Melius Solutions

17/09/2026

Turnover across Australia has fallen to 13.5% - the lowest in three years. ABS job mobility is down to 7.2%.
Two people on your team stayed this year.

One stayed because the work is good, the crew is good, and they can see where they're going.

The other stayed because of a mortgage, and a market that got harder to move in.

On your turnover report, they look identical.

That's the limit of a lagging indicator. It tells you who's still here. It can't tell you why - and it can't tell you what it would take to keep the first one, or re-recruit the second.

As AHRI's Sarah McCann-Bartlett put it: "stability is not the same as job satisfaction."

The awkward part is that a low-turnover year is exactly when the pressure to look closely is lowest. Nothing is visibly broken. The number is good. So the conversation that would surface the difference between those two people doesn't happen.

Which makes now the cheapest time to have it.

If your turnover dropped this year - what else are you looking at to tell you whether that's actually good news?

16/09/2026

Gallup asked managers worldwide a simple question: Have you had the training you need to do this job?

Fewer than half said yes.

That number doesn't surprise me. Most of the leaders I work with were promoted because they were good at the work. Nobody sat them down afterwards and explained that the job had changed - that they'd stopped being paid for what they produce and started being paid for what other people produce.

So they pick it up as they go. Some get good at it. Most are quietly making it up and carrying more stress than they let on.

Two days won't undo that. What it will do is give someone language for what they're already doing, a few tools that hold up when the conversation gets hard, and the fairly useful discovery that the parts they find difficult are the parts everyone finds difficult.

Leadership Essentials runs 23–24 September in Townsville. Two days, six outcomes, and a room of people in the same position.

If you've got someone leading a team who's never been taught how, this is a reasonable place to start.

Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2025

14/09/2026

Call her Alex.

She's not one person. She's the version of about thirty people I've worked with over the years, and if you've ever been promoted for being good at the job, you already know how the story starts.

Alex was the best in the team at the actual work. So she got the team.

Six weeks in, nobody has told her whether she's any good at it.

She isn't struggling in a way anyone would notice. The work is going out. She's across the roster. She turns up early, stays late, and the reports get done.

But there's a conversation she hasn't had. One person's work has slipped, everyone can see it, and Alex has rehearsed the conversation in the car three times without ever having it. She doesn't know how to open it without it going badly. So she waits.

And every week she waits, the conversation gets more expensive - and a little of her authority leaks away, because the rest of the team can see she isn't dealing with it either.

That's the part that surprises people. It's rarely a motivation problem. It's rarely that the leader doesn't care. It's that nobody has ever told them what the first thirty seconds of that conversation should sound like, and nobody has told them what good looks like in the role. They're marking their own work with no answer sheet.

You can be a decent person, work hard, care about your team, and still have no idea whether you're doing this well.

There's a second version of this that gets written about even less. People who have been leading for four or five years and have never had a day of formal development. They've built something that works, out of instinct and hard experience. They're not after a personality transplant. They want to find out which of their instincts are sound, and to have a name and a method for the things they've been doing on feel.

Those two people have more in common than either would guess, and they usually end up in the same room.

The next one I'm running is 23–24 September, in Townsville. Two days, called Leadership Essentials.

Details in the comments.

09/09/2026

Here's what you actually get.

Not "increased leadership capability." Not "enhanced communication skills." Those aren't things you get. They're things brochures say.

You get six behaviours you can run on the Monday, and a tool for each one that makes it repeatable:

1️⃣ A way to find out what you're actually like to work for, instead of guessing.
2️⃣ A circuit breaker for the moment you're about to react badly.
3️⃣ A ten-minute habit that changes how your team reads you.
4️⃣ A conversation that tells you what genuinely motivates each person - rarely what you'd assume.
5️⃣ A method for turning an unwritten rule into a stated expectation.
6️⃣ A planner for the conversation you've been avoiding, and the technique that keeps it from going sideways.

That's the design principle behind the whole program. Two days on its own is nothing. What matters is what's still working three weeks later, and that only happens if you walk out with something in your hands rather than something in your notes.

Leadership Essentials - 23 and 24 September, Townsville CBD.
Details https://meliussolutions.com.au/leadership-essentials-sep/

02/09/2026

Sixty seconds on why I like this one.

It's built for those who have recently transitioned into leadership and those who have been leading on instinct. Tools, tips, and practical know-how you can apply the next day.

Townsville, 23rd–24th September.

02/09/2026

The obligation has the wrong word in it
Every state and territory now has enforceable duties to identify and control psychosocial hazards. In most organisations, that work has landed with whoever owns wellbeing, and the response has been resilience training, EAP promotion, and mental health first aid.

That routing is entirely logical. The obligation includes the word psychological.

But read the seventeen recognised hazards, and they describe something else. Job demands. Role clarity. Change management. Conflict nobody owns. They are job design questions wearing a health label.

Which means the duty has been assigned to the part of the organisation with the least authority over the controls. A wellbeing lead cannot rewrite a role, resequence a change, or resolve who decides. They can only support the person absorbing the consequences.

It isn't that the wrong people are doing the work. It's that the work was sorted into the wrong pile.

16/08/2026

A team member walks into your office and closes the door.
“I’m struggling.”
Not with their performance.
Not with their capability.
With everything else.

They’re overwhelmed. There’s a lot happening outside of work. They’re not sleeping well, and they’re starting to wonder whether they can keep doing this.

You care about them, but you’re also their leader.
The work still needs to get done. The rest of the team is carrying extra load. And you’re conscious that what you say next matters.

This is a difficult conversation.

And it’s one of the reasons we believe difficult conversations are about far more than managing poor performance.

Leaders are increasingly navigating conversations about workload, wellbeing, behaviour, conflict, change, expectations, personal circumstances and competing needs.

Conversations where there isn’t always a neat script or an obvious answer.
The capability is knowing how to stay human while still being clear.
How to listen without taking responsibility for fixing everything.
How to show empathy without avoiding what needs to be said.
And how to move a conversation forward when you don’t know exactly where it will go.

That’s what we practise in our Mastering Difficult Conversations Workshop.

Not perfect scripts.

Real conversations, real scenarios and practical tools leaders can take straight back into the workplace.

And with professional actors bringing those conversations to life, participants get to see what happens when the conversation changes in the moment - because real conversations rarely follow the script.

📍 52 Walker Street, Townsville CBD
📅 27th August
🔗

JOIN US FOR A POWERFUL WORKSHOP THAT WILL TEACH YOU HOW TO MASTER DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS

09/08/2026

Most people have the same reaction when they hear the words role play...

"Please don't make me do it." 😬

We get it.

That's why we do things differently.

Instead of awkward role plays, we bring in professional actors to demonstrate real workplace conversations. Not scripted. Not rehearsed. Realistic.

Whether it's giving difficult feedback, managing performance, navigating conflict or responding in the moment, our actors can step into the exact situations your team is facing and demonstrate practical approaches live.

Participants get to pause the conversation, ask questions, explore different responses and see what works - without the pressure of being put on the spot.

It's one of the things clients consistently tell us makes our workshops memorable, engaging and immediately applicable.

Because learning difficult conversations shouldn't feel awkward, it should feel useful.

For more details on our next Mastering Difficult Conversations workshop https://meliussolutions.com.au/mastering-difficult-conversation-aug/

03/08/2026

Real conversations. Real learning. Real impact.

Sherren recently delivered our Mastering Difficult Conversations workshop in Townsville, bringing the learning to life with the support of a talented local actor. Participants didn't just talk about challenging conversations; they could see them unfold, feel the dynamics at work, and experience practical strategies in a realistic setting.

The feedback was incredible, with attendees walking away feeling more confident and better equipped to tackle tough conversations in the workplace.

We're excited to be running this workshop again in August and would love to see you there.

👉 Secure your spot via our website today.

JOIN US FOR A POWERFUL WORKSHOP THAT WILL TEACH YOU HOW TO MASTER DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS

27/07/2026

A great morning on Friday with an enthusiastic group of female leaders.