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Blogs & insights
You can now find our library of culture tools & session playbacks inside the
Explore our latest blogs and articles using the categories below:
Simplifying Culture
Move culture from fuzzy to focused with tools to simplify.
Hear how people feel (HABIT step 1)
Learn how to evaluate your culture & win stakeholder support.
Integrate it daily (HABIT step 4)
Pinpoint moments & skills to ensure leaders & managers bring culture to life.
Culture Stories
Insights & inspiration from workplaces around the world.
Align on the future (HABIT step 2)
Pick the best direction to fuel sustainable growth for your culture & business.
Trust & evolve
(HABIT step 5)
Culture is never done! Tools to help measure & improve your culture.
Culture Habits
Small practices with BIG impact. Pick-up & use habits to nudge towards growth.
Build the behaviours (HABIT step 3)
Clearly define and turn desired behaviours into everyday reality.
Culture Skills
Resources and practices to keep your culture skills sharp!
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Hopes and fears for workplace culture in 2026
Image created using AI The start of a new year sparks reflection. A blend of anxieties, doubts and hopeful thoughts — often lacking any grounding to turn them into reality. Perhaps that’s the point of reflections… But this year, I do feel more hope than doubt. And I want to help as many leaders as possible make workplace cultures that sustain growth for people and businesses, an everyday reality. Three things give me hope: 1. There are leaders out there choosin
Sarah McLellan
Jan 14 min read
Fuzzy to Fuel: Make Culture Your Growth Engine 🚀
Image created by Make It Human Emma’s start to the week follows a similar pattern. Every Monday morning, she opens her laptop determined to “do something about culture.” As the CPO of a fast-scaling tech company, she can feel the invisible drag setting in. The organisation is growing fast — but something beneath the surface is starting to fray. The team is talented. The product is strong. But conversations feel heavier. Decisions take longer. That early buzz of energy and
Sarah McLellan
Nov 3, 20254 min read
Purpose Isn’t a Slogan. It’s a Foundation.
Image source: by TheDigitalArtist from pixabay Without purpose, we fade. With purpose, we thrive. I learned this the hard way. Years ago, I led a team through a major organisational shake-up. Structures changed. Roles shifted. The work continued — but the why disappeared. Morale dipped. People started asking: “Do we still matter?” “What difference are we really making?” We’d lost our North Star. The turnaround only came when we re-anchored in a shared purpose — on
Sarah McLellan
Aug 26, 20253 min read
Making Sense of Leadership
Having shared the 5 elements in growth cultures, I am left reflecting on the key themes in our emerging world of work and what this means for leadership. To make work human we need to find fulfilling and sustainable opportunities. In this quest, we are increasingly encountering dichotomies where we need to impact both outcomes: For leaders - navigating these paradoxes and leading businesses through novel and changing times - demands new priorities. Recent research reveals
Sarah McLellan
Jul 11, 20254 min read
Why every business needs a Chief Culture Officer
We’re entering a new era of work — faster, more complex, and increasingly powered by AI. But as machines take over the command-and-control tasks — standardised, repetitive, and rule-bound — the real value in organisations is shifting to what only humans can do: Build trust Solve problems creatively Lead through ambiguity Learn and adapt Inspire, empathise, and collaborate This is the human side of performance. And yet, most organisations are still structured for a world t
Sarah McLellan
Jul 1, 20254 min read
Resetting Your Operating System for Growth
The Four Shifts Every Business Leader Needs to Make In today’s volatile business landscape, culture is no longer a ‘nice to have’. It’s the operating system that determines whether your people — and your performance — can adapt, sustain and grow. Yet many organisations are still running outdated systems. We rely on inherited behaviours, fragmented tools, and episodic efforts to drive culture. It’s time for an upgrade — one that enables people and business to grow together
Make It Human
Jun 20, 20255 min read
Are you cultivating a climate for human growth?
A climate for human growth by Make It Human I worked with a client recently who genuinely has human growth front and centre of everything. They’re a small company, growing quickly. Founder-led, they’ve reached a transition-point where they know new models and ways of working will need to be introduced to enable a successful next phase. However, the leaders are open and transparent about this need and are laser-focused on building a culture where people can thrive, as the prim
Sarah McLellan
May 9, 20253 min read
Sink or Swim? Rethinking How We Develop Managers
Image from Wix Images Despite everything we know about the pivotal role managers play in today’s workplace, we’re still asking the same old question: Are we setting them up to sink or swim? Astonishingly, the answer for many organisations is still “sink.” Just last week, Gallup released new research revealing that less than half of managers worldwide have received any formal training. This isn’t just a missed opportunity—it’s a ticking time bomb. Managers are the linchpin o
Make It Human
May 4, 20252 min read
The Culture Triangle: A simple framework for demystifying culture
Culture is often seen as intangible and difficult to influence. But it’s also the driving force behind every decision, behaviour, and feeling within an organisation. When understood and shaped intentionally, culture can become a powerful engine for growth. Culture isn’t a buzzword—It’s the force that shapes everything Culture isn’t just about values on a wall or an abstract idea. It’s the environment, behaviours, and habits that influence how people think, feel, and act. Lead
Make It Human
Apr 28, 20253 min read
Are you culture fit?
Image by Gustavo Fring from Pexels At the start of the year, I enlisted the help of a personal trainer to try and improve my physical fitness. Being the other side of 40 I have reached the age where looking after my body suddenly feels both more important and challenging at the same time. Previous methods to keep fit and healthy have lost impact and so it was time for a new strategy. It’s early days, but learning new exercises, even venturing into the weights room (an area i
Sarah McLellan
Apr 28, 20253 min read
Culture is cracking
Having identified 10 culture cracks (read more here ) often experienced across organisations, I developed a diagnostic to help identify where issues might be simmering and enable targeted action before serious failures occur. 305 people completed the diagnostic, across multiple countries, job roles and organisations. This enabled exploration of the trends in experiences of culture and to understand the extent to which company culture is cracking. 88% are likely to be exp
Sarah McLellan
Apr 23, 20255 min read
Is your culture cracking?
10 Signs of Culture Cracks by Make It Human. Sketch by Kacy Maxwell Fatigue failure is an engineer’s nightmare. The tiniest of cracks, often invisible to the human eye, silently expanding resulting in catastrophic failure of a structure, a ship or plane. The design, calculations, load-analysis rigorously tested are theoretically sound, but there’s no accounting for the unseen crack, damaging the structure beneath the surface. The forces impacting organisational culture are
Sarah McLellan
Apr 23, 20256 min read
Start with the end in mind
If we start with the end in mind, what would we design? For our lives, our families, our organisations? Even for our planet? The wisdom those who have lived long lives always impart focuses on spending more time with others, continuously learning and growing, and being kind and curious. Regrets are for opportunities and risks not taken, and decisions taking us away from building meaningful relationships. The very essence of being human. And yet, when we roll this up to groups
Sarah McLellan
Apr 23, 20255 min read
Why the messy middle matters!
The Messy Middle Matters, by Make It Human, illustrated by Kacy Maxwell For years companies have focused on the stages of an employee’s lifecycle. From cradle to grave (so to speak) the key moments shaping experiences, feelings of engagement, and decisions about whether to stay or go. Whilst this approach still has merit, in today’s always-on, intricately connected, and ever-changing world, it’s an employee’s experience of the ‘messy middle’ that really counts. Even before co
Sarah McLellan
Apr 23, 20255 min read
Why we need to make it human
Image by Vitaly Gariev via Unsplash The year is 2045. Ryan is gently woken by the implant in his wrist as his body monitoring system indicates this is the optimal moment to break his sleep cycle. Ryan puts on his VR glasses and checks-in with his health app and, on auto pilot, confirms the request to issue his first (of five) nutrient boosts. He lies back, and briefly enjoys the cooling, calming feeling as the nutrients are absorbed into his blood stream. Appearing in fro
Sarah McLellan
Apr 21, 20253 min read
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