Get ready to learn from one of the brightest minds in IT service and support leadership! Michelle Major-Goldsmith, one of HDI's Top 25 Thought Leaders. From avoiding the traps of misdiagnosed challenges to rethinking “best practices” and building trust through servant leadership, Michelle’s advice is packed with practical wisdom and fresh perspectives. Whether you’re looking to inspire your team, adapt to change, or lead with authenticity, Michelle’s insights will leave you thinking differently about what it means to truly lead. Check it out:
Q1: What’s one challenge you think IT service and support leaders are underestimating right now?
I believe IT service and support leaders are underestimating the cost of misdiagnosing the conditions they’re operating in. That matters because when leaders misread the nature of the challenge in front of them, they apply the wrong response and that quietly erodes resilience, slows adaptation, and amplifies risk. It doesn’t fail immediately. It fails cumulatively.
We talk confidently about VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) but too often we respond to them as if they’re the same thing. They’re not. And applying the wrong decision logic to the wrong condition quietly erodes performance.
- Volatility doesn’t need more restructuring, it needs stabilising anchors.
- Uncertainty doesn’t need delay, it needs clear decision rights and faster feedback.
- Complexity doesn’t need tighter control, it needs distributed judgment and learning.
- Ambiguity doesn’t need premature certainty, it needs space for sensemaking.
When leaders fail to make these distinctions, they default to what feels disciplined: more governance, more reporting, tighter metrics, and short-term optimisation. It can look like strong execution. In reality, it often suppresses judgment, slows adaptation, and trades resilience for immediacy.
Research into naturalistic decision-making, particularly Gary Klein’s work with firefighters and military leaders, shows that in high-stakes environments, expertise is not about perfect analysis — it’s about contextual pattern recognition and rapid adjustment. Yet many service organisations inadvertently train people out of that capability by centralising decisions and equating compliance with accountability.
At the same time, AI and automation are compressing cycles and amplifying interdependencies across ecosystems. Small misjudgements cascade faster. Learning loops need to tighten, not lengthen. In that context, adding more control can increase fragility rather than reduce risk.
The underestimated challenge isn’t technology or budget pressure. It’s whether our leadership models are actually calibrated to the conditions we’re facing and whether we have the discipline to diagnose before we optimise. That distinction will separate service organisations that evolve from those that repeatedly firefight.
Q2: What’s an industry “best practice” that you think needs to be challenged or retired?
The idea that best practice is universally transferable. The idea that it is a silver bullet. The idea that you just stick to one of the gazillions of approaches and frameworks that are available.
Frameworks, standards, and models have enormous value. They codify hard-won experience. They give us shared language. They prevent us from repeating known mistakes. But somewhere along the way, we started treating best practice as prescription rather than reference point.In service management and IT leadership especially, I see organisations lifting practices directly from books, conferences, or peer case studies and installing them as if context were irrelevant. Governance structures are copied. Operating models are replicated. Maturity targets are adopted. Metrics are inherited. And when results don’t improve, the conclusion is often that execution was weak, rather than that the practice itself was misaligned to the environment.
Best practice is not wrong. It is incomplete without context. What works in one ecosystem may fail quietly in another, not because the model is flawed, but because decision rights differ. Incentives differ. Cultural safety differs. Risk tolerance differs. System complexity differs. In complex environments especially, there is rarely a single optimal configuration. There are trade-offs. A governance model that works in a regulated environment may suffocate innovation in a growth business. An aggressive SLA regime may improve short-term metrics while degrading long-term partnership. A “scaled agile” model may promise speed while entrenching hierarchy if authority is not genuinely distributed. The problem is not that we have best practices. The problem is that we rarely interrogate the conditions under which they were successful.
We ask, “What is the model?” We ask far less often, “Under what constraints did this model thrive?” True maturity is not about adopting more frameworks. It is about understanding which elements of a practice matter in your context, which need adaptation, and which should be discarded entirely.
Q3: What’s one small change you’ve seen make an outsized impact on team morale?
I love this question because it reminds us that culture rarely shifts because of grand gestures. It usually shifts because of small, repeated signals. If I had to choose one small change that creates an outsized impact on team morale, it’s this: Leaders explicitly giving permission for people to challenge, question, and say “I don’t know” without penalty. It sounds simple. It isn’t.
When leaders move from control to servant leadership — from “prove yourself” to “how can I enable you?” something subtle but powerful happens. The emotional temperature of the room drops. People stop scanning for threat. Energy shifts from self-protection to contribution. That single behavioural shift builds psychological safety. And safety fuels empowerment.
When people feel safe, they surface risks earlier, admit mistakes sooner, ask better questions, challenge weak assumptions and show courage instead of compliance. Morale improves not because work becomes easier, but because people feel trusted. And trust is a multiplier.
I’ve seen teams transform when a leader starts responding to bad news with curiosity instead of blame. Or when they openly say, “If you see something I’ve missed, I expect you to tell me.” That invitation alone unlocks ownership. Servant leadership isn’t about being soft. It’s about redistributing power in a way that increases accountability. When authority is used to create safety rather than hierarchy, people step forward. They take initiative. They act with integrity. They innovate. Courage is contagious. But it needs air.
The small change is this: leaders modelling humility and inviting dissent. The outsized impact is this: teams that feel safe enough to be brave.
Q4: If you could give your past self one piece of career advice, what would it be?
If I could give my younger self one piece of career advice, it would be this:
Don’t change yourself to fit someone else’s template of leadership. And don’t try to lead like a man if that’s not who you are. Early in my career, I absorbed a quiet message that leadership meant being louder, sharper, more dominant. Use bigger words. Speak first. Fill space. Project certainty. Take up the room. So, I tried, and it never felt quite right.
What I eventually learned is that my power as a female leader was never in volume or force. It was empathy. In calm. In emotional intelligence. In the ability to read a room. In holding steady when others escalate. In asking the question no one else is brave enough to ask. In caring deeply about the humans in the system, not just the metrics.
You don’t need to harden to be taken seriously, flex your muscles to hold authority or out-dominate to out-lead. The quiet strength of listening well. The courage to stay measured under pressure. The discipline to respond rather than react. The emotional steadiness that creates safety for others. Those are not soft traits. They are strategic advantages. Leadership isn’t about imitating whoever currently holds the most visible power. It’s about understanding your own strengths and using them deliberately. Empathy builds trust. Calm builds confidence. EQ builds resilient teams. And courage doesn’t have to shout.
So, my advice to my younger self would be simple: Back yourself earlier, trust your instincts and lead as you.