What a Bookshop Till Taught Me about High-Impact, Low-Maintenance

I didn't grow up around leadership theory. I grew up around a till.

My mum ran her own bookshop. My dad was a factory manager for a large manufacturing business. Different worlds, same principle the customer always came first. It was the thing that decided how they spent their day. Mum knew every regular's name and what they'd been meaning to read next. Dad would walk the extra mile for a customer even when it cost him something: time, energy, a Saturday he didn't get back. Neither of them would have called it a philosophy. It was just how you did business, and how you treated people. And outside of work, Dad played, captained, and coached junior and senior football teams, drilling one idea into every squad he led: the team comes before any one player.

I didn't know it then, but that was my first leadership development program. There were no frameworks and no feedback survey, just two people who showed me what it looks like when someone is unfashionably devoted to the person in front of them, and to the team around them.

I never thought of myself as a leader. That's the honest truth. Leadership, to me, always looked like someone else, someone louder, someone of great importance. Then I landed at LIW, 20 years ago, and something shifted. Not because I suddenly became someone else, but because the work kept asking the same question my parents' experience had already answered: who are you being, for the person you are serving? Two decades on, I'm still being shaped by that question. As a result, my leadership has been built one client and one conversation at a time, always with a focus on the individual standing in front of me.

The promise underneath the promise

It took me years to find the language for what my parents had been modelling all along. When I joined LIW, I realised those same instincts were reflected in the values we talk about every day.

At LIW, we hold ourselves to four values: we care, we are courageous and bold, we are high-impact and low-maintenance, and above all, we are a team. Right now, I'm doing some of my favourite work of the year, testing whether those values holdup in practice. As part of our Design Thinking approach, we run empathy interviews to properly test and refine our understanding of the people we serve. That means deliberately going wider than our own client list: speaking with existing customers, yes, but also with senior Learning, Talent and Organisational Development leaders across the industry who've never worked with us. You don't get an honest picture of a persona by only talking to the people already in "the room". And one thing keeps coming up, in different words, from people who've never met each other, and it goes straight to the heart of high-impact, low-maintenance, the value I want to focus on here.

One senior leader, a Reward and Performance Lead inside a large organisation, put it to me like this: "It's not broken, so it keeps getting deprioritised, even when everyone agrees it matters." What she meant was that leadership development rarely announces itself as urgent. It's not on fire, so it never forces its way to the top of anyone's list.

The people I'm describing, and she is one of them, are ambitious, capable leaders doing genuinely important work. But the thing most likely to stall that work isn't a lack of belief in it. It's the sheer weight of everything else already competing for their attention. Important-but-not-urgent work loses that fight almost every time, and leadership development quietly slips down the list, month after month, until it stalls altogether. What these leaders want isn't more conviction from us. They want a partner who removes weight rather than adding to it.

That's what high-impact, low-maintenance means to me now: it's the answer to that exact problem. If leadership development gets deprioritised because it demands too much time and effort just to stay alive, our job is to make it demand as little as possible, so it stops competing for attention it was always going to lose. That means our value has to show up in the small, unglamorous moments: the proactive update before someone has to chase us, the material that's simple enough to hand straight to a stakeholder, the decision point that doesn't need a meeting to unpack it. Impact is the outcome we're aiming for. Low maintenance is how we earn the right to deliver it.

Above all, a team

The other thread running through every one of those interviews was trust, and how easily it's spent or saved. Nobody wants a hero consultant who swoops in to prove how clever they are. They want a partner who makes them look good in front of their own stakeholders. That's where our fourth value comes in: above all, we are a team. I've come to believe it's the engine behind the other three; care, courage and high-impact-low-maintenance all depend on it. My dad walked the extra mile for his customers because he saw himself as part of their success, and he brought that same approach to every football team he captained and coached: no one player ever carried it alone. That's the same instinct I want every LIW partnership to run on: your win is our win, and we act like it.

Where this is heading

This is the first in what I hope becomes a series, using our own customer research as a mirror for the value, we're here to create. The real, human patterns we're hearing, and what they ask of us in return. Because if I've learned anything in 20 years, it's that the customer experience isn't a department. It's a promise you keep in a hundred small ways, most of which nobody claps for.

There was no values statement behind my mum’s till. She knew every customer by name and asked about their kids before she asked about the book. She simply showed up, consistently, in the small moments that mattered.

That's the promise I am here to keep.