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What if most leaders are making their job much harder than it needs to be? Nobody asked you to hold every answer, control every outcome or take the weight alone. It’s exhausting, and it doesn’t even work.
In this engaging leadership fable, CEO Richard Mansfield discovers that every relationship his leadership depends on - his CHRO, his CFO, his executive team, his Chair, his investor - runs on a contract he wrote in his head and never showed to anyone. With the help of his coach, Nigel, he learns to make the implicit explicit - one relationship at a time. It is uncomfortable. It is also, as Nigel promises, simple.
This is a book for anyone who sits on an executive team, as every senior leader must pay attention to this specific, practical mechanism of contracting. Honest conversation is not a soft skill sitting alongside performance; it is the mechanism that produces it.
Discover: - Reflective questions at the end of each chapter to help you apply the ideas to your own team. - Three practical frameworks you can apply immediately: the relationship map, contracting, and observation-based feedback. - VECTRA, a diagnostic model for reading an executive team as a system.
Tom Emery is the owner of people performance consultancy HEX, an executive and team coach, leadership expert, bestselling author, keynote speaker and podcast host with a magnetic curiosity for what drives human potential. He spent his career watching CEOs from the chair next door. As Chief People Officer of a high-growth, publicly listed financial services firm, he sat on the executive team, shaped culture and reformed executive pay, gaining a close view of how leaders at the top succeed and fail.
Today he coaches CEOs and their executive teams for a living, which gives him a rare vantage point: the person in the room when the senior team is at its worst, and the one they ask to fix it.
He hosts the Beyond Potential and Tom's Life Lab podcasts, and his debut book, Amazon bestseller People People: Reach Your Full Potential as a CHRO, became a go-to resource on its release in 2025 and was a finalist at the Business Book Awards. He is based in Lichfield, UK.
Part one: The hard way
1 Something has to change.
2 Leadership is easy.
3 A meeting with the Chair.
4 The monthly ExCo.
5 The three-way meeting.
6 Contracting with Nigel.
7 The map.
8 Trouble and turbulence.
Part two: The contracts
9 Contracting with Priya.
10 Contracting with Jonny.
11 Contracting with the team.
12 Contracting with Strathmore.
13 VECTRA.
14 Testing it.
15 A deeper look at the system.
16 The new rhythm.
Part three: The test
17 Planning the offsite.
18 The offsite, day one.
19 The offsite, day two.
20 The wobble.
21 Eleanor.
22 The board meeting.
Conclusion: Leadership is easy