Leadership isn’t a promotion, it’s a practice

Why strong leadership matters just as much as strength in the gym

I started last week at 5am, under a barbell.

Back squats this time – I swap routines every few weeks.

I do three strength sessions and one conditioning session at the gym, every week without fail.

Fortunately, there’s some fun in between. Tuesday was Arya’s last day of school. There was an assembly and at the end the parents made a big arch in the playground, and all the kids ran through. There was confetti everywhere. It’s a nice way to mark that change, and she loved every second.

And on Thursday, I took the day off. We went to Paultons Park on the south coast. It’s a great day out and the roller coasters are just enough – big enough for adults who like a bit of speed, but still safe for kids. My 9 and 12-year-olds were living the dream.

In the office, my Mondays always start with CORD: collect, organise, review, do. It’s a system I’ve built into my week: collect everything, organise it with the Eisenhower Matrix sorting all tasks into important/not important/urgent/not urgent. Then review it, and then I do it.

After that comes the sales call, then whatever the week brings. Data protection. Process design for live facial recognition. Meetings. Calls. And the rest…

One theme keeps coming up. Our industry is full of accidental managers.

Great security guards get promoted, but being good on the floor doesn’t automatically make you a good leader. Without leadership training, people hit a level of incompetence quickly – and it happens at every layer, not just the bottom.

This is the stuff I think about all the time. We can talk about tech, data, and models all we want, but if the people leading teams haven’t been trained to lead, the whole structure wobbles.

Good leadership isn’t something you stumble into. It’s learned. It’s built. And like the gym, it takes repetition. You can’t skip it and expect to stay strong.

This brings me to ASEL. Above all our basic training we give every employee access to a suite of apprenticeships and further learning and development opportunities ensuring we have the right people, in the right positions with the right skills.

Because here’s the truth: in a crisis, people don’t look to a spreadsheet or a system. They look to the person in charge. If that person hasn’t been shown how to lead, the cracks appear fast.

In this industry, strength comes down to who can stand up for a team when it matters. And that strength, like everything else worth having, has to be trained.

Peter Fisher

Director of Risk & Intelligence