Your Party is a mess.
Now, I met Jeremy Corbyn once, he was lovely, but there’s lessons to be learned from the UK’s newest political party, and politics isn’t important to learn it.
The Guardian’s reporting on Your Party reads like a case study in how not to run a young organisation. Six MPs and four factions. Boycotts. Walkouts. Legal threats. A conference that needs extra security because members might storm the stage. You could call it political theatre, but most theatres at least rehearse.
There is a leadership lesson here, and it is not confined to politics. Any organisation can fall into the same trap.
The trap is simple. People assume they are aligned because they share a mission. They forget that missions do not hold organisations together. Behaviour does.
Your Party began with a clear rule. No factionalism. No internal war. No splitting into camps. Six months later that rule is in tatters. Word are easy. Governance is hard. . There were no structures, no norms and no shared discipline to stop the inevitable drift into ego, personality and grievance.
The Leadership Lesson
This is where the leadership lesson lands. If you want unity, you have to build it it. You cannot rely on just a shared intent. You cannot rely on charisma. You cannot rely on everyone being adults about it.
- You need routes for disagreement that are safe.
- You need decision making frameworks that do not depend on who shouts loudest.
- You need boundaries that apply to everyone. You need clarity about who leads, who decides and who owns the consequences.
Your Party had, and has, none of it. So the vacuum was filled with the oldest forces in organisational life: frustration, suspicion, and the belief that someone else is pulling strings.
The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions
In my work across business, councils, charities and SMEs, I see this pattern all the time. Groups form around a positive purpose. They begin with energy and belief. Then the cracks open. Not because anyone is malevolent, but because they never built the system that keeps them aligned when pressure arrives.
Purpose is not enough. Vision is not enough. Even integrity is not enough. These things get you through the first month. They do not carry you through the first conflict.
What happens when there’s friction
When an organisation starts to fracture, leaders often respond in exactly the wrong way. They withdraw. They hope tempers cool. They take a neutral stance so they cannot be accused of bias. It is a common instinct and a dangerous one.
Leadership in these moments is not about calming people down. It is about giving them something solid to stand on. A decision making model. A dispute resolution route. A working agreement. A shared language. A way of handling dissent without making it personal.
Your Party looks chaotic because there is no structure holding the pressure. Everything becomes personal because nothing has been systemised.
The irony is that internal organisation is the easiest leadership task to fix. It requires no ideology. No electoral strategy. No grand gestures. Just honest design and consistent behaviour.
- You decide how decisions get made.
- You decide how disagreements get surfaced.
- You decide how accountability works.
- You decide how members speak to one another.
If you do not decide, someone else will shape it through their behaviour. And once that happens, you are not leading a movement. You are reacting to a culture you never built.
The leadership lesson from Your Party is stark. If you do not create structure early, structure will create itself. You will not like the result. Oh and decide on a name and stick to it. Have an idea on who you are in advance of launching – but that’s a branding and communications lesson.
In politics or in business, stability is not an accident. It is an architecture. And good architecture is always built before the storm, never during it.