The Human Need to Belong: Why Teams Matter for Meaning and Wellbeing
Human beings are not designed to thrive in isolation. In our work, we see strong evidence that wellbeing is shaped not only by what we achieve, but by who we achieve it with. In work, this is one reason teams matter so much. A healthy team can do more than deliver results: it can stre …
A Leader's Long Shadow...
Good team leadership does more than set direction. It shapes the emotional tone, behavioural norms, and level of trust within a team. Over time, people tend to take their cues from the team leader: what gets noticed, what gets rewarded, what is safe to say, and what is better left uns …
Reconnecting with the Meaning of Work
It is not unusual for work that once felt energising and deeply meaningful to lose some of its appeal over time. Many people experience this and immediately ask themselves a difficult question: it this still worth it? The answer is not always straightforward.
Why Team Leaders Must Guard Against Groupthink
One quality of strong team leadership is the ability to create conditions for clearer thinking within the team. One of the greatest risks in any team is groupthink: a pattern in which the desire for harmony, loyalty, or speed suppresses challenge and weakens decision quality. Janis’s …
Getting a new team to fire on all cylinders...
New teams often start out pleasant rather than productive. People are careful, courteous, and reluctant to challenge one another—especially when they’re still working out the unwritten rules. To a lay observer, this can look like harmony; in reality it can become polite conformity, wh …
Meaning at Work - a Path to Learning and Growth
Viktor Frankl’s work remains one of the most practical foundations for thinking about purpose in modern organisations. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl argued that people are motivated not only by comfort, reward, or status, but by a “will to meaning” — the need to experience what …
Why Does A Team Need A Common Purpose?
When a team is busy and under pressure, it’s easy for “what we’re doing” to crowd out “why we’re doing it.” Individuals get lost in their tasks and quickly become detached from the ambitions of the team and their leader. However research consistently shows that clarity and alignment a …
Flow, Failure, and Fun: Why Experimentation Unlocks Better Team Performance
In most organisations, failure is treated as something to avoid — a risk, a cost, a potential embarrassment. Yet our most recent White Paper argues that teams reach their highest levels of enjoyment and performance precisely when they are free to experiment, learn visibly, and fail sa …
The Importance of Team Coaching to Support Succession Planning in Employee-Owned Trusts
An Employee-Owned Trust (EOT) is a form of employee ownership where a trust holds a controlling stake in a company on behalf of all employees, so the benefits of ownership are shared collectively rather than through individual shareholdings. In the UK, EOTs have become a mainstream su …
The Value of Psychometrics within Leadership Coaching
Psychometrics have become a core component of high-quality leadership coaching for a simple reason: when they are well-designed and correctly interpreted, they give leaders a reliable, evidence-based mirror on how they show up at work.