Cat White Leader Growth Lab

30/04/2026

Culture doesn't happen by accident - it is intentional, find out why and how to turn bad culture into good culture...

Culture is Intentional: How to turn bad culture into good culture

28/04/2026

Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. If you’ve promoted a new team leader or supervisor, and aren’t giving them training and development on being a leader, you’re setting them (and the company) up to fail.

Leadership might seem like a natural ability that some are just gifted with, but it’s actually a whole different mindset and set of expectations when you go from being an individual contributor to being a leader. There are new skills to learn, habits to adopt, and ways of thinking to get comfortable with.

If you’ve got a new leader in your team and you want to support them to grow and develop their skills (but don’t have the time yourself) I can help. Give me a buzz and we’ll have a real conversation about it.

26/04/2026

Just one step at a time!

23/04/2026

Want to move your business away from a blame culture?

One quick way to do that is:
Take ten minutes for mindfulness each day.

Doing this one simple thing every day has been shown to improve emotional regulation and strengthen your internal sense of control.

Want to find out more tips on how to strengthen your internal locus of control?

Give me a call on 07 2802 4495 or email me at [email protected]

20/04/2026

The best time to invest in leadership training? Before you're running on empty.

Early investment is where leadership development does its best work. When you build clarity and alignment before things get messy, you prevent a whole lot of common problems from ever taking hold.

But if you're already feeling the pressure, there are some clear signals that now is the time:
✅ You're still the one everyone comes to. Every decision, every quality check — it runs through you. And it's exhausting.
✅ Your team is capable, but inconsistent. The skills are there, but the follow-through isn't. Performance and communication vary depending on the day, the person, or the mood in the room.
✅ The hard conversations keep getting pushed back. You know what needs to be said — but it feels draining before you've even started, so it waits. And waits.
✅ You want to grow, but you're not sure you can manage more people. The business needs it. But the thought of adding more to your plate? That's what's holding you back.

At any of these points, leadership training gives you the chance to pause, reflect, and recalibrate — not just patch things up and hope for the best. It's about strengthening the foundations so you're not constantly firefighting.

Because sustainable growth doesn't come from working harder. It comes from leading better. Do any of these resonate with you? Let’s have a chat about how our 360 Assessment can help!

19/04/2026

Are you struggling to get honest feedback about your leadership style from your direct reports?

I once had a boss who was really driven to improve. She was always asking us if we had any feedback for her. I could tell she wanted to do the best she could.

Problem is, she was a bit of a micromanager…. but we couldn’t tell her to her face! GASP.

No matter how well she wanted to lead, and how willing she was to hear the feedback, there’s too many layers of power dynamics at play in this situation.

The higher you go up as a leader, the less people are willing to give you candid feedback. So the more you want to make an impact, the harder it becomes to find out how to improve.

Your peers can give you some feedback, but they don’t experience your leadership, only see it from their perspective, and probably only part of the time. Your direct manager can give you feedback, but they have their own biases and agendas.

It’s a rare thing to have employees who are willing and safe enough to share candid negative reflections to help you grow. If you have that, it means you’re already a fantastic leader.

For everyone else, the best way to get feedback from your direct reports is by allowing them the space and confidentiality to provide anonymous feedback that is gathered and collated by a third party. (Like we do at Leader Growth Lab).

What feedback do you wish your people would be able to share with you?

17/04/2026

When was the last time you hired someone who “looked perfect” on paper but lived to regret it later?

There is a reason that hiring for skills alone isn’t ideal – you should hire for mindset too.

Want to know more about that? Find out at the blog -

Learn how attitudes at work influence employee behaviour, motivation, and performance. Discover why understanding values and attitudes helps leaders hire better, motivate teams, and build stronger workplace cultures.

15/04/2026

Hiring family and friends can be a recipe for disaster. In this video, Cat talks about how to make it work!

Hiring family or friends doesn’t have to end badly – but most people get one thing wrong.In this video, I share a very real, very current example of what hap...

12/04/2026

Wanna know why your quality tanked when you hired more people?

I’ve been there.
It’s easy to control quality outputs when it’s just you. When I was directly responsible for client work, I didn’t have to explain what I wanted to anyone else. I could tweak until my heart’s content. When it was only me, I could go above and beyond whenever I chose.

Then I hired other people.

The lesson I quickly resigned myself to, is that people don’t do things as well as I would… at least, not straight away. So my solution was to double check the work. Review before it went to the client. Finalise the proposal myself. But there’s only so much of me to go around. As we got bigger, and took on more work, I physically couldn’t be everywhere at once. I couldn’t check every single email or proposal or solution sent to clients.

It was frustrating that I couldn’t see everything, and I couldn’t help but be worried that we were not maintaining the high standards of quality that my clients had some to expect. I was disappointed that my staff weren’t as good as I thought they would be. And I didn’t know what to do, because I couldn’t clone myself!

But what I learned – eventually – is that the issue isn’t capability of my staff, or my own capacity. It’s that my standards for quality are still living in my head.

As founders of our own business, so much of what we do is instinctive. But once we grow, instinct isn’t enough. The shift is learning how to get what’s in our heads OUT, and make those standards visible — defining outcomes clearly, agreeing on what “great” means, and letting people own the result rather than controlling every step.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable at first. It feels like releasing control.
But when we get what’s in our head into the team — properly — quality standards become something the whole team can live up to.

Where can you communicate standards to your people?