I would sum it up with love to our beautiful clients, past, present, and future.

I think the most common problem is that founders believe the issue lies with the team, when more often than not, the issue is with them or the workplace design. It's the team being blamed, when really it's things they're doing as a leader, or the way they've designed their workplace and governed their culture, that is having a negative, albeit unintentional, impact on the team.

The other common people problem I see is turnover. Turnover is usually the trigger that brings people to us, or it's an inability to grow because something is holding everything back. Beneath the surface, they often don't know what's causing it, and walking in as a psychologist, I won't know either. I need to go through a discovery phase, ask questions, conduct interviews, run surveys, and get to know the business before I'm figuring out what's really going on. But typically it comes down to high workloads without the resources to manage them, whether that's additional team members, more streamlined processes, or better technology. Sometimes you'll also see a disconnection from the organisation's mission and values, either because they're not being communicated in a way that resonates with people, leaving them feeling detached or disengaged, or because the business has grown so far from its original mission that nobody connects to it anymore, including the business owner.

I think the final thing I'd add is that founders sometimes want to protect their staff, and in doing so, withhold basic information about business performance that would actually help things make more sense. They're holding back context out of fear of causing worry. This tends to happen in organisations that have grown quickly, where information is still being gatekept, and that creates distrust and a perceived lack of organisational justice. The way decisions are made and communicated can seem unfair, and while that's never the intention, the lack of transparency has a real impact.

And I think that's the thing for any aspiring psychologist, consultant, or change consultant: your first job is to come with questions, not answers. It takes time to understand exactly what's going on, because only then can you design a solution that will actually have an impact. For any business owner being sold off-the-shelf solutions, I'd be cautious, because if someone isn't taking the time to properly understand the problem, the solution probably isn't going to work.