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What Drives Behaviour in Organisations?
Thinking About Leadership and Emotion
My work is concerned first and foremost with understanding the emotional life of organisations and the largely unconscious dynamics that shape how people behave at work, including how anxiety, defence, identity and power
quietly influence leadership, decision making and organisational culture in ways that rarely appear in
strategy documentsor formal structures.
This work is underpinned by organisational psychology, social psychology
and systems psychodynamic thinking, which I use to make sense of what is really going on beneath
the surface of everyday working life.
The books below are not designed as quick fix manuals or formulaic leadership guides, but as attempts to make academically rigorous ideas usable in real organisations without flattening their complexity or losing
sight of the emotional realities people are dealing with.
Taken together, they form a coherent body of work that underpins my coaching, advisory and teaching practice.
The Emotional Life of Organisations
How Feelings Shape Culture, Performance & Results
Feelings are the largely unspoken energy that drives behaviour in organisations. This book is rooted in the emotional realities I have encountered repeatedly in leadership teams, boardrooms and organisations under pressure, where what people feel often matters more than what is written in strategy documents or organisational charts.
Reading about farming does not prepare you for the reality of stepping into a cowshed, and in the same way, formal business education rarely prepares people for the emotional atmosphere of real organisational life. You can study leadership models, complete an MBA, and read the latest thinking in management journals, and still find yourself unprepared for the anxiety, politics and unspoken tensions that shape everyday working life.
The book takes these lived emotional experiences seriously. It shows how decisions, relationships, roles and cultures are continually shaped through feeling, often outside conscious awareness, and why organisations struggle when these dynamics are ignored or managed only indirectly.
In doing so, it sets out the psychological foundations that underpin my coaching, advisory and teaching work, and provides the context for my wider writing on leadership, burnout and organisational life.
Before The Emotional Life of Organisations, my writing focused on organisational situations where the emotional undercurrents are hard to ignore, such as leadership under pressure, burnout, conflict, and the strain
created by organisational change.
Across these books, I return to the same questions about what people are really reacting to at work, what is left unsaid, and how these unspoken dynamics shape behaviour and
performance over time.
Taken together, the books reflect a long standing attempt to make sense of how
organisations feel from the inside, not just how they are described from the outside.
The Saboteur at Work
How the Unconscious Mind Can Sabotage Oursleves, Our Organisations & Society
Written from working in organisations where people were exhausted, cynical and stretched beyond reason, this book treats burnout as an organisational issue, not a personal weakness.
Leading Hybrid Organisations
How to Build Trust, Collaboration & a High-Performance Culture
Written during the rapid shift to hybrid working, this book looks at what happens to trust, identity and connection when people stop sharing the same physical space.
Burning Bright Without Burning Out
The Anit-Burnout Workbook for Busy Professionals
This workbook came from supporting high performing professionals who were coping on the surface but struggling underneath, and translates psychological ideas about burnout into practical reflection.
Anti-Burnout
How to Create a Psychologically Safe & High-performance Organisation
Written from working in organisations where people were exhausted, cynical and stretched beyond reason, this book treats burnout as an organisational issue, not a personal weakness.
Taken together, these books reflect a long standing attempt to understand what actually shapes behaviour, decision making and relationships inside organisations, beyond formal structures and stated intentions.
They are written for people who recognise that working life is rarely neat or rational, and who want a way of thinking
about organisations that takes emotion seriously without reducing it to slogans or techniques.
The same perspective runs through my coaching, advisory and teaching work, where these ideas are tested,
challenged and refined in live organisational settings.
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