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The resignation lands in month twenty-two and everybody is surprised by it. She was well regarded. There had been no complaint. The exit interview records a personal decision and a family consideration, and the file closes. The decision was not made in month twenty-two. It was made across about ninety

Fund the programme, run it well, and three years from now the senior numbers will look roughly as they do today. Not because the programme did not work. Because a meaningful share of the women it was designed for will have left the organisation before they ever became eligible for

At the end of every women’s leadership programme there is a list of names. Everything that matters about that programme is decided by where the list goes next. Not the faculty. Not the framework. Not whether it ran over six months or six days. If the list goes into a

Every time I sit across from a CHRO defending a women’s leadership program, someone in the room asks the same question. If we truly believe leadership should be gender agnostic, isn’t it a contradiction to run a program that singles women out? Sometimes it’s the women themselves who ask it,

Most of the attention in this field goes to the boardroom. Board representation, C-suite percentages, the woman who did or did not get the top job. I understand why. Those numbers are visible, they are reported publicly, and they are the ones your key stakeholders read about. But if you

Four in ten employees who tell their manager they are burning out and say the manager then did nothing. This is not indifference. It comes from Eagle Hill Consulting’s Workforce Burnout Survey 2025, run by Ipsos across a national sample of more than 1,400 US employees. The finding sits inside

I had just finished a session on managing performance, the kind I have run a hundred times, and she had been quiet through most of it. Now she was standing at the edge of the table with her notebook still open, asking me something that was not on the agenda.

Someone said to me recently: why do we still need to build strategic HR business partner capability? AI makes the strategy now. It even tells you what prompts to use. I didn’t spend my energy arguing. But the question stayed with me long after the conversation ended, because it assumes

There is a moment in organisations that I’ve started paying attention to over the years. It isn’t when someone resigns. By then, the decision has usually been made long ago. It’s much earlier. It’s the moment a capable employee quietly decides, “I’ll stop putting myself forward.” Most managers never see

One pattern has become difficult for me to ignore. Organisations spend months refining strategy, but comparatively little time preparing the managers expected to bring that strategy to life.  Perhaps that’s why so many well-designed strategies struggle once they reach the real world. In my experience, execution is rarely where the

Lets pause and reflect. If someone became a manager for the first time today, would we train them differently from how we trained managers twenty years ago? Purely on instinct, the answer should be yes. But the reality is very different. The examples may have changed. The slides look more

For years, most organisations treated POSH compliance as a settled matter. You had a policy, you had an Internal Committee, you ran a session or two a year, and you filed your annual report. One national framework, one set of documents, done. That world has ended. Over the last eighteen