CULTURE WORK
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Most culture happens by accident. I help you build it on purpose.
Every organisation has a culture, whether intentionally designed or not. It manifests in who speaks during meetings, which conversations are avoided, and what behaviors are tolerated when no senior staff are watching.
I work with leaders, teams, and entire organisations to create an intentional culture. Sometimes this involves surveying the leadership team and displaying the results for all to see. Other times, it culminates in a day devoted to crafting a charter with input from the entire staff. Occasionally, it includes a two-day programme paired with six weeks of structured practice focused on team development.
Everything I facilitate begins with a conversation about the current dynamics and concludes with something tangible that people can refer to and be held accountable for in their leadership development.
Organizational Culture Development
The symptoms are familiar
Managers are often promoted for their technical skills without receiving proper leadership development to guide them in their roles. Difficult conversations are frequently avoided or handled poorly, leading to ongoing issues. The same two individuals tend to clash in every meeting, resulting in decisions being made in the room and later unmade in the corridor. This creates a facade of surface harmony while frustration simmers underneath. Valuable team members leave, and exit interviews often attribute their departure to the commute.
Most of these challenges stem from structural issues rather than personal conflicts. These gaps in intentional culture and leadership development are areas that can be addressed and fixed.
my approach
Intentional Culture
My work is grounded in a framework I call Intentional Culture, which emphasizes that thriving organizations don’t happen by accident. Instead, they're built through careful attention to six levers, including effective leadership development and team development strategies.
People Systems
How you hire, develop, promote, and eventually exit employees reflects your intentional culture. Each of these decisions not only impacts individual careers but also serves as a crucial lesson in leadership development and team development. The way you handle these processes teaches everyone else what this place truly rewards, whether or not that lesson was consciously intended.
Relationships
Trust, conflict, and daily interactions among people are crucial elements of intentional culture. Much of the friction arises from a lack of understanding about how each other works. This issue can often be resolved in an afternoon, especially when approaches to leadership development and team development become visible.
Structural Foundations
Roles, decision rights, and which processes hold weight when tested are essential in fostering an intentional culture. A lot of what gets blamed on personalities actually stems from an unclear reporting line, and no amount of team development or leadership development will fix that.
Meaning and Purpose
Whether the work resonates with anything meaningful to the audience, and whether people can articulate the team’s purpose without needing to read it off a wall, plays a crucial role in fostering an intentional culture and promoting effective leadership and team development.
Adaptation and Evolution
How the organisation cultivates an intentional culture that learns and absorbs change, while also focusing on leadership development and team development to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Outcomes and Results
What you measure influences behavior and contributes to an intentional culture. Targets serve as instructions that people follow precisely, sometimes leading them into outcomes you didn't intend, which underscores the importance of effective leadership development and team development.
Three of those levers sit with leadership and can't be delegated, as they are crucial for effective leadership development. The other three belong to teams, highlighting the importance of team development in fostering an intentional culture. Every piece of work below connects back to at least one of these aspects, and I'll tell you which.
HOW I RUN A ROOM
Nobody sits still in a room focused on intentional culture. Every competitor promises interactive sessions but often delivers just slides. Here’s what actually happens in mine.
People are on their feet inside the first ten minutes.
Every session opens with a physical activity before any content appears. Four corners, a line-up, a behavioral speed-meet, a parachute ball drop that illustrates competing over the wrong goal—all these activities set the contract for the day: this is a room where you move, speak, and engage in team development.
Every open activity has a capped output.
Three asks. Two colors of post-it. One commitment. This design rule prevents a culture session from devolving into a moaning fest, and it’s written into every plan I build for leadership development.
Groups filter their own material before it goes public.
Nothing goes on the wall until the people who created it have sifted through it themselves. This process protects everyone in the room, including managers.
Anything undiscussable is handled through anonymized scenarios.
Nobody is identified, ensuring that no one can claim afterward that they didn’t know.
I record you at the start and again at the end.
For skills work, I use a method I call Try It / Tune It / Nail It. You perform before being taught anything, learn, perform again, and then watch the two performances back-to-back. Nobody has to be told they improved.
You leave with something in writing.
A commitment, a charter, a ninety-day plan, or a game plan sheet. Every time.
ways in
THE INTENTIONAL CULTURE REVIEW
Discover the underlying issues in your organization before spending money on fixing the wrong problem.
Our structured survey of your senior team lasts twenty to thirty minutes and measures six key outcomes against the six levers that drive intentional culture and leadership development. This process reveals the gaps between your goals and what your organization is currently capable of producing.
You will receive a comprehensive written analysis and a facilitated away day where the leadership team collaborates on the findings. Many clients find that the issue they initially brought to me is actually a symptom of a larger challenge that they hadn't identified.
This approach is effective as an initial engagement and can stand alone to promote team development.
WAYS IN
DAYS
PROGRAMMES
PROGRAMMES
Whole-group, built from scratch, ends with an agreement, fostering an intentional culture within your organization.
Days are not simply away days with a facilitator attached. Each session is meticulously designed around your organization, utilizing your own data live in the room, and producing a document that the group has collectively signed up to.
Culture Day: How We Work Here.
For everyone. Both managers and staff answer the same questions anonymously, and the two sets of results are displayed side by side. This reveal often proves to be the most valuable ten minutes of the year. From there: scenario stations, a co-created charter, and an individual game plan for every participant. Half day.
Leadership Day: The Big Picture.
For the senior team, subsequently expanding to the wider management layer. Values and goals are captured effectively, team roles are mapped, and each senior leadership team (SLT) member contributes a commitment statement, culminating in a management charter crafted by those responsible for implementation. Full day, with a summary report delivered afterward, enhancing leadership development.
Team Day: How We Work Together.
Tailored for one specific team. Everyone completes a psychometric profile prior to our meeting, ensuring that the day commences with data instead of opinions.
Every team engagement begins with profiling everyone involved, establishing a foundation for effective team development.
The day's framework consists of four key moves: PROFILE, POSITION, PRESSURE, and PLAN, all of which are compatible with any psychometric instrument.
It's a full day, and you might want to keep the evening free.
I enjoy bowling and pizza just as much as anyone else, but let's prioritize something constructive first.
PROGRAMMES
PROGRAMMES
PROGRAMMES
Cohort-based, multi-session, with built-in follow-through.
The Evolving Leader.
Designed for first-time managers, supervisors, and team leads, this leadership development program spans two full days. It covers essential topics such as management identity, communication, feedback, delegation, trust, emotional intelligence, coaching for performance, strategic thinking, and energy resilience. Participants leave equipped with a comprehensive ninety-day impact plan.
The program includes six weeks of embedding intentional culture: participants engage in a weekly leadership experiment tailored to their readiness level, partner with a peer accountability buddy, utilize a reflection tool, and receive nudge emails to sustain motivation. Their line managers also receive a briefing guide to ensure effective support. For those with time constraints, a condensed two-module version is available.
Leading with Vision & Clarity.
This session is for established managers and senior leaders. Day one focuses on navigating complexity, distinguishing adaptive from technical challenges, addressing bias, and shaping organizational culture through compelling stories and rituals. Additionally, participants explore stakeholder mapping with a focus on power and political intelligence, as well as establishing clear decision rights. Day two features an immersive full-day simulation that integrates all models from day one, ensuring no breakout relies on just one tool.
MentorSpark.
Comprising two sessions and a workbook, this program is tailored for organizations looking to build or repair a mentoring scheme in support of team development. It begins with foundational concepts: understanding what mentoring is and isn't, cultivating listening skills, establishing trust, managing expectations, and navigating ethics and boundaries. The advanced module addresses ethical dilemmas, constructive feedback, motivation, and conflict resolution, with a practical assignment in between and a mentoring plan crafted at the conclusion.
WORKSHOPS
PROGRAMMES
WORKSHOPS
Focused sessions for specific aspects of intentional culture, without a full programme attached.
Feedback Fundamentals.
Three and a half hours, up to thirty people. This session starts with the effects of feedback on your body rather than just your mind, running a full psychology module before any models are introduced. We cover SBI, CLEAR, and provide enough live practice that participants are still applying these concepts in a fortnight. This approach supports both leadership development and team development.
Difficult Conversations Masterclass.
Two three-hour sessions across a week with a deliberate overnight gap, allowing you to take a real conversation away. When you return, we analyze what happened, fostering essential skills for effective communication within teams.
Emotional GPS.
A half-day workshop focusing on emotional intelligence without the jargon. This session dives into your own patterns, how to regulate under pressure, and the ability to read others more accurately, all of which are crucial for an intentional culture in the workplace.
GRAVITAS: Speak Up. Stand Out. Succeed.
A full-day workshop with a maximum of eight participants. We explore voice, pacing, structure, and tackle the underlying challenges, such as nerves and the feeling that you haven't earned the floor. The day includes four record-teach-record cycles, concluding with a side-by-side playback comparing your progress from the morning. This is open to anyone, not just those in leadership roles, promoting development across all levels.
Also available in a short form: Decoding Behaviours (a DISC taster), Time Ninja (two hours focused on attention and prioritization), and Exploring Our Workplace Culture (one hour, inclusive for all staff, providing a quick overview of the current culture).
Bespoke workshops designed upon request, tailored to your specific leadership development and team development needs.
profiling
How I use psychometrics
I'm accredited across DISC, Big Five, emotional intelligence, and high potential instruments, and I'll use whichever one fits the question you're actually asking to foster an intentional culture within the team.
The day runs on the following moves, which are essential for effective leadership development and team development, regardless of the psychometric instrument used:
Profile: Each person reads their own results and expresses what they recognize and where they might disagree.
Position: We put the whole team on the floor against the axes that matter, allowing everyone to see the overall shape of the group rather than a collection of individual reports.
Pressure: Scenarios are designed to replicate the specific conditions the team has identified as challenging. This is where the collective blind spot emerges, revealing the perspective that nobody in the room holds.
Plan: Each person commits in writing to what they will do differently when faced with those challenging conditions again, and the team agrees on how they will hold each other accountable.
For teams in sport, and for anyone whose real challenge is behavior under pressure rather than personality on paper, I recommend Spotlight. Developed by performance psychologists with Sir Andrew Strauss, it has been utilized in elite cricket, football, and rugby. It measures how individuals behave during tough situations and maps the entire team onto a single page.
Regardless of which instrument we use, the day follows the same four moves and concludes with written commitments, avoiding a folder of reports that nobody revisits.
The profile serves as the input. Identifying which lever is jammed is the crux of our work.
afterwards
What happens when I leave?
Most consultancies deliver a good day and then leave, and while the day is the easy part, true progress requires a focus on intentional culture. Depending on the engagement, the follow-through involves weekly experiments tailored to each individual's readiness, peer accountability pairs, and a structured reflection tool centered on what you tried and what you observed. Additionally, organizations benefit from nudge emails during the embedding period, briefing guides for line managers to reinforce team development, and ninety-day plans that are reviewed, not just filed away. Where a Day has resulted in a charter, I'll return to test it against reality, emphasizing the importance of leadership development throughout the process.
beyond training
Architecture, not just sessions
Some of what I do isn't training at all. If you need to build the underlying structure for an intentional culture:
Manager competency frameworks, either a universal set or tiered across team leader, middle manager, and senior executive, with each competency classified and mapped to support leadership development.
Management team charters are created collaboratively with the team and aligned to your organisational values, enhancing team development.
We also establish wellbeing and escalation routing, ensuring everyone knows who to approach for specific issues across line management, HR, and safeguarding.
These initiatives are usually commissioned alongside a Review or a Leadership Day.
who i work with
Organisations that treat culture as fundamental
Sports organisations and foundations.
Clubs, community trusts, and coaching teams who are dedicated to performance with integrity. My current and recent work highlights the importance of intentional culture, and Spotlight emerged from this very world.
Charities and non-profits.
Where people and passion drive everything, and the risk of burnout is an ongoing reality rather than just a slide in an induction deck, emphasizing the need for strong leadership development.
Care organisations.
Where human connection is the essence of the job and team development is vital for success.
Corporate teams.
Departments ready to stop tolerating dysfunction and eager to cultivate an intentional culture to build something better.
investment
What it costs
Our workshops are priced per session and are designed to foster intentional culture within your organization. Days, Programmes, and Reviews are quoted in three lines: design, delivery, and embedding. This structure is deliberate, as the design work for a bespoke Day involves substantial leadership development and team development efforts. Returning clients enjoy discounts of up to 20%, and special rates are available for charities and foundations.
Workshops from
£500
Programmes from
£1000
Days from
£750
The Intentional Culture Review
£1000
Start with a Discovery Call
I'll help you work out what would actually make a difference in fostering an intentional culture within your team. There’s no hard sell and no obligation to do anything afterwards regarding your leadership development or team development needs.
the other half of this site
If you arrived here from an essay rather than a LinkedIn profile, this is where the two halves meet.
The writing on this site is about power within intentional culture. Who holds it, how it disguises itself, and what it does to people living inside structures they didn't design.
The culture work asks the same question at an organizational scale, particularly in terms of leadership development. Which conversations can't be had here, and who benefits from that arrangement? Where do the real decisions get made, as distinct from where the meeting is held? What is the reward system teaching, as distinct from what the values poster says?
You don't need to read a word of the essays to work with me. The frameworks stand alone, and the sessions focus on practical team development. But both halves arise from the same twenty years of asking why capable people can't talk to each other, and I'd rather highlight this connection than present them as strangers.
If you're interested in my writing or videos click below
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