Most consultancies are quite vague about their work. The clients are confidential. The programmes are bespoke. The outcomes are transformational.
We get why. But one of our values at HappyHQ is radical transparency. So here’s an honest account of what organisations are asking us to run most right now – and what it tells us about where teams are finding it hard.
If you’re a founder, an HR lead, or someone thinking about L&D, this is what your peers are working on. Not the polished version. The real one.
The thing nobody says out loud
Leaders rarely come to us asking for culture training. They come with situations.
“Our leadership meetings go round in circles and nothing gets decided.” “Managers are avoiding the conversations they need to have.” “We have values. They just don’t show up when things get difficult.” “Good ideas keep getting lost.”
Individually these feel like small problems. But they’re usually symptoms of the same thing: a gap between how an organisation wants to work and how it’s working day to day.
Leadership teams doing the real job of leadership
We’ve been spending a lot of time with senior leadership teams lately, helping them communicate better – especially when the pressure hits.
A leadership team will come in saying they need help with strategy or communication. And somewhere in the first session, someone says something like: ‘Honestly, I think we’ve stopped telling each other the truth.’
The signs are familiar. Topics that come up in every meeting but never get resolved. Decisions that feel made in the room but somehow aren’t. Leaders who are brilliant at running their own function but have quietly stopped stepping in for the organisation as a whole.
What SLTs tell us they want is practical. Not conceptual frameworks to take away and think about – real tools they can use in the room the following week. How to structure a difficult conversation. How to make a decision as a group and actually stick to it. How to challenge each other without it turning personal.
In one recent session, a leadership team realised they’d been escalating issues to the founder simply because nobody felt comfortable challenging each other directly. Once that was named, the whole tone shifted. Then we gave them something concrete to work with. That’s the bit that matters: the insight plus the framework to do something about it.
Managers who were never shown how to manage
Ask a room of managers how many feel confident giving direct feedback. A few hands go up. Ask how many have put off a difficult conversation for weeks. Everyone starts laughing.
Most people become managers because they were brilliant at their job. Then overnight the job changes completely. Suddenly they’re responsible for someone else’s confidence, development, and performance – and nobody’s shown them how to handle that.
So they improvise. Feedback gets softened until nothing changes. Problems get fixed by the manager because it feels quicker than coaching someone through it. One-to-ones slowly become project updates because that feels safer than the thinking conversation.
What managers tell us they need isn’t theory. It’s a framework for feedback they can use on Monday. A structure for a one-to-one that actually goes somewhere. A way of setting expectations so people know where they stand without it feeling like a performance management conversation.
The employees who suffer most aren’t the ones with bad managers. They’re the ones with managers who care deeply but are quietly out of their depth. That’s a training problem. Not a people problem.
Communicating with impact when the stakes are high
In a pitch. In a team meeting with seniors. With a challenging client.
Capable, smart people whose thinking gets lost because they haven’t been shown how to structure it. They start presenting, two minutes pass, and you can see the room begin to drift. Laptops open. Someone asks a question that takes the whole thing somewhere else.
The work here is practical from the start: how to build a clear narrative around an idea; how to open in a way that makes people lean in; how to handle a challenge without losing the thread.
“I knew what I wanted to say. I just didn’t know how to land it.”
And crucially, in a style that still feels like them. Not a performance. Not someone else’s voice. Just clearer, more confident, more direct. In fast-moving teams, that skill determines whether good thinking moves forward – or disappears in the noise.
Authentic values, not just values in a deck
Most organisations have values. The problem is most of them are too broad to be useful when work gets messy. ‘Collaboration. Innovation. Integrity.’ All fine words. None of them tell you what to do when a high performer is undermining their team, or when a client is pushing you somewhere you don’t want to go, or when a leader needs to address behaviour that’s been quietly tolerated for too long.
A lot of the organisations that come to us aren’t just looking for values work. They’re growing, and they want to set the standard for how things are done before the culture sets itself. What does good look like in this team? How do we want people to behave when things get hard? What are we prepared to call out?
It’s not enough to define the values and put them on the wall. We help managers have values-led conversations – how to use them in feedback, how to reference them when setting expectations, how to make them part of how the team talks about its work every day. Authentic values are the ones that show up in those moments. Not because they’re on the wall. Because people know what they mean in practice.
When training needs to feel different
Not every team needs another workshop where someone talks at a room for two hours.
Some of the most useful sessions we run are the ones that feel nothing like a training day. Word cards. Tactile exercises. LEGO Serious Play. Things that get people out of their heads and into a different kind of conversation.
It sounds like a gimmick until you’re in the room. What tends to happen is that people say things they wouldn’t say in a normal meeting. Not because they’re being brave – because the format gives them a different way in. Building something with your hands and explaining what you’ve made surfaces thinking that a PowerPoint slide never would.
“I didn’t realise that’s how you were seeing it.”
That moment – between two people who’ve worked together for years and are suddenly understanding each other differently – is often the most valuable thing that happens all day. Fun and useful aren’t opposites. The best training is both.
What sits underneath all of it
The sessions we run have different names. But they’re usually about the same thing: a moment where someone has to decide whether to say the difficult thing or let it go. Whether to challenge or stay quiet. Whether to be honest or be comfortable.
Those moments happen every day inside organisations. Most of the time, nobody’s ever given people the tools to handle them well. That’s where we come in.
At HappyHQ, we help agencies and in-house teams build strong cultures and the leaders and teams who sustain them. Find out more about how we work at happyhq.co.uk/what-we-do, or say hello at hello@happyhq.co.uk