What’s this all about?
A slightly more personal post from me today. As you have probably guessed from the title, I’ve decided to pause the work I’m doing with start-ups for a while! Instead of running my company, I’ve just moved into an in-house role at IG group, a FinTech that owns a range of leading trading and investment platforms.
This week I joined them full time as their Head of Organisational Development - with the aim of helping individuals, teams and the organisation as a whole to move faster.
I’m super excited about the new opportunity for a few reasons:
I can test how my approach to organisational challenges scales from companies of ~200 FTEs to a company of more than 2000 FTEs
Working in house comes with a level of follow-through in a way that consulting never quite replicates no matter how embedded I get into my clients
Roles like this don’t come around too often so this is a great opportunity for me to learn more both personally and professionally
At the same time, it has been a bit sad to wind down the work I’ve been doing with start-ups over the last year and a half. That time has absolutely flown by and I’ve learned an immense amount about how small companies approach the work they do. I don’t think I’m saying goodbye to that world forever, more just a goodbye for now.
What does this mean for this newsletter
One of my biggest learnings over the past 18 months has been the personal importance of writing long form prose. Writing this newsletter has forced me to think hard about topics I care about and helped me to clarify my approach to organisational pain points. It’s too easy to avoid this kind of hard thinking, and having a group of people expecting regular posts has been a good forcing mechanism to get me to make regular time to do it.
I’m going to keep writing!
Although in order to do that I have to be very clear - this newsletter will continue to contain my personal views about topics related to organisational psychology and the future of work. It will not represent the views of IG group or any of the people I work with at the company.
Also, I will not be able to write as frequently as I have historically. In particular in the early period of taking on the new role, I will be pretty heads down getting to understand the company and trying to deliver some quick wins. I’ll have less time and less mental bandwidth to write the kind of long-read posts that make up the main body of this newsletter.
As a result, I’m turning off monetisation. I really appreciate everyone who has become a paid subscriber - the subscriber money acted as a clear signal of how much value I was adding to readers and the money from subscribers even went on to pay off a nationally representative survey of the UK population which we used in this article. However, since I can’t commit to regular articles it doesn’t feel right to charge people a regular subscription fee.
I also want to say thanks to everyone who has read the posts on here. It started as a passion project for less than 20 subscribers (several of whom were family!!) - but since starting we’ve had over 8000 views across all of my relatively niche & nerdy posts.
Exciting new step. I'm sure it will come with different challenges and growth opportunities from what you've done in the past, so good on you!