The Team That Feared Change — Then Led It
How a FTSE 100 leadership team went from carrying the wounds of one transformation to confidently leading the next.
The Inheritance
The digital leadership team of a FTSE 100 company had come through a bruising few years. A long engagement with a major global consultancy had left the team burnt out and the relational fabric strained: trust in senior decision-making had thinned, directors had become protective of territory, and a sense of being undervalued by the wider organisation had settled in as background weather.
A Group CIO had been brought in to lead the next phase: a significant digital transformation, anchored by a new multi-million pound technology partnerships. His concern was not the strategy. It was whether a team who still carried the wounds of the last change could be asked to get behind and deliver another one.
How it Began
The engagement began, as my work often does, with the team experiencing it directly: a keynote at a leadership away day. The next morning, the CIO emailed.
“Yesterday went down exceptionally well — the team all commented how much they got out of it. We’d love to invite you back, James, for a deeper dive on creating supportive cultures for leaders. I’d also like some 1-2-1 sessions for me to help me build for what is going to be a challenging 2026 full of change”
— CIO, FTSE 100 Organisation
A scoping conversation followed. What the CIO described — fatigue, suspicion, competitiveness, a quiet resistance to change — wasn’t a performance problem, lack of individual talent or a strategy problem. It was a relational system under strain. So that’s what we examined.
The Diagnostic
I conducted confidential, hour-long depth interviews with every member of the leadership team. These weren't surveys or structured assessments. They were open, exploratory interviews, built on the trust established through the keynote and led by someone skilled in deep, genuine listening. Unaccustomed to this kind of conversation, each director in turn mirrored the authenticity offered to them — and spoke to what mattered most, beneath the surface veneer.
I then analysed the interviews using the same interpretative methodology I use in published qualitative research — thousands of words of analysis per participant, cross-case pattern work, and theme generation — viewed through the Relational Intelligence Framework™. Five themes emerged, mapping closely onto the Framework’s domains: how visibility and recognition were operating; how fairness and transparency were being experienced; where role boundaries had become contested territory; what relentless pace was quietly costing; and where trust and psychological safety were uneven.
The result was a written report unlike anything the team had seen about itself: not a benchmark score or a survey readout, but a structured, evidenced account of the system they were living inside — in their own collective voice, with the patterns named.
The Moment it Landed
The report prioritised honesty over comfort. It landed heavily at first — precisely because it was accurate. Doubt surfaced, as it naturally does at a pivotal moment of change: a team can only shift a pattern it can see, and seeing it clearly is rarely comfortable. What carried the team through that moment was proximity. Because I was close to the process — not a distant observer delivering findings and leaving — I could hold the reception of the report itself, steadying the team and keeping alive their belief that change was possible. The CIO chose to share the full report with his team. That decision — his, not mine — became the turning point of the engagement.
The Work
Sessions are held monthly, typically by video call, for sixty minutes.
The format is conversational and unstructured by design — the session follows what is live for you, not a predetermined agenda. Some sessions are predominantly strategic. Some are predominantly relational. Many are both.
Between sessions, brief communication is available for time-sensitive reflection or short questions that don't warrant a full session.
The relationship is charged at consulting rates, not therapy rates, and is invoiced monthly.
What Changed
Over eight months, the shifts were visible and observable. A team that once avoided difficult conversations began challenging openly — including challenging the CIO — and staying in disagreement without withdrawal or resentment. Territory disputes gave way to shared ownership, with directors visibly championing each other’s work. Role boundaries clarified. The team’s own language shifted from protection to delivery.
Most tellingly, the teams talent was now unburdened, and a shared leadership creativity began flow: in one, the leadership group collectively shaped its approach to a technology partnerships worth millions — working through how to build trust with a major new partner while protecting the organisation’s interests. The relational work and the commercial work had become the same work.
Progress was tracked, not asserted: alongside the qualitative arc, the engagement used bespoke measures — developed from the team’s own themes — capturing movement in trust, cohesion, and purpose across the engagement.
The Point
The strategy didn’t change. The team had always been a team of immense capability. What changed was the relational system those things depend on. That’s the layer this work addresses: the drag on the hull that no restructure, framework, or away day reaches, because it lives between people, not in process.
A Conversation About Fit
If your organisation is approaching change with a team still carrying the last one — or if you recognise your own leadership team somewhere in this story — the conversation starts confidentially.
Get in touch: james@jameshartley.org