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.

04/09/2026

BE MORE CONFIDENT

‘Be more confident’ is advice that’s offered (often, but not always) with good intentions but no real instructions, as if confidence were a switch you'd forgotten to turn on that morning.

Confidence doesn't work like that. You can't talk yourself into it. Telling yourself to feel capable does very little, because your brain wants evidence, not affirmations.

That evidence comes from two places.

The first is repeatedly doing the thing. Research still ranks mastery - the process of having actually done something and come out the other side - as the strongest source of belief in your own ability. Not watching (or hearing about) someone else do it, but actually doing it yourself, badly at first, then less badly.

The second is feedback . Honest, specific, from someone whose judgement you trust. It tells you what's working, so you do more of it, and what isn't, so you stop.

Confidence isn't a trait you were handed or denied. It's a by-product. You build it one repetition and one honest conversation at a time. It becomes easier to be more confident when you are surrounded by people who celebrate you doing the work and provide feedback when you need it most.

Managers - you need to understand that you can't pep-talk someone into belief. Telling someone to be more confident may just have the opposite effect.

You can only give them the practice, and tell them the truth about how they went.

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03/09/2026

THE HYBRID APPRENTICESHIP GAP

Nobody teaches the unwritten rules anymore and this has been made more difficult by hybrid working. They used to get absorbed near the photocopier, over a coffee while waiting for a meeting to start or a chance encounter in a corridor.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index , drawn from billions of Outlook and Teams interactions, found that remote workers spent 25% less time collaborating across groups than before the shift to hybrid work, and satisfaction with the quality of workplace connections has been falling year on year. Hybrid work hasn’t just thinned out the small talk, it’s thinned out the informal mentoring that used to travel alongside it.

The cost shows up months later. Technically capable new starters who never learn how decisions actually get made, then leave within eighteen months blaming a culture that nobody deliberately built for them.

The CIPD’s guidance on coaching and mentoring makes the case for building this back in deliberately, rather than hoping it reappears on its own. Structured relationships, not the accidental kind, are what now carry the knowledge that used to travel by osmosis.

If your inexperienced staff only ever see you in a scheduled one-to-one, they’re not being mentored, they’re being managed.

This is not a call to return to office full-time, it’s a call to build the accidental moments back in on purpose, because they won’t happen by accident anymore.

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02/09/2026

POST IT FOR ONE PERSON

An HR friend of mine told me recently that they'd shared something on LinkedIn and it ‘hardly got any likes’. They said it the way you'd report a mild illness.

I know the feeling. We've been trained to treat the little number as a verdict on the thing itself, and by extension on us. But the number counts how the reader chose to react, not the good you did - and those two things are rarely the same.

There are so many great culture stories out there and they all need to be shared so that others can be inspired by them.

So when you share a success - a project that you all nailed on time, a team habit that finally stuck, a mistake your team stopped making, or something you all learned - don’t see it as something that you’re posting for applause.

See it as a trail of breadcrumbs that you are leaving for that one person who needs to see your message at that precise moment. That's the real benefit of your post, and it has nothing to do with the ‘likes’, ‘loves’ or ‘applause’ counter underneath it.

The research is actually firmer on this than I expected. The World Happiness Report 2025 finds that giving does us the most good when it carries three things: a real connection, a free choice, and a clear sense that it helped someone.

Self-focused motives tend to blunt the reward that other-focused ones deliver. Share to be seen, and you feel less. Share to help one person, and you feel more.

So don’t worry about vanity metrics when sharing your successes or learnings, just get your post up for that one person that it might help.

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01/09/2026

PROJECT FAILURE ISN’T A TECHNICAL SKILLS PROBLEM

I’ve sat in more project post-mortems than I can count, and I can’t remember one where the team lacked the technical skills to deliver. What they lacked, almost every time, was safety in the culture to say so, before it was too late.

The Project Management Institute’s latest Pulse of the Profession research puts a number on what I’ve seen for a while now: 56% of the money spent on projects is at risk because of internal conflicts leading to ineffective communication. Not because the plan was wrong on day one (although I’ve seen that too), but because nobody corrected it once it started drifting.

Projects rarely fail in a single dramatic moment. They fail gradually, in plain sight, in the accumulation of small, unspoken, ‘this isn’t quite working’ moments that nobody felt able to raise in the team or steering committee meeting.

I once worked with a delivery team that missed a deadline that everyone I interviewed privately knew was unrealistic three months before it arrived. Not one status report said so. The project rating stayed ‘green’ until the week the client found out, because green was the only colour that felt safe to submit.

The uncomfortable part for project sponsors is that the fix isn’t a better tracking tool or a stricter change-control process. It’s asking, at every steering committee meeting, ‘what’s not going well, and who’s worried about something they haven’t said yet?’ – and then genuinely ‘rewarding’ the person who answers honestly.

Skills get projects started, yet it’s team culture that determines whether the truth reaches the person who could still do something about it. Train your project managers in risk registers all you like. Better still teach them how to build a project team where raising a risk doesn’t feel like a risk in itself.

That’s the skill nobody puts in the training budget, yet it’s the one that actually determines whether the project delivers, or not.

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31/08/2026

SWITCHING OFF TOGETHER

I've written before about muting your own notifications – from Outlook rules to Teams Torment . But willpower isn't a policy and teams still really struggle with their interrupting technology.

When Boston Consulting Group tested predictable, protected time off for their consultants, as a team practice, not an individual discipline it changed everything.

It started with one team and scaled to 900, across 30 countries and neither client service nor inter-departmental collaboration suffered (which is often the excuse people use for not doing it).

The lesson therefore isn’t ‘have the discipline to switch off your notifications’. It's ‘let’s build switching off into how our team operates’, with senior leaders modelling it first.

In return you’ll get time and your attention back.

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28/08/2026

THIGMOMORPHOGENESIS

Young trees that are staked and sheltered from wind grow tall, fast, then snap the first time a real storm hits. The ones left out in the elements to sway, develop thicker trunks and deeper roots. Botanists call this thigmomorphogenesis (pronounced thigmo-morfo-jen-e-sis).

We do the opposite with managers. We shield new ones from conflict, tough calls, budget pressure and then act surprised when the first real storm breaks them. We put the blame on their lack of resilience when the problem is that we’ve overprotected them or not provided them with the skills to withstand what they’ve been exposed to.

If you want strong managers, equip them with the skills , then expose them, early, on purpose.

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27/08/2026

THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW THEATRE

Once a year, organisations around the world perform a ritual that both sides know doesn’t work.

Research shows that just 14% of employees strongly agree their performance review inspires them to improve, and only 2% of Fortune 500 CHROs strongly agree their own performance management system does either.

Fewer than a quarter of employees think the process is even fair. If a medicine only worked for 14% of patients, we’d stop prescribing it. Yet, we keep running performance reviews anyway, because the ritual has become a theatre that organisations feel compelled to perform.

Twelve months of behaviour – good, bad, indifferent – gets compressed into a single rating, discussed once, then filed away until the same conversation next year.

Yet the rating often says more about recency bias than the full twelve months in review. Nobody remembers March by December, including the manager completing the (often overly complicated) form.

What actually works requires more courage and is harder to fit into a calendar invite. Feedback (positive and negative) close to the moment it’s earned, given often enough that the annual conversation becomes a summary rather than a surprise.

Employees who are regularly involved in setting their own goals and who are provided with regular feedback on how they’re tracking, are four times more likely to be engaged than those who aren’t.

None of this needs a new system or a longer form. It needs managers who can talk to their people about performance more than once a year, and organisations willing to admit the annual review was never really about development. It was about a process that made underperformance defensible in a tribunal.

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26/08/2026

PURPOSE STATEMENTS THAT NOBODY CAN RECITE

Ask anyone in your organisation to repeat your purpose statement back to you, unprompted, and watch what happens.

If they can’t – not word for word, but in spirit, at least – it isn’t really a purpose statement. It’s just something that somebody, somewhere created, that everyone else read about once in an email, then never again.

A purpose only earns its place once people can carry it into a decision without checking the website first.

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25/08/2026

AGENCY AND COMMUNION: THE BIG TWO

I talk a lot about the need for employee agency in culture definition - that ability to shape one’s own conditions, make one’s own calls, find one’s own place in the room. It’s crucially important. It contributes to our sense of purpose and helps us to bring our whole selves to work.

Employees in cultures without agency stop offering opinions (or are afraid to do so), stop taking risks, and stop caring whether the team or project succeeds because it was never really theirs to shape.

But agency on its own is a lonely (somewhat selfish) business and without communion, collaboration, innovation and ultimately success are almost impossible.

Psychologists have had a name for this pairing since the 1960s: the 'Big Two' - agency and communion. Agency is about mastery, separation, getting ahead. Communion is about connection, cooperation, getting on.

A culture built entirely on the first, without the second, doesn't produce confident individuals. It produces what researchers call ‘unmitigated agency’. That is, drive with no counterweight, and it produces exactly what you'd expect: transactional relationships, personal gain over collective welfare, selfish decision-making and cultures that good people leave because of the actions of a few.

We saw this play out at scale in recently published research. A study of over 200,000 earnings calls from 3,567 CEOs found that agency alone - ambition, assertiveness, competitiveness - had no measurable link to company performance. None.

What did predict outperformance was communion: language demonstrating relationship-building, collaboration, concern for the people around them.

CEOs who combined high agency with high communion beat everyone else. Those with high agency and low communion came last.

Communion isn't the ‘soft’ add-on to a hard-driving culture. It's the thing that stops agency curdling into something stagnant or combative.

None of this makes agency the problem. A workplace where nobody has a say, no autonomy, no room to grow is its own kind of miserable . Indeed the first quarter of my culture workshops is spent purely on agency.

But a workplace where everyone has plenty of say and no shared purpose is just a room full of people optimising for themselves. Communion is what turns ‘my place’ into ‘our place’. It's where individual growth gets pointed at something bigger than the individual. This is why three quarters of my culture workshops are dedicated to communion.

Agency gets people to the table. Communion is what they build once they're sitting there.

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24/08/2026

THE HIGH PERFORMING TOXIC STAR

Every organisation I’ve worked with has one: the person who hits every number and leaves a trail of resignations or disengagements in their wake.

Harvard Business School researchers tracked 50,000 employees across 11 companies and found that avoiding a toxic worker delivers nearly double the value of hiring a star performer. The toxic ones aren’t underperforming – they’re often faster than everyone else. Yet what I see time and again is that it’s the people around them who pay; peers of a toxic worker are 54% more likely to quit.

Protecting a toxic star isn’t a talent decision, it’s a culture one, and everyone watching already knows it.

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