CULTURE WORK

Most managers get promoted because they were good at their last job. Nobody taught them the job they've actually got now, which is shaping the conditions other people work in.

Three of the six levers of Intentional Culture belong to leaders, and can't be delegated:

People Systems. Who you hire, who you promote, who you let go, and how quickly. Every one of those decisions teaches everyone else what this place rewards, and the lesson lands whether or not you meant to teach it.

Structural Foundations. Where decisions get made, who owns what, and which processes hold weight when they're tested. Most dysfunction people blame on personalities turns out to be structural, and no amount of team-building fixes an unclear reporting line.

Outcomes and Results. What you measure and what that measurement does to behaviour. Targets are instructions, and people follow them precisely, including into places you didn't intend.

Two ways in:

The Evolving Leader — for first-time managers, supervisors and team leads. Understanding your own style and blind spots, emotional intelligence in practice, giving feedback that lands, and having the conversations you've been avoiding. The foundations you need before you can work any lever deliberately.

Leading with Vision & Clarity — for established managers and senior leaders. Strategic thinking, leading through change, building high-performing teams, coaching others, and creating accountability that doesn't require you to watch. This is where the three levers get worked directly.

Practical, built for people leading in real time, and tailored to what's actually happening in your organisation.

A team can't rewrite its own hiring policy or redraw the org chart. What a team owns is the other three levers, and those are the ones that make daily working life bearable or miserable.

Relationships. Trust, conflict, and what happens in the gaps between people. Most friction here comes from people not understanding how each other work, which is fixable in an afternoon once you can see it.

Meaning and Purpose. Whether the work connects to anything anyone cares about, and whether people can say what the team is for without reading it off a wall.

Adaptation and Evolution. How the team learns, absorbs change, and stops repeating the thing that didn't work last time.

Everyone completes a psychometric profile before we meet, which gives us data rather than opinions. I use DISC, Big Five and others depending on what fits. The profiling isn't the product, it's the instrument for finding where those three levers are jammed.

From there we work with proven frameworks — Lencioni, Project Aristotle and others — to diagnose what's going wrong and build something specific to act on.

Good for teams going through change, teams that feel stuck, leadership teams who need to model better collaboration, and away days that need actual substance. 

I like bowling and pizza too. Let's do something useful first.

 Standalone sessions for when you don't need a full programme, just a focused intervention on a specific thing.

Difficult Conversations Masterclass — performance conversations, difficult news, addressing behaviour, navigating conflict. Real practice, not slides. 

Half or full day.

Emotional GPS — emotional intelligence without the jargon. Understanding your patterns, regulating under pressure, reading other people more accurately. 

Half day.

Feedback Fundamentals — the SBI and CLEAR models, and practice giving and receiving feedback in a safe environment, because most people have never been taught how.

Half day.

Gravitas: Public Speaking — Speaking with authority, whether that's presenting to a room, running a meeting, or making your point when you're the most junior person at the table. We work on the mechanics — voice, pacing, structure, what to do with your hands — and on the harder part underneath, which is nerves and the quiet assumption that you haven't earned the floor. 

Full day, maximum eight participants so everyone actually gets to practise. Open to anyone, not just managers. 

Bespoke workshops designed on request.