The shift nobody trained you for

There is a moment in a technical career that no certification prepares you for. The day your job stops being about the quality of your own work and starts being about whether other people deliver theirs.

You can see it in the patterns. Decisions that stall even though the analysis is sound and the tooling is in place. Initiatives that circle for months because nobody is clear on who owns what. A widening gap between what the technology can do and what the business actually decided it wanted. And now a new one: AI that moves the work faster than anyone has agreed who is responsible for the result.

None of these are technical problems. Adding another system, another process, or another model rarely fixes them. They are problems of coordination, agreement, and shared understanding between people. That is a different skill, and it can be learned.

Why this matters more now, not less

There is a comfortable story going around that AI will reduce the need for human leadership. The opposite is happening. As AI absorbs more of the analytical and technical load, the work that is left is the work only people can do: judgement, trust under pressure, getting a result through others when the map is not clear.

In Brian's words, from the May 2026 edition of Top Cyber News MAGAZINE:

"The leaders who will be successful in this new era are not the most technically capable. They will be the ones who are the most influential."

They move people. That is the capacity this program builds.

What you will be able to do

By the end of the six weeks, you will be better able to:

• Deliver complex aims reliably, designing commitments that hold across people, systems, and AI-enabled work.
• Speed up coordination across functions, vendors, and peers, with less of the delay and rework that comes from fragmented handoffs.
• Win cooperation without reaching for authority, through clearer agreements rather than escalation.
• Improve the moments where work actually moves: the decisions, the approvals, the meetings, not just the plans.
• Lead from your strengths under pressure, without over-functioning, withdrawing, or correcting everyone around you.
• Decide and act in high-stakes, AI-accelerated work using structured inquiry and durable agreements.

Good Company

The Program

One introductory webinar, then six weekly working sessions. Small group, real cases, light reading between sessions and honest reflection. You bring a live situation you are in right now, and you work it.

Introductory webinar 
When technical excellence stops delivering outcomes. An hour on why responsibility outgrows personal execution, and what changes when it does. Come to decide whether the program is for you.

Session 1 — Orientation and We Offer a Mirror
We start with a mirror. Before any technique, you look squarely at how you show up in the small exchanges that decide whether work moves, and the state of mind you bring to them. Most of what stalls a leader starts here.

Session 2 — We Always Transact and A Series of Exchanges
A transaction is not a cold point of sale. It is every exchange through which work gets agreed and done. You learn the full cycle an exchange moves through, and where skipping a step quietly costs you the result.

Session 3 — Conditions of Life and Personality
People say yes for their reasons, not yours. You learn to read what the person across from you is actually transacting for, and how four distinct personalities, including your own, show up in those exchanges.

Session 4 — Characteristics and Behaviour, and Behaving Transactionally
Knowing the pattern is not the same as changing it. This is where it becomes practice: working with your personality instead of being run by it, and leading exchanges by invitation rather than force.

Session 5 — Your Value, Your Cost, and Teams
Every strength carries a cost. The same personality that speeds a transaction up can derail it when it is misused. You learn where yours does each, then how it plays out across a team.

Session 6 — Practice Exercises and Certification
The final session is applied. You work your own live situations against everything from the previous five, keep what holds, and complete the certification you can add to your profile.

Who this is for

Senior technology, cyber, and digital leaders who are accountable for outcomes that depend on people and systems they do not directly control. CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, and the leaders coming up behind them. People who want precision, structure, and results, not motivation or a personality makeover.

Leaders often get the most from this when two come from the same organisation. The shared language travels back to work with you.

Who it is not for: anyone looking for tooling content, AI productivity hacks, or a reel of leadership platitudes. 

Details

• Six group Zoom sessions of 75 minutes, plus the introductory webinar.
• Supported by an online learning platform for applying the work to your real projects between sessions.
• Your own course dashboard, with a recording of every session.
• Certification on completion, to add to your LinkedIn profile.
• Investment: $1,200 ex GST.

Meet Brian

I work with technical experts transitioning into leadership. I have spent more than twenty years alongside CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, and senior technical executives as they step into leading people, where authority is exercised through influence and judgement rather than control.

What I have seen, again and again, is that adding more systems or process or AI rarely restores momentum when an initiative stalls. The cause is usually transactional: unclear ownership, unspoken assumptions, weak commitments, and decisions that bottleneck as responsibility scales.

My approach is practical and built on your strengths. I do not teach leadership styles or theory. I help you see where your leverage breaks, design clearer agreements, and get moving again without over-functioning, withdrawing, or escalating.

I am the author of Leadership Is Changing the Game: The Transition from Technical Expert to Leader. The book develops the case for leaders to move up the 'influence curve' as they transition from expert to leader. 

I am also the co-author of The Gentle Art of Leadership, written with Dean Phelan and based on original research and interviews with more than fifty leaders worldwide. The book challenges the idea that strong leaders have to be loud or forceful. The gentlest leaders I know are also the strongest. They are not pushovers. They set clear boundaries, and they get the best from people by treating them with dignity and respect.

I bring Transactional Intelligence™ to this program as an Influential U consultant. If you are looking for a coach who makes it about themselves, who runs on hype and hustle, you are in the wrong place. If you are ready for a gentler, more effective way to lead, I would be glad to work with you.

Final call