Leadership Is The Small Moments · a FREE leadership resource
Nobody prepares you for the hard moments.
The tears. The silence. The person who gets defensive before you've finished your sentence. You get handed a team, and you're expected to hold it all together, with no script.
This is the script. The words for thirty hard moments every manager faces, and how to steady yourself when the room tightens.
Get the free guideWhat's inside
Thirty moments. The ones you know,
and the ones nobody talks about.
Part one is the moments that tighten a room, the tears, the silence, the defensiveness.
02 When an employee cries in front of you.
07 When there's silence in a hard conversation.
11Â When you're now managing your former peers.
13Â When someone goes around you to your manager.
16Â When a high performer is quietly damaging the team.
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Part two is the harder ones nobody writes down: managing former peers, the person going around you, the high performer quietly damaging the team. Each is a page you open right before the conversation.
How each one works
Not a framework to study.
A page to open in the moment.
Every scenario is built the same way, so under pressure you always know where to look. No models to memorise. Just enough to slow the moment down and stay present.
THE MOMENT
What's actually happening, and why it's harder than it looks.
THE INSTINCT
The response most of us reach for, and why it creates distance.
GO-TO-PHRASES
Specific words to come back to. Anchors, not scripts.
THE LENS
One insight from years working with people in crisis.
WHAT YOU'RE SAYING
The message underneath your words, because that's what people hear.
WHO IS THIS FROM
Brooke Baxter
I spent years in social work, sitting with people in the most high-pressure, emotionally charged moments of their lives, before I moved into leadership coaching and organisational design. What that world taught me does not show up in mainstream leadership programs.
I'm not teaching you to be a therapist. I'm showing you how people actually work in tense moments, and what to say so the conversation goes better. That's relational leadership, and it's a learnable set of behaviours, not a personality trait.
The guide gives you thirty maps. Most of the managers I work with reach a point where the map is right, and the pattern still won't shift, and the real question stops being what to say and becomes why this keeps happening. That's the work I care about most, and it's what we do together in Leader2Leader.
Leadership is the small moments.
Brooke brings an energy and enthusiasm to her leadership that lifts everyone around her. As a leader, she is both inspiring and genuinely considerate — the kind of manager who supports people to do their best work.Â
____ Deb K
Brooke’s strength lies in her deep understanding of leadership and team dynamics, and her ability to translate this into practical, well-structured models and approaches that managers can readily apply. She is an excellent communicator who engages people at all levels and brings them along on the journey.
____ Phillippa B
LEADER2LEADER · FOUNDING ONLINE GROUP
The words are the start. Practice is the work.
Most managers read the right words, then freeze when the moment actually arrives. Leader2Leader is where you practise. Five managers, six live sessions, your real situations worked through together.
It starts with a diagnostic and a 1:1 debrief, so you walk in with your own plan. Registrations for the founding group close Monday 12 October.
Read about Leader2Leader"Brooke didn't let me hide behind 'I'm still learning'... I back myself a lot more now."
BETH, CSO
"Three months later, I'm doing less of their job and more of mine."
RACHEL, CSO
The next hard conversation is already coming.
Get the guide now so it's on your phone when you need it.