March was all about change and impact for us, which felt in nice alignment with the fact that it was B Corp Month (our first) and the theme this year was “this ...
When my Dad asked me if I wanted to “come along and see what you think” to a client leadership event back in 2014, I would have laughed if you had told me that ...
Early this year I completed my dissertation as part of the MSc with Roffey Park in People and Organisational Development. I explored what it means for consultan...
“This is a safe space” For who? How do you know?! We can never really control or accurately predict what people will find more or less safe, however this doesn’...
Oh, the weather, a classic British way to relieve social anxiety and inhibition. Recently, I did just this. My colleague Jo and I were hosting a public conversa...
Little did we all know at the start of the Covid pandemic how much our leadership resilience would be tested in the years to come. Overnight, many businesses ac...
In a world of uncertainty and complexity, collaboration is key. How we work together offers us hope and possibilities in a world which isn’t getting any more si...
The overlooked relationship between collaboration and conflict Collaboration is often associated with working well together, providing a competitive advantage, ...
The pandemic has given Chief People Officers a voice of influence like never before. Over the last few years, HR has become, quite rightly, more and more about ...
What the European Super League fiasco tells us about the importance of culture. Across Europe over the past few days you can’t avoid hearing about the uproar in...
It seems every conversation I have these days, with colleagues, friends and clients starts with the same few sentences: “yah, doing OK, it’s crazy. But do we ha...
As we continue on in the middle of the second wave of the pandemic, I have noticed a marked difference in how leaders and teams are responding to this next phas...
Look on any successful leader’s office bookshelf and you’ll probably spot several books about cultural diversity, and several books about working remotely. But ...
RISE Beyond has been partnering with Bruntwood since 2015, initially to support the organisation and help develop their competitive advantage in the face of rap...
A RISE session in leading beyond the coronavirus crisis I recently facilitated a session alongside my RISE colleagues, Chris and Matthew, for a group of CEOs fo...
Last week we held a cross-client conversation on the topic of behaviour in uncertainty; it certainly felt like a relevant topic given the current climate and wh...
Steve and I met in Soho in September 2019 - this is the second part of the conversation and we mostly talk about creativity. Click here to read the previous pos...
At the beginning of April 2020, we hosted a conversation on improving the quality of experience for virtual teams. You can watch it here:
Chris Alder and Jo Wood from RISE had a conversation with Jason Leigh Gafa from Yellow about resilience, relevance and the importance of vulnerability, as well ...
Or 9 or 12... see here’s the thing, I don’t believe there is an ‘x step blog’ that you can read that will make collaborating (working with other human beings) m...
How we respond in times of uncertainty is key... Hugely unpredictable and complex global patterns can emerge suddenly as if from nowhere and fundamentally disru...
Hephzi Pemberton is the founder of Equality Group, a consultancy and executive search firm working with diversity and inclusion. Hephzi and Jo met in Soho to ha...
I was recently facilitating a leadership development programme, and in the room next door another ‘organisational development consultant’ was delivering a works...
Sometimes looking from a different angle makes the difference. For years I have pondered the key ingredients to make an offshoring structure in a company a succ...
What happens to us when we work virtually? How do cultural diversity and distance impact how we act, think, and feel? Actually quite a bit. For instance, let’s ...
What do you really enjoy about your work that you'd like to share with others? In its simplest expression, I enjoy being helpful to people and drawing on my own...
Bruntwood and RISE have been working together since 2015. Polly is the leadership development director at Bruntwood. She works with the board and the senior lea...
Ever get that feeling, where after days, weeks, or even months of hard work, your team can’t seem to move forward? The way you are working remains stuck in an i...
Steve is an artist, writer, speaker, coach and consultant interested in creativity and the human condition, particularly in these things we call “organisations"...
Life is full of tensions. As I work with people in organisations I am forever noticing the ubiquitous nature of the tensions that are a reality of how we live a...
What do you really enjoy about your work that you'd like to share with others? Working to support the development of people and organisations feels like an extr...
How does feedback change when we deliberately take the assumption away that the feedback-giver is right? Is there a way to engage in a discussion with a colleag...
A conversation with Anne Caspari Anne is a specialist in transformative processes and change, for both personal and leadership development. With a MSc/MPhil in ...
What do you really enjoy about your work that you’d like to share with others? What I deeply enjoy about my work with RISE clients is that I never quite know wh...
Note from the Field A week in June It’s a baking hot day at the end of June and I’m preparing for four days of work facilitating a leadership retreat with two f...
Note from the Field Initiating an organisational change process can be a thrilling experience. It can represent new possibilities for leadership and achievement...
What do you really enjoy about your work that you'd like to share with others? The thing I most enjoy about my work is the variety that I am exposed to. One day...
What do you really enjoy about your work that you'd like to share with others? I totally love grappling with the complexity and the unknown nature of the work t...
Meeting Matthew Rich-Tolsma What do you really enjoy about your work that you would like to share with others? A teacher of mine, Marshall Rosenberg, who sadly ...
My colleague Matthew Rich-Tolsma recently held a RISE webinar on “Business Bullshit”, where we spoke with a group of business leaders and organisational consult...
Meeting Beth King What do you really enjoy about your work? What motivates you? The thing that inspires me most of all is creating environments where organisati...
I was approached by my colleague to write something on culture. What do I want to say about this topic to a community when I assume in my mind every single memb...
A conversation with Barrett C. Brown... Barrett is a global expert on developing leaders to successfully navigate complex challenges and rapid change. He suppor...
Meeting Tomas Hancil... What do you really enjoy about your work that you'd like to share with others? Probably the most enjoyable things happen rarely - but ar...
I’ve been a Chairman, CEO, and C-suite Director in large businesses, start-ups and membership-based organisations, in the UK, Europe and globally. Now as CEO of...
Why is it, that despite everything we know about leadership, all the books, events, training and coaching that is available, leadership still fails? This post a...
My RISE colleague, Tomas Hancil, and I have been experimenting quite a lot whilst working with the topic of feedback, particularly with a number of clients who ...
What is culture?
Meeting Manju Melwani... What do you really enjoy about your work that you’d like to share with others? I love to understand inter-personal dynamics. I find peo...
The Art of Facilitation Facilitation is often understood as something someone, an impartial outsider, does to a group in order to make them do something or make...
A conversation with Caryn Vanstone... Caryn consults on whole organisation performance and behavioural change work - taking a cultural and empowerment/accountab...
In our blog looking at who’s best to manage a family owned business, it was evident that the most successful are ultimately those who combine family ownership w...
Almost all family owned businesses start off being managed by the family, but over time should you keep it in the family? Before we examine the key issues to co...
The need for changemanagement in a business can come from a variety of directions. Maybe market conditions are shifting, perhaps you need to embark on the next ...
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” Wise words from a t...
Established in 1971, Toly had become a global supplier of high quality packaging for the cosmetics industry, yet in late 2013, the CEO, Andy Gatesy, felt the bu...
In our own consulting practice, we are dealing with a number of family businesses as well as RISE being a family business. Leadership transition, especially bet...
How diverse is the community of people that influences your thinking? Do your people have the ability to think and draw conclusions? Can they adapt to changes, ...