HR Professionals
Coaching’s identity crisis
The coaching industry may look fragmented and fiercely competitive, but Angela Cox feels it is better understood as a profession still evolving. As models multiply and practitioners adapt what they were taught, the deeper shift is towards more human-centred coaching that reflects the complexity of modern leadership and organisational life. If you ask ten people to describe what coaching actually is, you will probably receive ten different answers. Some will describe structured conversations focused on goals and performance. Others will…
Reviewers don’t become advocates, co-designers do
Ben Satchwell argues that review rounds create judges, not champions. Sending a near-final capability framework for comment builds critique, not ownership. Co-design brings influential practitioners into the room early, at key moments: framing the problem, shaping the structure, and testing reality. Shared authorship fuels advocacy, accelerating adoption more than perfection. Most capability frameworks go through a review round. The team drafts the framework, then sends it to a group of stakeholders for comment. The feedback comes back, some of it…
From mistakes to momentum: Building a company culture that learns
Organisations unlock innovation when they stop punishing mistakes and start learning from them, reasons Paul Sloane. From Post-it Notes to Slack and vacuum cleaners, failure can spark breakthroughs. Paul explores how psychological safety, intelligent experimentation and honest post-mortems help teams take smarter risks, adapt faster and build lasting competitive advantage. In a traditional corporate landscape, failure is disdained. However, forward-thinking organisations recognise that innovation is a numbers game. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t taking the risks necessary to stay…
Why leadership development doesn’t stop at a one-off workshop
As AI reshapes work, Shannon Alter writes that L&D teams must stop treating leadership confidence, presence and emotional intelligence as optional. Future-ready organisations will be those that build adaptable, human-centred leaders through deliberate practice, feedback and support before the highest-stakes moments arrive, retention falters and top talent starts looking elsewhere. Learning and development professionals are navigating a disconnect right now: while AI adoption accelerates across organisations at unprecedented speed, Gallup reports that fewer than 50% of employees participated in professional…
From intention to action: Designing behaviour that makes change stick
Don’t demand just willpower! This article draws on two Make Your Brain Work podcast episodes with Amy Brann and Dr Jessie Gulsin to explain why change snaps back to old habits. Learn how biology drives ‘resistance’, why environments beat motivation, and how L&D can use cues to make change stick. Most organisational change programmes fail not because people are lazy or resistant, but because they are human. Despite good intentions, behaviour often snaps back to familiar patterns, leaving leaders frustrated…
Good leaders don’t avoid office politics
Leaders who want to drive effective change cannot afford to ignore office politics, much as they might want to. Far from being manipulative, political skill helps people build trust, read situations, and influence organisational outcomes constructively. Steve Macaulay and David Buchanan explain why it should be a core leadership capability. For busy people, “office politics” can often feel like a barrier to skill and culture-building and just getting things done. However, developing political skill is not about encouraging scheming, it…
TJ interviews: Ravin Jesuthasan on actionable insights for building skills-first enterprises
Conor Gilligan speaks with Ravin Jesuthasan about why job-based models are failing, how skills-powered organisations unlock AI and productivity gains, and the practical steps HR and L&D leaders can take to redesign work, reskill talent and deploy skills faster for stronger business performance in volatile markets today and tomorrow alike. Ravin Jesuthasan, a recognised futurist and authority on the future of work, human capital, and automation is a Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer, an Executive Fellow…
AI adoption has a people problem, not a tech problem
Jennie Marshall argues that while organisations are investing heavily in AI, too few are turning pilots into meaningful impact. The real barrier is not technology but leadership, culture and capability. To close the gap, leaders must build confidence, embed AI into workflows and measure adoption, not just expenditure at scale. A while back I was heading north to visit a client, coffee in hand, when I put on the Science & Tech Daily podcast. Piers Linney was talking about AI,…
Employee engagement is rising up the agenda. So why can’t leaders agree on what it is?
Alice Desbouvrie argues that employee engagement improves when leaders share a clear definition of what it means. Without that alignment, learning, communication and support become easily fragmented. Lisa explores why consistent leadership thinking matters, how disengagement affects performance and retention, and what organisations can do to build stronger workplace connection. According to LumApps’ Future of Work Index Report, nearly 70% of senior leaders say employee engagement has become an increased priority for their organisation over the past two years. This…
Is your organisation’s leadership judgement built by design, or by damage?
Helen Routledge argues that leadership judgement is rarely built in classrooms or reviews, but in high-pressure moments where the stakes are already real. She explores why relying on live exposure is costly, how the practice gap forms, and why organisations need safer ways for leaders to learn before consequences hit. Most leaders don’t struggle because they don’t know what to do. The problem tends to show up later, in the moment where they have to decide what matters most, with…
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