Every week, our commercial team sits down with HR directors, chief executives and heads of people from organisations across every sector. Some of those conversations turn into programmes. Some turn into research. Most of them simply tell us what’s really happening inside organisations right now.
This is where we share that. No jargon, no theory for theory’s sake – just the questions we’re being asked, and how we’re answering them.
Lately, three questions keep coming up. Here’s what we tell people.
1. Why is my leadership team exhausted, even when the business is doing well?
Because performance and wellbeing aren’t the same measure, and most organisations are only tracking one of them.
We hear this from leaders in growing businesses as often as we hear it from those managing decline. Good numbers can mask a leadership team that’s running on fumes: back-to-back change programmes, a calendar with no thinking time in it, and an unspoken expectation that resilience means absorbing whatever comes next without complaint.
Busy is not the same as effective. Exhausted is not the same as engaged.
The fix isn’t usually another wellbeing initiative bolted on top. It’s looking at what’s actually being asked of leaders – the number of priorities, the pace of change, the decisions they’re expected to make without real authority to make them – and being honest about whether that’s sustainable. It’s a theme we come back to often in our Leadership & Management Fundamentals and Advanced Leadership & Management Practice programmes, because building genuine capacity has to include this conversation, not skip past it.
2. How do we stop losing good managers to burnout or better offers?
Usually the issue isn’t pay. It’s role clarity, support, and whether managers feel equipped for the job they were actually promoted into.
A huge number of managers get the role because they were excellent at the job before it – not because anyone checked whether they had the skills, confidence or support to lead people. We call this the “accidental manager” problem, and it’s still one of the most common causes of attrition we see, at every level from first-line supervisor to senior director.
Retention conversations tend to start with salary benchmarking. The organisations that actually move the needle start somewhere else: do our managers understand what’s expected of them, do they have somewhere to take the parts of the job they’re finding hardest, and is there a coach or peer group they can be honest with? That’s usually where our coaching work and our Advanced Leadership & Management Practice programme come in – not as a reward for good performance, but as the infrastructure that stops good managers quietly burning out in the first place.
3. Is our culture actually changing, or are we just saying the right things?
If the change hasn’t reached how decisions actually get made day to day, it hasn’t landed yet – no matter what the engagement survey says.
This question comes up most often after a values refresh, a restructure, or a new strategy launch. Leadership teams can genuinely believe culture has shifted because the language has shifted – new words in townhalls, updated values on the intranet – while the way decisions get escalated, the way disagreement gets handled, and who actually gets listened to in a meeting hasn’t moved at all.
Real culture change shows up in unglamorous places: how a difficult decision was handled last month, whether someone felt able to challenge their manager, what got rewarded versus what got said out loud. It’s this gap – between the stated culture and the lived one – that our Organisational Health and Culture consultancy work is built to surface and close.
None of these are easy conversations, and none of them have a single right answer. But they’re the conversations organisations are actually having with us right now – and the reason this diary exists is to keep sharing them, honestly, as they happen.
So beyond this entry: which of these three is showing up in your organisation right now?
If you’d like to talk any of this through, our commercial team would welcome the conversation. That’s where most of these diary entries start.
