People, progress and doing things with, not to.

It’s been a busy few months at Here2there, and recently I’ve found myself moving between some seemingly very different pieces of work.

One day I’m facilitating a leadership programme. Another I’m talking about workplace wellbeing. I might be coaching, working with a group exploring organisational change, facilitating a co-production session or sitting down with the team to think about the next stage of one of our digital products.

But the more I reflect on it, the more I realise there’s a common thread running through almost everything I’m doing.

It’s about people, progression and creating the conditions that help us move forward.

Taking leadership out of the textbook

A significant part of my recent work has been leadership and organisational development.

I’ve been designing and delivering programmes exploring confident, accountable and resilient leadership, leading and influencing change, psychological safety, communication, emotional intelligence and navigating difficult conversations.

What I’m increasingly convinced of is that leadership development shouldn’t be about giving people more models to remember.

Models and research are useful – I use plenty of them – but the interesting bit is what happens when we ask:

“What does this actually mean for me, in my role, on Tuesday morning?”

That’s why the sessions I design are highly interactive. There’s conversation, activity, reflection and, usually, quite a lot of laughter.

People need opportunities to explore ideas, challenge them, relate them to their own experiences and decide what they might actually do differently as a result.

Because attending training isn’t progression. What happens afterwards is.

Recognising the reality people are working in

Something else that has really struck me recently is how important it is to acknowledge the context in which we ask people to lead.

I’ve worked with managers who care deeply about their teams but are dealing with vacancies, long-term sickness, relentless workloads and decisions they have limited ability to influence.

Telling someone in that situation simply to be “more resilient” isn't particularly helpful.

Instead, some of our conversations have explored agency.

What can I influence? Where might I have more choice than I initially thought? How can I communicate upwards effectively? What can I change for my team? And where do I need to acknowledge that something genuinely sits outside my control?

For me, good development creates space for those honest conversations rather than pretending leadership happens in perfect conditions.

Communication: simple, until humans get involved

One of my more unexpected recent pieces of work started with a phone call late on a Thursday.

A client had a company-wide offsite on the Monday and had identified communication as something they collectively needed to improve.

Could I come and work with the whole team for half a day?

After a deep breath, I said yes.

I built the session around experiences rather than presentations – listening, assumptions, emotional delivery, written communication, different perspectives and the gap that can exist between what we intended to communicate and what somebody else actually received.

We kept returning to three questions:

What did I intend?
How did it land?
How do I know?

The response was wonderful – including a completely unexpected round of applause at the end, which genuinely made my week.

But what stayed with me was how much there is to explore in something we do all day, every day, often without thinking about it.

Moving beyond tokenistic wellbeing

I’ve also been doing more work around workplace wellbeing.

This is an area I care deeply about, particularly because I think we need to move beyond some of the more tokenistic approaches to wellbeing at work.

Fruit bowls, yoga sessions and breathing exercises can all be lovely. But they can't compensate for unhealthy workloads, lack of psychological safety, poor relationships or people feeling they have no control over their working lives.

Meaningful wellbeing work needs to help people understand themselves and identify practical things they can do to support their own wellbeing.

But it also needs to look at the environment around them.

And, importantly, we need to equip those supporting someone who is struggling. Managers and colleagues often desperately want to help but aren't sure what to say, what to notice, what they can reasonably do or where the boundaries of their role lie.

Wellbeing is both individual and collective.

Doing things with people, not to them

Perhaps the strongest theme running through all of this is something that has become increasingly important to me:

Do things with people, not to them.

It applies to leadership development. It applies to organisational change. It applies to wellbeing.

And it absolutely applies to technology.

Alongside our consultancy work, we're continuing to develop H2t's human-centred digital technology, working particularly across health, social care, education and the third sector.

I'm endlessly interested in what technology can make possible – but only when humans remain firmly at its centre.

The question shouldn't be, “What can we build?”

It should start with, “What are people trying to do, experience or achieve – and could technology help?”

That means listening, co-producing, testing assumptions and recognising that the people using a service or technology bring expertise that those designing it simply don't have.

Maybe it isn't such a mixed bag after all

When someone asks what I do, I sometimes struggle to give a neat answer.

I’m a coach. A facilitator. An organisational development practitioner. A former financial services executive. A product owner. A CEO. And someone who can get disproportionately excited about a really good digital solution.

On paper, it can look like quite a mixed bag.

But increasingly, I don't think it is.

Whether I'm sitting with one person in a coaching conversation, working with 30 leaders, facilitating a room full of colleagues or helping design a digital product, I'm essentially interested in the same questions:

Where are we now?
Where do we want to get to?
What's getting in the way?
And what might genuinely help us move forward?

That, ultimately, is what Here2there has always been about.

Helping people and organisations progress, connect and thrive.

And judging by the last few months, there are plenty more interesting conversations still to come.