Meredith Wilson

Taboo lives in every organisation.

The sacred cow nobody questions. The decision everyone works around. The feedback that stays in the carpark. Anthropologists study taboo as a window into what a culture most needs to protect, and most fears.

What is your team protecting?

July mentoring places are opening.

If this is the right time to bring an experienced executive in your corner, here is what the leaders who work with Meredith Wilson know about mentoring that works.

The leaders who get the most from it arrive at a specific point. The role is more complex than the one before. The stakes are higher. The decisions are less clear-cut. And the people around them, however capable, are not positioned to offer the kind of frank, lateral perspective that the moment actually calls for.

That is what good mentoring provides. A thinking partner with genuine operational experience. Someone who has navigated complexity at that level, who can ask the questions you are not yet asking yourself, and who can help you see what you are too close to see.

Meredith works with a small number of executives at any one time. Ten places, maximum. The conversations are one-on-one, tailored, and built around what matters most to you across the now and next.

A few July places are available now.

If your organisation is looking to allocate professional development investment before 30 June, current-year funding can secure a July start.

Choose your culture heroes carefully.

When I’m partnering with leaders shifting culture I’m looking for a hero.

A hero is a shift that reaches broadly, lands fast and is felt personally by a significant proportion of your people.

Maybe it’s an expense threshold that treats adults like adults? Or meetings that get cancelled and never comes back (1:1s when you’re busy?). Maybe it’s a team cap or shirt that says “you belong here”. Maybe it’s providing more choice in something you’re currently locking down.

These can be simple. Heroes just have to be real in a visible and felt way.

Proof the change is real. Evidence the culture is shifting.

When heroes land well, they cast a halo. People extend belief to the changes they can’t yet feel. That goodwill becomes your runway for the slower, harder work inevitable when shifting culture.

Hold out for the hero. Yes it’s symbolic change but that is it’s power. Overindex on the hero. Make it real. Make it work. Launch it early.

Sequencing is strategy.

Despite the craziness of the world, or maybe because of it, exploring China this year feels like exactly the right time to go. Seven days inside one of the most significant economic transformations of our time, with a small group of senior women who want to understand it firsthand. And culture. All the culture. Come and see it with me. September 12-18.
www.meredithwilson.com.au/china

This September, a small group of senior women leaders will spend one week inside the country that shapes more Australian board and executive decisions than almost anywhere else.

The Leading Women Delegation to China runs 12 to 18 September, in partnership with China Australia Trade and Investment Council - 中澳贸易投资商会.

Beijing. Shenzhen. Wuzhen. Shanghai. Four cities, one week.

Curated company visits. Executive briefings. Real conversations with peers working on trade, technology, supply chains and risk every day.

Alongside the itinerary, Dr Elizabeth King will offer optional sessions on developing a high-performance mind, drawn from her PhD research in the wisdom traditions, much of which has roots in Chinese philosophy.

A few places remain.

If you’re curious, the easiest next step is a conversation.

Newton called it 300 years ago. Momentum doesn’t sustain itself. Friction eventually wins. The leader’s job is to read the conditions: reduce friction where you want the shift to travel, and add it where old patterns are trying to reassert themselves.

Most leaders associate culture change with big visible action: a new strategy, a restructure, a values refresh, a transformation program. These feel proportionate to the size of the ambition. They are also, in most cases, the least effective lever available.

Events or interventions like these do inject momentum into the system and are valuable for the energy and focus they bring. The half life of these interventions is reduced by the initial inertia and daily friction the momentum come up against.

In practice, it’s a shift in everyday actions and leadership that people experience everyday will enact, embody and embed change.

What would the formula be of this shift? Perhaps:

Δc = M − F(t)

Change in culture equals momentum minus friction over time.

Most leaders can describe the culture they want. Far fewer can describe the culture they are currently leading. That gap is where most culture work should start.
It is almost never where the investment goes.

Culture reads the leader before it reads the strategy.

Something is happening in the middle layer of organisations that I'm not sure leadership teams have fully registered yet.

Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, released this week, shows global engagement fell to 20%. That number will get the headlines.

The more important number is what's happening to leaders (Gallup uses the term Managers)

Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. When the multiplier is degraded, the effect compounds across every team, every meeting, every conversation.

Culture = moments that matter x leader actions

This is a capacity problem. It belongs in the strategy conversation.

What's happening in your organisation to the people who set the cultural tone for everyone else? What's your plan to turn the ship around?