, either ours or others.

But broadly speaking the purpose of goal setting is to help us achieve our vision.