Tracey Holland, Change Leader, Reforge Change
By February, most leaders are ready to properly start the year.
The Christmas fog has lifted.
The decorations are down.
The last of the chocolates have mysteriously disappeared.
And then something else tends to happen.
Leaders and senior teams start looking around.
They notice what everyone else seems to be doing.
They assume others are further ahead, more organised, more “sorted”.
And suddenly, they feel behind.
I’ve seen this play out countless times.
Comparison can feel motivating at first but very quickly it becomes a catalyst for the wrong decisions and very little real progress.
Why comparison is so disruptive
Comparison doesn’t just dent confidence.
It changes behaviour.
When leaders feel they’re falling behind, a few predictable things start to happen:
- Decisions get rushed because nobody wants to be the one slowing things down
- Structures get copied without asking whether they actually fit
- Priorities get added instead of chosen
- The next shiny framework or methodology gets adopted as a quick fix
That’s not ambition.
And it’s definitely not strategy.
It’s panic and insecurity dressed up as urgency.
And urgency driven by comparison rarely creates progress.
It creates noise.
What this looks like on the ground
On the surface, it can look like momentum.
Decisions are being made.
Activity is high.
People are busy.
Underneath, it’s often a very different story:
- Confusion about what really matters
- Rework caused by poorly thought-through decisions
- Teams being asked to deliver more without anything being taken off their plate
- Growing exhaustion that nobody quite names
The biggest problem is that comparison strips out context.
Every organisation is operating within a completely different system.
Different funding pressures.
Different governance and decision routes.
Different cultures.
Different people, skills and lived experience.
What works brilliantly in one organisation can actively damage another.
But when leaders are busy looking sideways, they stop paying attention to what their own system is telling them.
When tools become measuring sticks
This is also where leadership and team tools often get misunderstood.
DISC.
The Five Behaviours.
High Performing Teams models.
These were never meant to be measuring sticks or worse, actual sticks to beat people with (and yes, I’ve seen that happen).
They are meant to be mirrors.
They help teams:
- understand how they communicate
- see how they behave under pressure
- notice where trust or clarity might be wobbling
They are not there to judge themselves against some imaginary “ideal” team and decide they’re failing.
When comparison creeps in, even the best tools lose their value.
What strong leadership looks like instead
Strong leadership doesn’t come from keeping up.
It comes from:
- reading your system properly
- understanding what your team can realistically carry right now
- noticing where support is actually needed
- making decisions at a pace that allows them to be the right ones
Different teams.
Different constraints.
Different seasons.
Context beats comparison every time.
If your urgency is driven by what others are doing,
it’s probably not urgency.
It’s noise.
Where a reset can help
This is often the point where a reset is needed.
Not a big reinvention.
Not a shiny new methodology.
Just a pause to look properly at what’s going on beneath the surface.
To strip things back.
To be honest about priorities, capacity and decision-making.
And to re-anchor the work around what actually matters here in this organisation, at this point in time.
Because clarity doesn’t come from copying others.
It comes from understanding your own system well enough to lead it with confidence.
