The game had been decided before anyone touched the ball. We were chatting with our own Hywel Griffiths remembers standing with teammates before kick-off, looking around at a group of players who, on paper, should never have worked together particularly well. Different personalities. Different styles. Different levels of confidence. Yet something about the way they trusted each other changed the atmosphere completely. Not louder. Not emotional. Just settled. Years later, after working across sport, education, executive coaching, and international business operations, he would recognise the same pattern again and again.
Organisations often talk about performance as though it begins with targets, reporting lines, or financial pressure. But maybe performance usually begins somewhere much less visible. In how people communicate under pressure. In whether teams trust each other enough to move quickly, in whether leaders create clarity or confusion. That moment on the rugby field taught Hywel more about how organisations actually work than most management models ever could.
For years, many people and us @YourBigPic have known Hywel Griffiths through a finance lens, as Chief and Finance Partner. And that made sense. Finance was often where the outcomes became visible. But finance was rarely the starting point. The starting point was almost always people. One observation has stayed with him throughout his career:
Real alignment only becomes visible under pressure so when priorities collide. Or when information is incomplete. Or When speed matters more than consensus. When leaders change midway through a project and the new leader has never agreed to the original assumptions. When two capable leaders hear the same conversation and make different decisions.
Hywel has seen each of these scenarios repeatedly throughout international operations, leadership development, and executive coaching. Teams often mistake shared language for shared understanding. In the room, listening to a presentation or an inspiring leader, everything can feel coherent. Outside the room, people revert to different assumptions, different thresholds, and different interpretations of what matters most. The business keeps moving, so the gap is rarely obvious at first.
Then the symptoms begin to appear:
Most organisations diagnose these symptoms as communication issues, personality clashes, or accountability problems. In Hywel’s experience, they are often symptoms of something deeper. Shared language is not the same thing as shared understanding. And that is where the Comet Model becomes useful. Performance is what organisations want. But performance doesn’t come from a performance programme. It comes from the conditions that allow people to perform consistently.
Teamwork creates those conditions. Not team-building days or motivational slogans, but the trust, communication, alignment, and shared understanding that allow people to move in the same direction when it matters most. Finance is the report card. It tells us whether the system is working. It confirms progress, highlights risk, and provides essential feedback. But chasing financial outcomes without understanding the performance and teamwork beneath them is a bit like trying to improve exam results by coaching students the night before the test while ignoring the learning environment they’ve spent the year inside.
The Finance Partner label captured one dimension of Hywel’s work. The fuller picture is the Comet. Performance is the nucleus. Teamwork as the field that enables it. Finance as the tail that follows behind and shows the results.
Over four decades, Hywel’s work has moved through sport, teaching, leadership coaching, media, business ownership, and international operations. Different environments. Different challenges. The same pattern. Where people perform well together, results tend to follow. Where performance struggles, the causes are often more human than operational.
That’s why our ongoing partnership with Hywel matters. Not because it adds another finance specialist to the room, but because it strengthens the connection between performance, teamwork, and the realities organisations eventually see reflected in their financial health. Over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more of Hywel’s thinking, experiences, and practical tools, including the Traffic Light System and the wider performance-led work now sitting within the YourBigPic ecosystem. If you’d like to explore what a performance conversation looks like, connect with Hywel on LinkedIn or reach out directly. Sometimes the numbers are telling you something. The question is whether you’re looking in the right place first.
