Every Leadership Interaction Leaves a Trace: What Are Yours?

Forensic Leadership: The Impact Every Leader Leaves Behind | The Strategic Leader Podcast

There is a concept in forensic science called the Locard Exchange Principle. It was developed by a French scientist called Dr Edmond Locard in the early twentieth century and it underpins criminal investigation the world over. It states, very simply: every contact leaves a trace.

When a person enters a crime scene, they leave something behind. Footprints, fibres, fingerprints. And the crime scene leaves something on them in return. It is a principle so obvious, once named, that it barely needs explaining.

In the latest episode of The Strategic Leader, Paul Kincaid, a former British Army officer turned leadership consultant and author, lifts that principle out of forensic science and drops it squarely into the world of leadership. And the result is one of those ideas that is immediately, almost uncomfortably, recognisable.

Because of course it is true. Every interaction you have as a leader leaves a trace on the people around you. The question is: are you paying attention to what kind of trace you are leaving?

Green, red and code brown

Paul describes traces on a spectrum. At one end, there is a rich, deep green: the interaction where someone leaves feeling genuinely energised, understood, trusted, stretched in the right way. At the other end, a deep red: the meeting that felt dismissive, the feedback that landed badly, the briefing that left people confused and slightly resentful.

And then there is what I found myself calling, probably slightly unprofessionally, code brown. The trace that is neither green nor red. The nothing. The blank.

I was watching a leader brief her team recently and it was one of those moments where the intention was clearly good. She asked if anyone had questions. She said all the right things. But you could feel, from across the room, that it had not landed. The team left with a kind of polite blankness and very little sense of what they were supposed to do with the information, or why it mattered.

That, Paul points out, is not a neutral outcome. As a leader, you cannot not leave a trace. If the people around you walk away with nothing, that is a red. Because the job of a leader, at any level, is to positively influence the people around you. A blank page is not a pass mark.

The gap between intention and impact

This is something Gemma and I come back to again and again in our coaching work: the difference between what you intended and what people actually experienced. Most leaders, most of the time, have broadly good intentions. They are not setting out to undermine, confuse or disengage the people around them. And yet the trace they leave is sometimes quite different from the one they thought they were leaving.

What Paul's framework does is give a language to that gap. Instead of "when you said that, I found it quite dismissive," which can feel like a career-limiting conversation in the wrong culture, you have: "that left a bit of a red trace on me." It creates what Paul calls an air gap between the observation and the accusation. You are owning your own experience of the interaction rather than making a direct judgement about the person. And for anyone with a reasonable level of emotional intelligence, that is a much easier door to walk through.

I genuinely think most leaders, if they heard that something they said or did had left a red trace on someone, would want to know. They would be curious. The language itself seems to invite curiosity rather than defensiveness.

Which version of you is walking into the room?

One of the most practical things Paul says in the episode comes before any of the interaction itself. Before you can think about what trace you want to leave, he argues, you need to know which version of you is about to show up.

If you have been awake since three in the morning. If you have just come out of a difficult conversation. If you are anxious about something you have not yet had space to process. That version of you is far more likely to misread what someone says, to respond from a place of irritation rather than curiosity, and to send a red trace without meaning to. Not because you are a bad leader, but because your cognitive resources are stretched and your filter is thinner than usual.

This connects to everything Gemma and I have talked about across this series regarding the weight that comes with senior leadership. The traces you leave at the top of an organisation do not stay in the room. They travel. They ripple down through layers. The leader who is visibly dismissive in an exec meeting sets a temperature, as Steve McNicholas put it in an earlier episode, that the whole organisation can feel long after the meeting has ended.

Slowing down before you go in, even briefly, and asking yourself: how do I want to show up here? What does this room need from me today? That is not a soft practice. It is a high-leverage one.

The 16-year leadership gap

Something Paul says about leadership development that I think is worth sitting with: most people get their first leadership role at around 26 and do not receive any formal leadership development until they are 42. Sixteen years. During which time they are largely modelling what they have seen, or performing what they imagine a leader should look like.

And because so much of that modelling goes unexamined, people absorb both the good and the bad without being able to tell the difference. You might be role modelling brilliance from a leader who brought out the best in people. You might equally be role modelling behaviours from someone who achieved results at significant relational cost, and not even know it.

The traces idea is one way of beginning to examine that. Not through a formal programme or a training day, but through the simple habit of pausing and asking: what did I just leave on that person? Was that what I intended? Is that who I want to be as a leader?

Teams that talk about their traces

One of the things Paul describes that I find most compelling is what happens when a whole team starts using this language together. Not as a performance management tool. Not formally. Just as a shared shorthand.

He describes high-performing teams that start to gently call each other out: "oof, that was a bit of a red one." Said with the right level of warmth and psychological safety, it becomes a way of holding each other accountable without it feeling like a confrontation. The language does the heavy lifting.

And when you zoom out further, Paul argues that the leaders who will matter most to an organisation in the long run are not the ones with the most impressive technical track record. They are the ones who consistently leave green traces on the people around them. The great enablers, as he puts it, rather than the great doers. The ones who make everyone else in the room feel more capable, more clear and more committed by having been in it.

That feels, to me, like a fairly good description of what we mean when we talk about strategic leadership at the top table. Not just the ability to think at the right level. But the ability to leave people better off for having spent time with you.

Worth a listen if...

You lead people at any level and want a fresh, immediately usable lens on the impact you are having. You work with or sit alongside leaders who are technically strong but relationally costing the organisation more than anyone is saying out loud. Or you are simply curious about what forensic science can teach us about leadership, which, it turns out, is quite a lot.

You can find The Strategic Leader wherever you listen to podcasts. And if there is a strategic dilemma you would like Gemma and me to dig into in a future episode, we would love to hear from you.

Fi Craig is the founder of GoodThinking, a Bristol-based team and executive coaching practice working with senior leaders and their teams across the UK and internationally. The Strategic Leader podcast is co-presented with Gemma Bullivant.