For leadership teams

You've grown, your structure changed, but the way you work didn't.

After a big change or a fast stretch of growth, your leadership team ends up running on ways of working that no longer fit, and were never really designed in the first place. I work with your leaders to design and codify how you actually work, together in the room and one-to-one, so your culture compounds as you scale instead of slowly falling apart.

Book a call → Scoped around your business, your leadership team and the way you actually run.
Alicia running a session with a leadership team

Join companies designing a better future for their people

15+ years and a track record across 100+ startups, scaleups and FTSE 100s.

Client logos including GB Bank, Attest, Trint, Contentsquare, Hotjar, Cognition, Ophelos, Finverity, Sustainable Energy First, LSE and Imperial Enterprise Lab
The problem

Growth was supposed to feel like winning. Mostly it feels like hanging on for dear life.

You've added people, clients, layers. And somewhere amongst that growth, all the things that used to be easy got hard and frustrating:

None of that means you hired the wrong people. It just means the way you work, your operating system, was built for a smaller, simpler version of your business and was never redesigned for the one you've become.

Because your culture is the actual way work gets done, not values on the wall or pizza Fridays. And right now it's nobody's job to design it, so it's just making everyone slower.

What we're fixing

Your operating system, in four parts.

Culture is just the sum of how well the everyday jobs of working together actually get done. These are the four that matter most. Some teams work through all four together. Others take one, get it properly embedded, and come back for the next. We decide that based on where you're straining and what your business can absorb.

How we connect

Communication · meetings · information flow · shared direction

So everyone's genuinely heading the same way, because they know where you're going and why, not just busy in parallel.

How we own

Decision rights · accountability · guardrails for change

So decisions get made at the right level and stop bottlenecking at the top, and everyone knows what they can run with, so you keep making progress.

How we grow

Expectations · feedback · development

So people know what "great" looks like, how to get there, and how to give feedback that course-corrects. Your culture holds its shape as you keep hiring.

How we adapt

Experimentation · rituals · change

So the team keeps moving through change, trying new things and exploring new opportunities instead of seizing up exactly when it needs to move.

Together, they're what separates companies that compound from companies that just cope.

The cost of standing still

Left undesigned, this is already costing you.

It rarely shows up as a single line on a P&L, so it's easy to miss. But it's real money, leaking out of the business every quarter you leave it.

Attrition
Up to 2x salary

What it costs to replace one senior leader who checks out or leaves, once you add recruitment, handover and the months of lost momentum behind them.

Slow decisions
Weeks lost

On decisions that stall, get re-opened, or route back to one person, while competitors who decide cleanly keep moving.

Wasted meetings
~2 days a week

Of senior time in meetings that could have been a decision or a message. Multiply that across your leadership team's salaries.

Misalignment
Compounding

Every new hire onto a culture nobody's defined makes it harder to fix later. Left alone, it doesn't hold steady, it gets worse.

How it works

A senior partnership with your leadership team, built to fit your business.

I work directly with your leadership team to rebuild how they actually operate together: how they connect, how they own decisions, how they grow their people, and how they adapt when things change.

I've done this inside more than 100 startups, scaleups and FTSE 100s, which means I'm not learning your problem from scratch. I've seen the shape of it before, so the diagnosis takes a session rather than a quarter. And I do the work with you, not just advise on it, which is usually the real reason this never gets done: not that nobody knows it's broken, but that nobody has the capacity to fix it.

The method is consistent. The shape is not. How much we take on, how deep we go and how we sequence it is designed around your size, your leadership team, your commercial pressures and the cadence your business already runs to. A fifteen-person business mid-restructure needs something very different from a two-hundred-person group integrating an acquisition.

Three ways it tends to take shape

One focus

Solve the most pressing problem first

Start where it's hurting most, usually how decisions get owned, and design that part end to end with your leaders. The fastest way in when one thing is clearly the bottleneck.

In stages

One behavioural change at a time, in order of impact

We sequence the work by what shifts the needle most, embedding each change properly before starting the next, so it lands alongside the day job rather than competing with it.

Full build

The whole operating system

All four parts, group sessions and 1:1 coaching for every leader, codified and handed over. For teams going through real structural change.

We work out which of these fits on the first call, before anyone talks about scope or budget.

The working rhythm

Learn → Design → Apply → Review ↻ repeating at a cadence that fits your business
FirstScope it to you

Before anything starts, we work out what you actually need: how many parts of the operating system, how deep, over what period, and at what session rhythm. Sized to your leadership team, your commercial pressures and what your business can realistically absorb without grinding to a halt.

StartDiagnose together

We map how your company actually works right now: where decisions stall, where the culture's thinning, what only ever lived in someone's head. We also look at what's already working, and what we can build on. Your leaders see the same picture, often for the first time.

ThenOne part at a time

Working sessions at an agreed cadence, one principle per focus: connect, own, grow, adapt, in the order your business needs them. Each session I bring the approach and the frameworks; your team co-designs your version of it, for your real challenges; and you apply it live in the business between sessions, with my async advice.

Alongside1:1 coaching for every leader

Each leader also gets regular one-to-ones with me, to embed the decisions in their own patch and unpick the individual pain points the group sessions don't reach. It's where the shared design becomes personal, and where the change actually sticks for each person.

ThroughoutBuilt at every layer

We design each part through behaviour, system and technology, so new ways of working actually embed instead of fading by Friday.

EndCodify and own it

You come out with your operating system documented and communicated: your ways of working, your decision rights, your rituals, made explicit, shared and genuinely used. Plus the capability and toolkit to keep evolving it as you grow.

Your team stays in the driving seat throughout. They learn to run this, so it's a capability your business owns, not a dependency on me, and not another costly change consultant you're paying again next year.

Book a call →
Designed to stick

Built at every layer.

Most culture or change work might move how people feel for a workshop or a week, then fades, because it never reaches the systems underneath. Over 15+ years helping companies through change, I've learned it only holds when you design it at every layer. So every part of your operating system runs through three, in order.

Layer 1 · Behavioural
How people actually act, day to day, when they decide, give feedback and communicate.
Layer 2 · System
The rituals, charters and frameworks that make those behaviours repeatable across the business.
Layer 3 · Technology
The tools, AI included, chosen to serve the first two layers, where they genuinely earn their keep.

Work through them in order and it actually changes things, because it's built into how you operate and show up every day, not bolted on top and hoped for. It's also why, when AI or the next big change lands, your team is already built to absorb it rather than be thrown by it.

Proof

I've done this many times, for leadership teams navigating exactly this.

Alicia Grimes

Alicia Grimes

Founder, The Future Kind

With over 15 years of design, strategy and global company launches up my sizeable sleeves, I love designing powerful people experiences. From building human-centred design capabilities and developing international company cultures, I've gained insights from 100+ startups, scaleups and FTSE 100s.

Namedrop? I would never. But while you're here I've led projects with Heidi, Design Council UK, Attest, Contentsquare, Gorilla, Ophelos, Finverity, Sustainable Energy First and Trint, to name but a few.

I'm not from an HR background, which is exactly why leaders bring me in: I get the commercial reality and the human side. I started The Future Kind to put that capability into teams, rather than keep it locked in a consultant.

Find me on LinkedIn where I talk about culture, startups, and practical tools and frameworks for creating (much better) companies.

Cognition125 people · 8 months

One culture, three companies, three continents.

When three companies merged across the UK, the Americas and five countries, the new leadership team needed one intentional culture, fast. We aligned the leaders with shared rituals for how they communicate, collaborate and decide, designed a clear structure with roles and culture built into their OKRs, and codified the end-to-end employee experience. They came out with one cohesive, scalable culture, now upheld by the Culture Champion community we helped them build.

"The Future Kind supported us through one of the biggest changes in our company's history. They aligned ambitions within our leadership team and developed a people-first, high-performing, international culture. The commitment to 'building the plane whilst flying it' perfectly suited our fast-paced environment."Katie Swannell-Gibbs, UK CEO
GB Bank40 people · 4 months

Culture turned from a feeling into a system.

A fast-growing challenger bank needed to turn its founding culture into replicable behaviours, rituals and systems it could scale nationwide. We redefined authentic values top-down and bottom-up, mapped the employee experience into a living culture strategy, and built the systems that put values into everyday decisions: hiring, partnerships, policy. Culture went from too vague to scale to a measurable strategic lever, with a roadmap to stay aligned as they grow.

"The Future Kind helped us turn our culture from a shared feeling into something tangible that runs through every part of the business. They helped us identify our most authentic values and the measurable behaviours that underpin them. It will be an enduring linchpin for how our culture evolves."Jenna Baker, Chief People Officer
Launch30 people · 3 months

A loved culture, made concrete and scalable.

This performance agency already had a culture people loved, and they wanted it defined, actionable and ready to scale. We got the whole team shaping new values and turning them into real behaviours and ways of working, co-designing a blueprint for their next chapter. The team now uses their values daily, with clients and each other.

"I didn't realise we'd come out with a semi-populated blueprint for our future. The detail that's gone into this has far surpassed what I imagined. If we put everything into action, we'll be unstoppable."Jaye Cowle, Founder + CEO
The return

What you actually get back.

Every penny is a real, considered investment right now. So here's the return, in hard terms, and what you walk away holding.

You keep the people you can't afford to lose

The culture that attracted your best people is designed to hold as you scale, and retention is about the cheapest growth there is.

Decisions get made faster, at the right level

With ownership finally explicit, work stops bottlenecking at the top, and your most expensive people stop spending their week unblocking everyone else.

Your leadership team pulls the same way

A shared language and shared standards mean you stop re-litigating the same debates and leaking time to misalignment.

You grow without the chaos multiplying

More people, more clients, more work, all held together by a way of working built for the size you are now, so scaling makes you stronger, not messier.

Change actually lands

New ways of working embed instead of fading, so you stop paying, in time and money, for initiatives that don't stick.

It's a capability you own, not one you rent

The frameworks and toolkit stay with your team, so the return keeps compounding after we finish. No consultant on retainer.

In practical terms, you finish holding:
  • How you work, written down in plain language and genuinely used, not filed
  • Clear decision rights, so everyone knows what they can run with
  • Meetings and rituals that earn their place in the diary
  • A shared language your leaders hold each other to
  • The frameworks and toolkit to keep evolving it without me
Why this works

You don't need another person in the room. You need what 100+ businesses already learned, applied inside yours.

Most leadership development hands you an associate and a pre-built course: the same slides, the same modules, the same fixed number of weeks, delivered the same way to every company that buys it. It's fine. It rarely changes anything, because it was never designed for your business.

This is the opposite. You get the pattern recognition from 100+ startups, scaleups and FTSE 100s, pointed directly at what's slowing your team down, plus someone with the capacity to actually do the work alongside you.

Next steps

Design how you work, before it designs chaos.