The Power of We: Leading with Responsibility, Credibility and Team Alignment

In this episode of the Leaders Who Coach™ Podcast, I speak with Jon Freedman, Fractional CTO and financial technology strategist, about leadership, responsibility, credibility and what it takes to build aligned, high-performing teams.

Jon brings over 20 years of experience in financial technology, including work across investment banks, hedge funds and scaling technology teams. What comes through in the conversation is a very grounded view of leadership: you do not need a management title to act like a leader, and credibility is built long before you need people to trust your judgement.

This is a conversation about responsibility. Not as ownership in the narrow sense.

But responsibility as a way of showing up, contributing, communicating and helping a group move in the same direction.

Leadership starts before the title

Jon makes an important distinction between management and leadership. When you become a manager, you are expected to lead. But long before that, you can choose to behave like a leader.

That might look like taking responsibility for the outcome. It might mean understanding why the work matters, not just completing the task in front of you. It might mean communicating well with people outside your technical specialism, or noticing how your work contributes to the wider business goal.

This is especially important in knowledge work. Technical capability matters. It is the foundation. But it is rarely enough on its own. The people who stand out are often the ones who combine skill with responsibility, curiosity, business understanding and the ability to work well with others.

Credibility is built over time

A strong theme in the episode is credibility. Jon describes credibility almost as his currency of effectiveness. When people trust your work, your judgement and your consistency, they can imagine you solving the problem before you have even started.

That does not happen through one big moment.

It builds slowly.

Through delivery.
Through communication.
Through how you handle pressure.
Through whether people feel you understand the business context.
Through whether they believe you are acting in service of the shared goal.

Credibility matters because, without it, even the clearest message may not land. With it, direct communication becomes easier to receive because people know there is experience and integrity behind it.

Alignment starts with the “why”

Jon talks about the importance of helping teams understand why they are doing the work. Not just what the task is.

Why it matters.

How it connects to the business.
How it supports the team’s purpose.
How it helps the organisation move forward.

If someone cannot see how their work contributes to the goal, that needs to be fixed. Either the leader has not explained it clearly enough, or the task itself may not be pointing in the right direction. That is such an important leadership check.

Teams move faster when people are pulling in the same direction. But alignment does not happen because a leader said it once. It often requires repetition. The mission may need to be said so often that people start rolling their eyes. And still, it needs to be said.

Disagreement is not the problem

One of the strongest parts of the conversation is Jon’s view on strong opinions and disagreement. When someone has a strong opinion that differs from yours, the starting point is not to shut it down. The starting point is to understand it.

If the team is aligned around the end goal, a strong opinion may contain something useful. It may reveal context you do not have. It may point to a risk you have not seen. It may save the team from going down a path that looks sensible on paper but will not work in practice.

As Jon says, when people seem difficult or unwilling to move, they are usually not doing it simply to be disruptive. They often believe something strongly that you have not yet understood.

That is where listening matters. Not listening as a courtesy. Listening as a leadership discipline.

Coaching is not command and control

There is a clear rejection in this conversation of command-and-control leadership as the default approach for knowledge work. If you hire people for their expertise, then their opinions, challenge and judgement should be part of the value they bring.

Otherwise, why hire expertise at all?

A leader’s role is not to create a team that simply says yes. It is to create the conditions where people can contribute well, challenge constructively and still stay aligned around the shared goal. That does not mean everyone can do whatever they want.

It means people have room to think, challenge and bring their strengths in service of the outcome. There is a balance.

Freedom without direction can become chaos.
Direction without listening can become compliance.
The leader’s work is to hold both.

Managing ambiguity with openness

Jon also speaks about the challenge of answering difficult technical questions when the answer is not yet knowable.

How long will something take when no one has built it before?
How much effort will it require?
What will happen once the team starts?

There may not be a perfect answer. But there can still be communication.

One of Jon’s practical points is the importance of regular updates. If a team disappears into a problem and only returns at the end to say it did not work, trust suffers. If they share progress as they go, stakeholders can see what is happening, offer additional context, help redirect or understand why something needs to change. That openness reduces surprises.

It also signals respect.

Respect for the client or stakeholder.
Respect for the team’s work.
Respect for the uncertainty of the problem itself.

Scaling a team requires trust in others

The episode also explores Jon’s experience scaling a department from seven to more than 90 people in a year. That kind of growth is intense.

It requires structure, speed, judgement and a willingness to trust the people around you. It also requires honesty about trade-offs. When hiring at speed, leaders need to be clear about what can and cannot be guaranteed.

Jon describes being deeply involved in the hiring process, not because he believed he was the only person who could spot talent, but because he was responsible for building a cohesive team.

That distinction matters.

When people are joining a team during a major growth period, they are also taking a risk. They are trusting the leader, the culture and the direction of travel. Human connection matters in that decision.

People want to understand who they are joining, how the team operates and whether they can see themselves contributing there.

“WE” builds credibility and inclusion

One of the most memorable reflections in this conversation is Jon’s story about learning to use “we”. Early in his career, someone felt he had taken credit for work they had contributed to. It was not his intention, but the impact stayed with him.

Since then, he has been deliberate about downplaying his own individual contribution and talking about delivery as a group effort.

We delivered this.
We worked on this.
We achieved this together.

That does not make individual contribution invisible. Over time, people still know who is delivering. They see the quality. They see the consistency. They see who is contributing.

But “we” keeps the team inclusive. It signals that the work belongs to the group, not just the most visible person. That is powerful leadership. Because people want to feel that their contribution mattered, even when their part was small.

Final reflection

This conversation with Jon is a reminder that leadership is often less about claiming space and more about creating it.

Creating space for expertise.
Creating space for disagreement.
Creating space for people to understand the “why”.
Creating space for regular communication.
Creating space for the group to succeed together.

Credibility is built through responsibility, consistency and the way leaders show up over time. And alignment is built through repetition, clarity, listening and shared purpose.

The power of “we” is not about minimising individual effort. It is about reminding people that meaningful work is rarely delivered alone. When leaders make that visible, they build trust, protect the team and create the conditions for people to do their best work together.