TechConnect Corsham: What Makes A Leader Today?

On the 11th September we ran a late summer special TechConnect in Corsham in collaboration with Mike Booth at the Digital Mansion, and the theme of leadership took centre stage. What followed was a conversation that cut through job titles and hierarchies to ask a deeper question: what does leadership mean in today’s complex world?

Setting the Scene

The evening, hosted in partnership with our Swindon community, brought together founders, technologists, and business leaders for a candid exploration of the values, challenges, and responsibilities of leading people and organisations.

Two guest speakers helped shape the discussion:

• Steve Fuller, co-founder of The House (Bath’s first B Corp) and course leader of a new creative leadership programme with Bath Spa University.
• Andy Cuff, CEO of Computer Network Defence Events, drawing on over 40 years of leadership experience in the military and now in cyber security.

Both offered different lenses on the same question: what makes a leader?

Five Values of Leadership

Steve introduced insights from global research identifying the five values most people now expect of leaders:

1. Accountability
2. Integrity
3. Vision
4. Adaptability
5. Empathy

While accountability and integrity have long been expected, adaptability has emerged as critical in a fast-changing world. Empathy, meanwhile, is no longer a “nice-to-have” — it’s a defining quality of effective leadership.

“Leadership is an inside-out job,” Steve explained. “If you haven’t done the work on yourself, how can you be authentic?”

Care and Inspiration

Andy’s perspective was grounded in lived experience. “The only way you can inspire is to genuinely care about the people you work with — and they’ll know if you’re faking it.”

For him, true leadership isn’t about command or control, but about cultivating a culture of care, where people know their contributions matter and feel part of a team. His military career shaped this view, but his role leading a 42-strong tech business in Swindon has reinforced it.

Culture, Curiosity, and Challenge

The conversation expanded to cover the environments leaders create. A few key themes stood out:

• Challenge as a value: Teams thrive when it’s safe to question decisions, but leaders must create the conditions for constructive challenge rather than simply “granting permission.”
• Beyond hierarchy: Leadership can — and should — emerge at all levels of an organisation. Followers don’t just look up, they look sideways.
• Failure as learning: Avoiding blame and embracing failure as part of the process builds resilience.
• Curiosity and playfulness: Effective leaders don’t need all the answers; they create space for better questions.

As one participant put it, leadership is not about having the crown, but about knowing your gaps, surrounding yourself with complementary strengths, and holding each other accountable.

Leadership for an Uncertain Future

The world of work is shifting: multiple generations with different expectations, hybrid and remote teams, and rapid technological change. Leadership today requires empathy, adaptability, and the courage to be human in a professional setting.

Profit, as Steve reminded us, is an outcome of good leadership, not the reason for it.

Be a part of the conversation

TechConnect exists to bring these conversations to life. They’re not lectures or panel talks, but open discussions where lived experience, research, and curiosity collide. It’s about giving our community space to learn with and from each other. Please do come and join us!