The Steady Middle
Leading after the emergency stops being news
Every organisation knows how to run at an emergency. Almost none know what to do in the year afterwards, when the adrenaline is gone, the press has moved on, and the people who held everything together are quietly updating their CVs.
Drawing on 240 interviews across four sectors, Imogen Hale maps the terrain of the long middle: the repair conversations nobody schedules, the false recovery at month seven, the difference between a team that is coping and a team that is quietly emptying out.
The result is a practical, humane book about capacity rather than grit — and about what leaders owe the people still standing.
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PublisherVerrall & Boyd (fictional)Pages288 · Hardback, ebook, audioISBN978-0-0000000-0-0NarratorRead by the author
“The rare leadership book that refuses to flatter the reader. I have bought nine copies.”
Dov Krainer
The Pellinore Review
“Hale writes about institutions the way good novelists write about families.”
Prof. Anneke Vos
Lowry School of Management
“I recognised my own hospital on page four and had to put it down for a day.”
Marcus Ilesanmi
Ward manager
One · The month the flowers stop arriving
Chapter one, complete. Roughly nine minutes.
The first thing the ward manager told me, when I finally got her to sit down, was that she missed the worst week. Not the work of it — the clarity. For nine days in February everybody knew exactly what mattered, nobody asked her to fill in a form, and strangers left flowers at reception.
By June the flowers had stopped, the forms were back, and four of her best nurses had gone to an agency for a pay rise she could not match. Nobody called that a crisis. There was no name for it at all, which is part of why it went on so long.
This book is about that unnamed stretch. I have come to call it the steady middle, not because it feels steady from inside — it rarely does — but because it is the part that decides whether anything you did in the emergency actually holds.
Excerpt fictional