You can write a strategy. But you can't deliver it without the people in the room

You can write a strategy. But you can't deliver it without the people in the room

I want to be honest about something that gets lost in a lot of CEO commentary about leadership: a strategy document is not a strategy. It is a starting point. What turns it into something real is whether the people who have to deliver it actually understand it, believe in it, and feel they had a hand in shaping it.

That conviction is behind one of the things I am most proud of at Ground Control — our annual Ground Control Strategy Day.

Why we put 90 people in a room

Every year, we bring together 90 leaders and managers from across Ground Control — from every division, every function, every level of the business. We share our business plan. We explain the direction of travel, openly and in full. And then we ask for feedback.

That last part matters more than most people might expect. This is not a town hall where the strategy is announced, and questions are politely taken. It is a genuine working session, one where the people closest to our clients, our contracts, and our operations get to challenge our thinking, add to it, and connect it to the reality of what they see every day. Some of the best adjustments we have made to our plans have come directly from that room.

There is another purpose to the day that is just as important: connection. Ground Control operates across the whole of the UK and Ireland. The people who run our grounds maintenance contracts in the North rarely sit in the same room as the people managing our infrastructure work in the South. The Strategy Day changes that. It creates the kind of peer relationships and shared understanding that you simply cannot build through a slide deck or an email update. People leave knowing not just where the business is going, but who they are going there with.

The best people; and not just by sector standards

I believe Ground Control has the best people in the industry. But what makes that claim more than self-congratulation is where those people come from.

Look around our organisation, and you will find people who have joined us from construction, banking, the military, engineering, and the charity and third sectors. People who have led customer service operations, managed complex supply chains, driven cultural change in large organisations, and delivered under genuine operational pressure. They chose to bring that experience to Ground Control, and it shows in how we think, how we solve problems, and how we lead.

This diversity of background is a competitive advantage. Bringing in perspectives from sectors that have grappled with different challenges, such as customer experience, large-scale logistics, regulated environments, and people-intensive services, sharpens how we approach our own. The Strategy Day is a direct expression of this: put ninety people with genuinely different backgrounds and experiences in a room around a shared plan, and the quality of the thinking that comes back is something no leadership team could produce alone.

One of the things I ask of every director and senior leader at Ground Control is that they are genuinely approachable. Not performatively open. Actually accessible; to the managers in their teams, to the people on the ground, to the difficult questions as well as the easy ones.

This is harder than it sounds in a business of our scale and complexity. It requires directors who are willing to be in the field, at the Strategy Day, in the feedback sessions, not just in the boardroom. It requires a culture where raising a concern is seen as a contribution, not a risk. And it requires leaders who are honest when they don't have all the answers, rather than projecting a confidence they don't feel.

I don't always get this right. But it is the standard I hold myself and our leadership team to, because I genuinely believe the quality of leadership in a business like ours is the single biggest determinant of whether our strategy succeeds or fails.

Promoting from within is a strategy, not a sentiment

We have set ourselves a clear target: 80% of our leadership roles filled from within Ground Control. That is not an aspiration. It is a number we track and are accountable to.

The reasoning is clear. The individuals who know this business best, its clients, its culture, and its operational realities, are already part of it. Developing these individuals into the leaders we need is beneficial both for them and for the business. It sends a strong message to everyone at Ground Control that career progression is attainable, that our investment in people is genuine, and that the careers available in this sector are worth pursuing. This approach aligns with our commitment to diversity of background rather than contradicting it. When someone joins Ground Control, our goal is to ensure they feel valued and see opportunities for progression and purpose that encourage them to stay.
It also demands something of us as a leadership team: that we invest seriously in development, create clear pathways, and resist the temptation to always look externally when a senior role becomes available. That discipline is part of what makes the commitment credible.

None of this is complicated. But all of it requires consistency in how we lead, in how we listen, and in the choices we make about where we invest. That is what leadership looks like to me.