Author: Josh Hensman
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More Than a Number: What 2,200 Hours of Volunteering Taught Me About Leadership
A few weeks ago, TD SYNNEX did something I didn’t expect. They recognised me publicly for 2,200 hours of volunteering with St John Ambulance. They named me their top global volunteer. It’s a strange feeling. Pride, yes. But also humility. Because that number, big as it is, barely scratches the surface of what it represents.…
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Three Months of InterThread: What I’ve Learned by Writing It All Down
It started as an idea. A space to explore the insight between leadership and impact. A place to write, reflect, challenge, and hopefully, offer something useful. Three months on, InterThread has become more than a blog. It’s become a lens. A rhythm. A leadership practice in its own right. And the biggest insight? Writing isn’t…
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Ethical Leadership Is Not the Easy Option
“Ethical leadership isn’t soft. It’s disciplined, courageous, and sometimes uncomfortable. But it builds lasting trust and impact.” There’s a temptation to think of ethics in leadership as something peripheral. A moral extra. A nice-to-have. But the more experience I gain, the clearer it becomes. Ethical leadership is the core of meaningful leadership. It isn’t just…
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Are You Busy, or Are You Delivering?
“Busyness is not the same as productivity.” It’s an uncomfortable truth in many organisations. We reward activity more than impact. We confuse full calendars with effective leadership. We treat responsiveness as value. Somewhere along the way, the measure of success became how stretched someone is, not what they actually deliver. I’ve lived this. I’ve fallen…
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What You Don’t Know Is Leading You
“Leadership isn’t just about making decisions. It’s about knowing what you don’t know.” It sounds obvious. But in practice, it’s one of the hardest things any leader faces: the limits of their own perspective. We often define leadership through clarity, confidence, and decisiveness. But clarity without curiosity becomes tunnel vision. And decisiveness, without reflection, becomes…
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Are You Leading Through Clarity or Assumption?
“Most workplace conflicts come from assumptions, not actual disagreement.” It’s rarely the big issues that derail teams. It’s the quiet ones. The unclear messages. The things left unsaid. The assumptions. In my experience, teams rarely fall out because they disagree. They fall out because they didn’t realise they were never aligned in the first place.…
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Command vs. Influence: Leading Without Authority
“You can’t pull rank when there’s no rank to pull.” That’s the reality in volunteer settings. Increasingly, it is the same in many modern workplaces too. There’s a difference between being in charge and being followed. Between holding authority and holding trust. Between command and influence. And the further you move into voluntary, community-based, or…
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Culture is the Work: Navigating Change in Volunteer Settings
“Culture doesn’t sit on a whiteboard. It lives in tone, habits, and what goes unsaid.” Walk into any volunteer-led space and give it a moment. You can usually feel it. Sometimes, there’s a warmth in the air. A sense of shared purpose. A gentle rhythm to how people interact, help one another, and get things…
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AI in the Voluntary Sector: Efficiency Meets Human Connection
“AI should assist, not replace, human discernment.” The Admin Burden Is Real The voluntary sector runs on goodwill, grit, and spreadsheets. From last-minute plan changes to safeguarding checks, admin overload is the background noise of too many charity teams. Volunteers sign up to make a difference, not to get lost in logistics. And staff? They…
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The Quiet Power of Volunteering: A Reflection on What We Don’t Always See
“You can feel the impact of volunteers everywhere, if you know where to look.” Not in the headlines. Not always in photos. But in the quiet things. The lift someone didn’t have to offer. The task covered at the last minute. The room opened early and closed late, without fuss. Volunteering isn’t always loud. Most…
InterThread 