Making an impact
The work I'm most proud of rarely makes the headlines. In fact, staying out of the headlines can even be the goal.
I step in to help boards finally have a conversation about culture; one they might have been avoiding. It could be to get alongside the leader who has realised that the culture problem they'd been diagnosing in their team has actually started with them. It can also be to assist organisations with a training programme but, better still, that they leave with a reformed strategy and commitment, all pointing in the same direction.
​
Over the course of my career I've had the good fortune to work with more than 40 organisations, from global brands to fast-growing companies navigating significant change.
Over the past six years, 92% of my clients have chosen to work with me again. That's the thing I'm most proud of and grateful for.
​
These case studies give a flavour of the work I do.
Cross Cultural Leadership
A senior team within a global FMCG business came to me because they wanted to be proactive in their approach to international relationships.
​
The team had reporting lines stretching across multiple regions and were navigating relationships with senior leaders in different countries daily. They were good at their jobs but they had noticed that their cultural fluency was something their global counterparts had and they lacked. Rather than wait for that to become a problem, they decided to get ahead of it.
​
I designed and facilitated a full-day offsite built around two questions: how do we understand each other better, and how do we use that to work more effectively? We worked through how communication styles, attitudes to hierarchy, and approaches to negotiation and influence vary across cultures and what that means when you're trying to land a decision across a time zone.
​
We followed it with weekly learning touch points to keep the momentum alive, 1-1 coaching for individual leaders to work through their specific relationships and challenges, and structured check-ins at six months and a year to track how things had shifted.​
​​
I loved working with this team. They already had the self-awareness to know what they didn't know and wanted to do something about it. Twelve months on they had shifted how they talked about culture and how they operated within it.
Board Effectiveness
A large housing provider came to me with a clear ambition: they wanted a board that genuinely performed as a team, not just a group of capable individuals sitting in the same room.
​
Through our time together, we worked on the behaviours, dynamics, and decision-making culture that determine whether a board is truly effective. The focus was on transparency, psychological safety, and collaborative challenge. In particular, the conditions that allow all voices to contribute meaningfully, rather than the loudest or most senior ones dominating. The programme was designed to reflect their own company values back to them.
​
The result was a board with a shared language for its culture, clearer expectations of each other, a forward focus having explored external factors and trends, and greater confidence in handling the difficult conversations that governance demands.
Cultural Audit
Sometimes an organisation commissions a cultural review because they already know something is wrong. What takes courage is deciding to find out exactly what, and to hear it from someone independent who will tell them the truth.
​
The business received survey data that pointed to a disproportionate experience for people from underrepresented backgrounds. The leaders commissioned an independent review to understand what was really driving it.
​
The review surfaced a complex picture. A commercially driven, talented team operating under real pressure, with a culture that had developed habits that were working against both performance and people. The findings were presented to senior leadership with honesty and care, alongside a clear set of recommendations.
​
The most important thing an organisation can do is create the conditions to see their culture clearly and then actually act on what they find. Cultural audits aren't really a nice to have but an essential part of good business and governance.
