Colin D Ellis

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 Bo

ok: 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.

19/06/2026

MILLICAN'S LAW

Comedians are a constant source of inspiration for me. They are dedicated to their craft, work hard to provide enjoyment, are continually in touch with today’s world (well, most of them), are prepared to push the envelope and keep working hard even when something doesn’t land as they hoped.

I have a roll-call of people that I follow and one of them is Sarah Millican, a comedian from the North-East of England.

At one gig she talked about her rule or Millican’s law as she calls it , which for me, can apply to our working lives too. It’s as follows:

If you’ve done something well, succeeded or else want to brag about an achievement (hey, we’re only human), then you can do so, but only until 11am the next day

Similarly:

If something hasn’t gone your way, you want to have a good old moan about it or else want to blame the world for your current circumstance, then again, you can do so, but only until 11am the next day

After 11am, you have to draw a line under it and move on. Not only will your energy and mindset thank you for it, your colleagues will too!

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18/06/2026

ASKING THE QUESTIONS YOU STOPPED ASKING

Most organisational structures are built on the assumption that wisdom travels downwards. Senior to junior. Experience to inexperience.

When done well - through on the job coaching - this model provides junior members of staff with critical business lessons that they can copy or avoid in the future. And yet, it often seems to ignore the fact that senior members of staff often don’t know enough about the world today .

Reverse mentoring - where junior employees mentor senior leaders - isn't a quirky HR experiment. It's an admission that the world has changed faster than most leadership teams and boardrooms have noticed (or are prepared to acknowledge).

Yet, in my experience, the newest person in the room often sees what everyone else has stopped seeing and these insights can be invaluable to leaders.

When new employees are relatively fresh and not yet swayed by the current cultural norms, then leaders would do well to ask for their input to current issues or opportunities for improvement.

Better still, do what a CEO I worked with three years back did. When he asked me what he could do to stay in touch with the current zeitgeist or what it felt like to be a younger member of staff, I told him to create a ‘Fresh Eyes Board’ made up of diverse younger and less experienced employees.

We created a terms of reference focused on continual cultural (and brand) evolution and put out an expression of interest. To his surprise, it was massively oversubscribed.

It has been running ever since and has raised issues related to time wastage, changing attitudes, communication preferences and ethics as well as becoming an early warning signal for behaviours deemed to be out of step with company values for the world we live in today.

Being more experienced doesn’t mean that you have all the answers. It just means that you have learned to live with the questions you've stopped asking.

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17/06/2026

NO-ONE AND EVERYONE

The best teams that I work with hold this one truth; ‘We are stronger together than we are apart and no-one is successful until we’re all successful’.

That’s not to say that individual endeavours aren’t required or that, when achieved, they are not celebrated. It’s just an acceptance that everyone’s input is required in equal measures, in order to achieve success.

When the team has this mindset, they find it easier to have courageous conversations, will switch priorities seamlessly in times of crisis and will continually look for ways to help each other to avoid mental or physical stress.

And when those things occur regularly then everyone wins, individually and collectively.

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16/06/2026

THE IMPORTANCE OF ORIGIN STORIES

Last week I made scouse (pronounced like house ) for dinner.

Whilst I was making it, my son (as all children like to do when they’re thinking with their stomachs) asked me what I was making. So, like my parents once did with me, I bored told him the origin story of the dish.

Originally called lobscouse (from the Welsh lobsgows) it is a dish linked primarily with sailors who would throw every bit of vegetable and leftover scraps of meat (typically beef and lamb) that they had, into a pot and cook it up.

You would probably call this a stew, but in Liverpool we call it scouse. Liverpool became synonymous with the dish not only because of its sailing and port heritage, but also because of its ability to grow potatoes (the predominant ingredient).

When Liverpool fell on hard times, we would make ‘blind scouse’, that is, vegetables without the meat and serve it with bread instead. A tradition that has remained since.

Mum would usually make it for us on a Monday with the leftovers from Sunday lunch and it was one of my favourite dishes of the week. In fact, in Liverpool, 28th February is still Global Scouse Day (a great time to visit the city!)

To this day, Liverpudlians are called ‘Scousers’ thanks to our penchant for this dish.

Origin stories are something that I use in my leadership workshops and they are one of the most effective ways of bonding people together. They activate powerful neurochemicals - cortisol during moments of tension and oxytocin during connection - which create the biological conditions for empathy and trust.

Yet, too often, organisations throw people together (usually based on their expertise) and expect them to find some way of working together that produces the results that we’re looking for. Some organisations spend tens of thousands on team-building workshops and never achieve this.

I’m always clear that the exercise is not an oral biography. We don’t want someone standing up for 20 minutes talking about the time that they cut their finger open on a tin (this actually happened).

Instead, it’s about providing enough information to be able to see, hear and appreciate them as a human being first. Who they are, based on where they are from, what they have experienced and what their aspirations for the future are.

It doesn’t matter if you are 18 or 80, everyone has a story to tell. A little bit of knowledge about each other can not only create unbreakable bonds, but it can also bridge the age/gender/experience/personality divisions that inevitably raise their ugly heads during times of stress, when we forget we are just humans trying to do the best job that we can, in the environment we work in.

Social cohesion - the glue that holds teams together - tends to arise from exercises such as these. Without this, you may just be left with a group of technically competent strangers who know each other’s names, but not what their Mum’s made for dinner.

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15/06/2026

ACCOUNTABILITY FOR CHANGE

The organisations that I work with that truly transform (there are some good case studies here - bit.ly/cde-casestudies ) are the ones that hold themselves to the commitments that they made.

Every single one of my culture workshops ends with a written list of promises that team members make to each other. If you don't write your promises down, you don't really mean it and the workshop just ends up being a fun couple of days away from the office.

Those promises come with accountability partners, and a meeting within the first month. Not six months, not "whenever", one month.

And what I've noticed is that the difference between organisations and teams that change rapidly and those that change gradually has nothing to do with the scale of their ambition. It's entirely about the courage they have to follow through on what they said they'd do for each other.

Without team accountability, change will always be optional.

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12/06/2026

ONE RULE FOR THEM

In some organisations - and yours may be one of them - there are two sets of rules. One for everyone, and one for the people who've quietly decided the first set doesn't apply to them.

It’s not just leaders vs. staff. Often it’s experienced vs. not-as-experienced, males vs. females, consultants vs. permanent employees and so on.

It’s a behavioural double standard and it’s one of the most corrosive forces in workplace culture.

I often say that it's not the absence of values that destroys trust. It's the selective application of them.

Professor Tony Simons at Cornell University has spent decades researching what he calls behavioural integrity - the alignment between what leaders say and what they do. His findings are consistent. When that alignment breaks down at the top, people below don't just notice. They adapt to what they observe.

The rules you choose to enforce tell people far more about your culture than the values you espouse.

If your organisation holds people accountable for their behaviour, that has to mean everyone. Seniority, experience or gender is not an exemption clause. If the standards bend for some, everyone else will eventually conclude, rationally, that standards are optional.

Leaders need to fix this double standard before it ruins the culture for everyone else.

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11/06/2026

THE ORGANISATION THAT NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

When we talk about legacy, we almost always talk about people. The leader who changed everything, the manager who believed in you when nobody else did or the colleague who made Monday mornings bearable.

We (and I include myself in this ) rarely talk about the organisations themselves.

Yet the culture an organisation chooses to build - the way it treats its people, the values it actually lives - outlasts any individual within it. It becomes the thing people carry with them long after they've left. It’s the thing they talk about and the thing they try to recreate (or avoid) when they leave.

Patagonia is the obvious example, and it's obvious for a reason. Founder Yvon Chouinard built a company where employees were trusted with autonomy and where purpose wasn't just a statement on the website, it was the very reason the business existed at all. When the waves were good, people were encouraged to surf . When the work needed to be done, people stayed to do it.

This wasn’t a mandated leadership edict, it was a legacy that the organisation had built. And that legacy is not just a performance enabler, it’s a magnet for high-potential people too.

Most organisations won't be like Patagonia. Nobody is talking or eulogising about them. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t get to choose the culture that gets left behind. It’s inherent in the people that passed through and the ones are still there.

The cultural experience people have is the legacy - good or bad.

The question isn't who'll remember you, it's what you build for them to remember.

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10/06/2026

BLAME IS A THIEF

NASA discovered this the hard way after the Columbia disaster. Their post-incident investigation didn't point to a single technical failure.

Instead it pointed to a culture in which people had learned not to raise concerns. Warnings were issued, yet they'd been dismissed.

When something goes wrong, the first question a blame culture asks is ‘who?’ and in doing so, it permanently prevents the more useful question, which is ‘why?’

Research has consistently demonstrated that teams in psychologically safe environments - where failure is treated as data to be learned from, rather than evidence of guilt - significantly outperform those where it isn't.

Interestingly, the fear of being blamed doesn't make people more careful. It makes them more careful about being caught.

The damage it causes runs deeper than morale. A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that blame-oriented cultures increase employee disengagement, reduce information sharing, and stifles the collaboration and innovation that most organisations claim to want.

And yet, when something fails, some still look to the point the finger.

If you want a culture that learns, grows and improves you need to make it OK to be wrong every now and then. Blame will steal that from you.

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09/06/2026

THE 5 BEHAVIOURS REQUIRED FOR AI ADOPTION

According to the RAND corporation , organisations spent approximately $685bn on AI initiatives in 2025 and found that 80% failed to realise the expected value from them.

Microsoft meanwhile found that the single biggest predictor of AI adoption isn't the technology itself, it's manager role-modelling and whether the culture has the collective behaviours to get the most from it.

As someone who helps organisations to build 'AI-ready' cultures, here are five key behaviours from my work to help you realise value from your own AI investment:

Curiosity over compliance

PwC found that organisations leading on AI adoption fostered curiosity, experimentation and exploration - a culture decision not a procurement one. Meanwhile, research from Manpower Group shows nearly two-thirds of workers report burnout from stress and heavy workloads. Burnt-out people don't experiment - they just try to survive. Leaders who want curious teams have to stop filling every hour of the working week and wondering why nobody is innovating.

Psychological safety

Research from Henley Business School found 61% of workers feel overwhelmed by AI's development, with nearly a quarter saying their employer isn't providing enough support. A Culture Amp study found 29% admit using AI without telling their manager. Whilst MIT Sloan found managers who lead by example are 3.4x as likely to boost regular AI use in their teams. The most powerful thing a leader can say right now is: 'I'm still figuring this out too.'

Continuous learning as identity, not event

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report estimates 59% of workers will need soft skills training by 2030. Yet employers spent $103bn on training in 2025, with only 27% going towards soft skills. The fastest-adapting organisations won't necessarily have the biggest budgets - they'll have learning embedded in daily behaviour, not bolted on as a ‘technology learning event’.

A willingness to let go

Many people have spent years developing skills that AI now does faster. The WEF notes nearly 40% of existing job skills will change (though there's plenty of argument around this), with AI literacy and adaptive thinking replacing routine tasks. Those who transition well are the ones prepared to let go of what they do now and grab onto what's new.

Collaboration across boundaries

The most common AI challenge is cultural silos - inconsistent experiences and the same problems solved separately, repeatedly. MIT Sloan highlights that embedding ‘business translators’ - between teams - drives better AI adoption. Reorganisations don't fix silos; they redraw them . What's required is a willingness to share information, failure, credit and uncertainty across org chart boundaries.

The data is unequivocal, cultural readiness is the critical factor in how organisations respond to AI; and it’s not just about individual behaviour. It’s collective.

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08/06/2026

CURIOSITY IS A LEADERSHIP CHOICE

Organisations often talk about curiosity as though it's a personality choice that employees either make or don’t. Yet, in my experience, it’s not as simple as that.

Most people that I speak to, would love to question existing ways of working or have the time to investigate new ones. However, their leaders quietly discourage the former and never provide capacity for the latter.

It will come as no surprise that the organisational cultures where creativity and innovation thrive are the ones whose leaders role model what that looks like.

Research published in 2025 found that when leaders actively display curiosity, it directly improves employees' creative performance and sense of belonging. This leads to greater engagement and enhanced results.

The leaders and managers of these organisations aren’t silencing those that question or frowning upon time spent solutioning new ideas. They recognise that for performance to thrive, the status quo needs to be continually questioned to ensure that the organisation stays ahead of the competition or improves its service performance.

Curiosity isn’t a personality choice, it’s a leadership choice and one that directly influences the culture.

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