APS Intelligence

What causes high turnover in large organisations?

Pay matters less than people think, and exit interviews tell you less than you want to believe. People rarely leave for the reason they put on the form. They leave because of what they experienced daily for months before they applied elsewhere: the manager who didn't hear them, the meeting where another voice ran over theirs, the promotion that went to someone less capable but more visible, the policy change that landed without explanation. Pay becomes the headline because it's the cleanest reason to give and the easiest one for HR to act on. The actual driver sits underneath. Three things con

How do we fix a broken leadership team?

Define "broken" first. The label covers a lot of ground. The team might be stuck in analysis. Decisions don't always hold once the meeting ends. Members can perform for each other rather than work with each other. Some voices may have grown too loud while others have gone quiet. Decorum sometimes breaks down. The experience of being on the team can become unpleasant for those on it. The wrong people may be in the seats. Often, it's several of these layered together. The first job is to get an accurate read, because an incorrect diagnosis leads to interventions that don't fit. An offsite about

What's the difference between executive coaching and management training?

The honest answer is they solve different problems, and many organisations buy them in the wrong order. Management training teaches you what to do. It assumes the manager is unaware of a tool, framework, or technique, and that giving them the technique will change their behaviour. For some skills (running a one-to-one, structuring a performance conversation, applying a feedback model) that's true. The manager learns the move, practises it, and over time it becomes a habit. Executive coaching teaches you who you are when you do it. It assumes the leader knows what to do but isn't doing it consi

Organisational culture consulting vs internal HR teams: when is each right?

It isn't an either-or, and the best work happens when it's neither alone. Internal HR carries the day-to-day machinery that no external partner can replicate: pay compliance, regulatory alignment, pension obligations, pay-gap reporting, performance management cycles, employee relations, and the deep institutional memory that comes from being there through previous reorganisations. They know the personalities, the stakeholders, and the policies that create the friction nobody wants to admit. For ongoing work, internal HR is the engine. External consulting earns its place when the situation call

How do we measure workplace culture improvements?

Surveys measure what people say. Culture is what people do. Those two things are rarely identical, which is why surveys are not the primary instrument for measuring cultural change. There's a body of research that takes culture measurement seriously: Amy Edmondson on psychological safety, Chris Argyris on the gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually do (his distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use), Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken on the conditions that produce organisational silence. The gap between what happens and what's said is your real cul

How does APS Intelligence approach culture transformation?

Most consultancies start with "culture". We start with behaviour. Culture is what leaders and people do, not what the company says it values. Adam Grant has quoted John Amaechi's line on this: "culture is defined by the worst behaviour tolerated". That framing tells you precisely where to intervene. If you want to change the culture, change the behaviour the senior layer tolerates, then change the behaviour the senior layer models, then build the conditions and skills that let the manager layer sustain the change. In practice, that's three pieces of work, in different proportions for different

What do clients say about APS Intelligence?

The most useful answer is the named testimonials on this site, which include senior leaders at JLL, Tesco, Jefferies, Kantar, and Supercell. They detail the engagements they led, and we'd encourage you to read them rather than rely on a summary. Three patterns emerge across the named testimonials and the wider set of confidential feedback we receive. First, we tend to surface a different problem than the one the engagement started with, and clients consistently describe the surfacing itself as the most useful part. Second, the change tends to hold beyond the engagement, because we target speci

Need a facilitator for your leadership offsite?

A leadership offsite is only worth the cost if it has an impact in the room that survives the journey back. The most common request we see is from a chief executive or chief people officer who wants the senior team to leave with three things: a sharper read on the actual problem they're facing (often different from the named problem on the agenda), a set of decisions the team has actually made together rather than rubber-stamped, and a behavioural shift in how the team works with each other after the offsite ends. That last one is where most facilitation falls short. The energy of the offsite