Colin D Ellis

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Colin D Ellis 5 x best-selling author, award-winning keynote speaker, culture consultant and podcaster.

I work with organisations around the world to help them build vibrant high-performance cultures of success. Colin D Ellis is a global workplace culture expert sought after by organisations around the world to help them build vibrant, high-performance cultures. He is the author of four best-selling books, including “Culture Fix: How to Create a Great Place to Work" and the award-winning “Project Book: The Complete Guide to Consistently Delivering Great Projects”. He is a regular speaker at conferences and events around the world, and has been featured in media outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Sky News and the BBC. His latest book, “Detox Your Culture: Deliver results, retain staff, and strengthen your organization's reputation” will be released in August 2024. Colin’s takes a highly successful and unique approach to culture building by teaching employees how to build and evolve it themselves. To date he has worked with almost 100 different cultures in almost 20 countries with clients ranging from Red Bull in Austria, to the US House of Representatives, the Dutch Olympic Team and IAG Insurance in Australia. Originally from the UK, Colin now travels globally to deliver his programs and speeches. He enjoys coffee, a single malt whisky and still allows his football team Everton to ruin his weekend.

20/10/2026

HONEST CONVERSATIONS COST LESS THAN YOU THINK

Whenever I start a new culture change initiative, regardless of where it is or who it’s with, I insist on finding out what employees actually think about where they work. My preference is always to do this face-to-face, for good reason.

In October 2024, HR analytics firm Visier surveyed 1,000 US employees and found that 47% often or occasionally feel pressured to withhold honest feedback when completing engagement surveys. It seems that the exercise built to collect the truth is not reliably getting it. Nearly half (44%) also say their manager would rate their emotional state differently from how they would themselves.

Part of the problem, I feel, is how we define honesty. Most of us take it to mean not lying. A 2023 review , covering nearly 170 empirical articles, treats it as a ‘…process with an intellectual side and a relational side’. The first involves looking for accurate information and updating (this is key, it can’t be built on past information) what we believe. The second involves communicating in a way that helps others understand what is true.

By that measure, a dodged question or a technically true but misleading statement (the ‘political answer’) falls short, even though neither is technically a lie. These behaviours carry serious costs for relationships and for organisations.

So why do we hold back? Largely I think, it’s because we expect honest conversations to go badly. In a series of experiments , one of which asked participants to be completely honest with everyone in their lives for three days, people overestimated the ‘costs’.

Honest conversations were more enjoyable for the speaker than predicted, and listeners reacted less negatively than expected. Unfortunately, as humans, we often focus on the immediate discomfort and overlook how useful the information could be. Yet people become more receptive when they can see that the speaker cares about them and wants to help.

The same pattern shows up in teams. In the 1990s, Amy Edmondson set out to test whether better-led hospital units made fewer medication errors. The units with the strongest leadership and relationships reported more errors . She concluded that people in those units felt safe enough to report them, an idea she later developed into her work on psychological safety. Nurses there described mistakes as ‘natural and normal to document’, while nurses in units that reported few errors described an unforgiving environment. A low error count tells a leader very little until they know whether people feel able to report.

The honest conversation most people are putting off will probably go better than they expect, particularly if the other person can see that it comes from care. Leaders who want to hear the truth can begin by being honest themselves and by showing what happens to it once it is raised.

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19/10/2026

10 EQ WORDS THAT WE USE TODAY

Language changes all the time. Words that I used during my early days of work are no longer used, in the same way that children's names evolve and change too.

Language is something to embrace and understand, rather than fear or yearn for the return of. Here are 10 words - linked to emotional intelligence - that I hear in the workplace today. What would you add to this list?

Humbition : Ambition with humility.

Candour : Saying the true thing, kindly.

Bonhomie : Easy warmth that puts people at ease.

Amity : Friendly relations that survive a disagreement. (Not a place famous for sharks! )

Fortitude : Emotional strength sustained over weeks and months.

Succour : Help offered unasked.

Clemency : Mercy where a mistake could have been punished.

Levity : Lightness that lifts a room without upsetting anyone.

Alacrity : Cheerful readiness to help.

Temperance : Restraint in the heat of the moment.

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16/10/2026

VOLUNTEERS WANTED

Every team has someone who needs to do administration. Usually the same someone is ‘volunteered’, and they are also the one who organises the leaving card or regular events to bring the team together.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne studied this in 2017. In mixed employee groups, women were about 44% more likely to be asked to volunteer for tasks like these, and nearly 50% more likely to say yes.

I like to think the best of people and I’m sure that nobody sets out to be unfair. However, it would be nice if this issue was recognised and that instead of waiting for the same person to be asked again, someone else volunteered instead.

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15/10/2026

QUESTION TIME

Prime Minister’s Questions is a regular event held in many parliaments around the world. UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Norway (amongst others) provide an opportunity for ministers to question the prime minister in public.

Its principal focus is to make accountability visible. The executive can't just announce decisions; it has to defend them live, to their opponents, mostly without a script.

For employees this ‘Ask me anything unscripted’ often only happens once a year at a staff conference and I think this is a huge opportunity missed for many CEOs.

To be fair, some have embraced regular ‘All Hands’ (or all employee) meetings at which they take questions, however, the few that I have attended this year have been staged with leaders knowing the questions in advance.

A quarterly question time with anonymous questions would be a great way for business leaders to not only regularly engage with their employees, but also to answer the questions that may be generating discussion where work is happening. These conversations - and the uncertainty that comes with them - often gets in the way of productive work.

Of course, this means that CEOs have to listen, prepare and then be confident in their answers. But then that’s what’s expected when you reach the top of the tree.

So front up, regularly, and take questions from the people doing the real work. If a prime minister can face the room every week, a CEO can manage four times a year.

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14/10/2026

COMBATTING LEADERS WHO STEAL

One of the things that used to irk me the most as an employee was seeing a leader repeat a colleague's idea back to the room and collect the nods and credit that the originator never got.

Everyone witnesses this behaviour, yet hardly anyone says anything (including me at the time), which is how it carries on.

Research found that employee anger and the sense of loss of having an idea stolen dropped significantly when a leader or colleague publicly named the original creator.

So in the absence of leadership attribution, the rest of us have a job to do. ‘It’s a great idea, I think Priya mentioned that last week’ is a four second intervention and will do nicely.

Do it often enough and people will start stealing the intervention instead.

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13/10/2026

5 WAYS TO LEAVE A GREAT LEGACY

Legacy tends to come up at leaving parties, usually when the card has been signed and the speeches are underway. This is too late to start thinking about what people will remember.

Most of it is built through everyday behaviour, so anyone can work on it at any time regardless of their seniority. Here are five ways to start the legacy-building process.

1. Aim at the people (not for a plaque)

Researchers Zacher and Bordia, writing in 2024 , describe the wish to be remembered as the more self-focused side of the wider desire to support the next generation. Teams seem to respond to the second. In a study by Zacher, Rosing, Henning and Frese , older leaders who cared about developing others were rated by their teams as more effective, and those teams were more satisfied and worked harder. Decide what you want people to do better because they worked with you, then tell them.

2. Hand over what you know early

A handover often covers the tasks to be completed and very little about how the work really gets done. One symposium linked legacy-building to the passing on of knowledge and the culture that surrounds it. That argues for documenting it well before the final month, while you are still around to answer questions.

3. Give people decisions of their own

Knowledge only helps if people are allowed to use it. Hand over real decisions and let people own the outcome. They are then able to ask questions whilst you’re still in the building.

4. Share the success as you go

Dame Stephanie Shirley founded Freelance Programmers in 1962 and gradually transferred shares to her staff while still running the company. She stepped down as chief executive in 1987 , and around 70 of her people became millionaires . The company was renamed more than once and was bought in 2007. What she gave her staff did not depend on the name surviving. Most of us have no shares to give, but we can share the wins when they happen instead of at the review.

5. Elevate others, not yourself

Say who did the work. Name the person whose idea it was, in the room where it matters and while they are there to hear it. Credit is free and still rationed in most organisations, and people remember who rationed it. A 2026 study of 489 older employees in China found that those whose efforts to share what they know go unrecognised or unsupported may become frustrated. Praise needs nothing but a sentence and the habit of saying it.

Finally, ask a few colleagues what they think you are leaving behind. Their answer is the one that counts, and there is still time to change it.

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12/10/2026

TWO MINUTE MOMENTS

Microsoft's own data puts the gap between workplace interruptions at about two minutes . It will come as no surprise that they are mostly emails and Teams/Slack messages, each one grabbing attention if only for a moment.

They may all be perfectly reasonable, however, put together they will increase stress and anxiety as the work seemingly piles up whilst the time to do it diminishes.

If you don’t feel like you can disable notifications , then another option would be to set aside a small amount of time throughout the day to ‘clear’ what you’ve been sent. Some leaders that I’ve worked with have excelled at this process and have now reduced their clearing process to two minutes.

They scan emails and messages and quickly determine whether they are for information or action. Actions get added to their list or else replied to (in short so as to prevent a time drain) immediately, before they move on with their day. Some are using AI to do this work for them.

This way they avoid the ever-expanding ‘unread’ notifications and always feel in control of the information they need and the action that’s required.

But mainly this process makes most notifications easy to ignore, knowing that they have two-minute moments set aside to address them throughout their day. It’s a great idea you can steal. One that requires a little discipline, but that makes a huge difference.

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09/10/2026

THE POST-MEETING MEETING

Every organisation these days has a minimum of two meetings. The one in the diary, and then the one required immediately afterwards to cover all of the things that should have been discussed in the first one.

If we taught everyone how to chair meetings, write agendas and then everyone had the discipline to stick to them, then maybe, just maybe, the post-meeting meeting nonsense could be avoided.

Download my new white paper ‘Making Culture Change Stick’ to find out more about how you can build, change or retain a great place to work at www.colindellis.com/culture-papers

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08/10/2026

THE CASE FOR TEAM GOALS

In the NBA , everyone wants the title. Yet researchers found that players pass less in playoff games , when the stakes are highest, and that selfish play was rewarded with more lucrative contracts. The team gets worse and the individual gets paid.

Business does the same thing with KPIs (key performance indicators). Everyone is assigned a personal number and everyone chases theirs, regardless of what it does to the colleague at the next desk.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are the better answer. The team agrees on one clear ambition and a few measures to show it is getting there.

Choose the measures with care. Outcomes, such as customers who stay or teams who would recommend working here, change behaviour for the better. Activity, such as workshops delivered, just keeps people busy.

Involve the team in setting them. People who help set a target are more likely to own it, and participative goal setting keeps outperforming the assigned kind . A missed stretch target should prompt curiosity, not a search for someone to blame.

So before the next planning session, put one question to every measure on the list: if we hit this perfectly and it made things worse, would we notice?

If not, change the measure.

Download my new white paper ‘Making Culture Change Stick’ to find out more about how you can build, change or retain a great place to work at www.colindellis.com/culture-papers

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07/10/2026

PICK A DESTINATION

Whatever you think of (new British PM) Andy Burnham's politics, his conference speech last week did something many business leaders still avoid. It told people where he wants to go.

He promised a ‘new social contract for the 21st century’ and admitted that the country's finances make delivery a risk. Ambitious, yet honest about the constraints. That is what makes a vision believable, and a vision nobody believes is just a decoration that drains engagement, energy and productivity.

I say this to CEOs all the time. Engagement starts when people know what they are working towards. Without a destination, staff invent their own, and a hundred private visions make for a very slow train. A clear vision answers the question every employee asks every morning: what is all this for?

Then comes the unglamorous part. Build a strategy to get there. Make sure the people around you prioritise the work that serves it, even when something shinier arrives. Especially then. Colleagues can argue about the route all day. The destination has to be settled.

A vision that never influences a decision is a poster. Possibly a nicely designed one, but a poster all the same.

Where are you heading, and would your team give the same answer?

Download my new white paper ‘Making Culture Change Stick’ to find out more about how you can build, change or retain a great place to work at www.colindellis.com/culture-papers

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