Executive Team Culture Assessment & Development
Culture is set at the top. So is the harm.
Every organisation's culture flows from the behaviour, relationships, and unspoken dynamics of its leadership team. When those dynamics are healthy, not perfect but healthy, everything beneath them can thrive. When they are not, the entire organisation absorbs the consequences, whether anyone names it or not.
Executive Team Culture Assessment brings rare clinical depth to understanding what is actually happening in your leadership team, and what to do about it.
This is not a staff survey. It is a clinically informed assessment of the human dynamics that everything else depends on.
30
Years of clinical and consultancy experience
Trauma informed
A trauma informed approach to corporate culture. Culture assessment that understands how stress, trauma, and self criticism shape behaviour at the top, and how to change it.
What Is A Trauma Informed Culture Assessment?
Most culture work measures engagement and sentiment. This assessment goes deeper. It examines the communication patterns, behavioural dynamics, and emotional undercurrents within your leadership team, informed by three decades of clinical understanding of how stress and trauma drive behaviour.
Because what presents as a difficult personality, a communication problem, or a clash of styles is very often something else underneath, and treating the surface leaves the cause untouched.
Recognising The Patterns
What It Looks Like Around The Leadership Table
Unhealthy dynamics at the top rarely announce themselves. They show up as strong leadership, high standards, or that is just how we operate under pressure. Until someone gets hurt. These are the patterns Anna sees most often.
None of these are character flaws, and naming them is not about blame. They are recognisable patterns with recognisable causes, and they are changeable.
Both realities are usually true at once. Leaders genuinely believe they are being clear and decisive, and their teams experience something quite different. Neither is lying.
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The bullish BOARD room
Forceful voices steamroll opposition, cut people off mid sentence, and make unilateral decisions. It looks like confidence. Underneath, it is often about control, and the rest of the team learns that challenge is unsafe.
02
The yes that means no
Agreement in meetings, delay in implementation. Apparent cooperation while nothing changes. Passive aggression erodes trust quietly, and colleagues learn they cannot rely on what is said in the room.
03
The brilliant but cold executive
Clinical detachment that looks like composure. Redundancies made without feeling, devastating feedback delivered without warmth. When leaders disconnect from their own emotions, they lose access to everyone else's too.
04
The team in survival mode
Quickness to anger, fractious relationships, disinvestment in the shared mission, and exhaustion that time off does not fix. A leadership team stuck in fight or flight rather struggle to work together.
05
The culture nobody can name
Everyone in the organisation feels it. Nobody can say it. High turnover in certain teams, silence in certain meetings, and an atmosphere that shifts when certain people enter the room. This is the pattern most organisations live with for years, because naming it feels impossible and unsafe from the inside.
A Different Level Of Assessment
Why Standard Culture Work Often Does Not Hold
Culture programmes fail for a predictable reason: they address behaviour without understanding what drives it. Values workshops and communication training assume everyone in the room is operating from a settled foundation. At senior level, that assumption often does not hold.
It is no one person's fault, and it is neurological rather than personal. But everyone at the top shares responsibility for addressing it.
Standard Culture Work
Surveys, values, and behaviour rules
Engagement surveys measure the symptoms. Values exercises describe the aspiration. Behavioural ground rules address the surface. All of it can be useful, and none of it reaches the underlying dynamics, which is why the same patterns so often return within months.
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Engagement surveys
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Values workshops
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Communication training
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Away days
Clinically Informed Assessment
The dynamics underneath the behaviour
Anna's assessment examines what is driving the room. Hypervigilance presenting as dominance. Threat responses presenting as conflict. Dissociation presenting as coldness. Inner brutality presenting as impossible standards. Understood at this level, culture change becomes inevitable rather than hopeful.
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Behavioural dynamics
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Emotional templates
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Inner Brutality
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Psychological safety
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Trauma informed
How It Works
Assessment, Insight, Development
The work is discreet, respectful, and built around your team. There is no public unveiling of findings and no naming and shaming. The purpose throughout is understanding, and then durable change. It might be only one or two people need or welcome support. BUT, that has a significant impact.
Delivered UK wide and internationally, in person and online. Assessments are shaped to team size and situation, and every engagement begins with a free, confidential conversation.
Scoping conversation
A confidential discussion with the sponsoring leader to understand the situation, the history, and what has prompted the assessment. Sometimes there is a specific rupture. Sometimes there is simply a sense that something is not right.
Clinically informed assessment
Anna works with leadership team members through confidential individual conversations and observation of team dynamics, building a picture of the communication patterns, behavioural drivers, and emotional undercurrents shaping the culture.
Findings and recommendations
A clear, humane account of what is actually happening and why, delivered with warmth and directness. Recommendations are considerate and strategic, directed where they will have the fastest and longest lasting impact.
Development and follow through
Working with the team members to change patterns. Depending on need, this can include team development sessions, individual support for team members, Kindness Informed Leadership work, and follow up over time so the change is lasting, and also evolving.
Who This Is For
Leadership Teams Ready To Look Honestly
This work is for boards, executive teams, and senior leadership groups who recognise that something in the room needs attention, whether that is open conflict, quiet dysfunction, or the aftermath of a difficult period.
It is also for organisations in transition: new leadership, merged teams, post crisis recovery, or rapid growth, where the culture at the top is being formed right now and can be formed well.
The atmosphere your people work in every day is set in one room. This work makes that room healthy.
Executive teams experiencing conflict, factions, or a trust breakdown they cannot resolve from the inside.
Boards concerned about the behaviour or dynamics of a leadership team, and wanting expert, discreet insight.
Newly formed or merged leadership teams who want to build a healthy culture deliberately from the start.
Teams recovering from a difficult chapter: a departure, a crisis, a restructure, or a period of sustained pressure.
The next step
A Discreet Conversation About Your Team Needs
If something in this page has named what you have been sensing in your leadership team, the next step is a private conversation.
There is no fee for an initial call, no obligation, and complete discretion. Anna will give you an honest view of whether this work is what your team needs.