Ahead of our upcoming webinar, Beyond Behaviour Management, Nadia Knight spoke with Louise Mortimer, Founder of Academy HR, about the changing nature of leadership, the growing importance of resilience, and why a more human-centred approach is needed to tackle today’s people challenges.
Drawing on her experience as a senior HR leader and creator of the S.P.A.C.E Professional Resilience Model, Louise shares her perspective on the realities facing HR and people leaders, where organisations often struggle to turn intent into action, and how leaders can better support both individual and organisational resilience.
In this interview, she explores the challenges shaping the modern workplace and explains why understanding the drivers behind behaviour could be the key to building stronger cultures, more effective leadership and sustainable performance.
You’ve stepped out of a substantive HRD role to build Academy HR. What did you see in the market that led you to make that decision?
It was actually less about what was in the market, and more about how I felt I could add the most value to people leaders and fellow HR practitioners beyond an employed role. I have a huge passion for supporting the people behind the professionals, which is why I have been so drawn to the people & culture profession over the years.
I can see how the world of work is evolving and the common themes organisations are struggling with in terms of workforce disconnect and how the growing use of AI is contributing to communication fractures. I believe that we need to make a cognitive shift to sustain the art of humanistic leadership now more than ever, and I want to support in leading that movement.
Across the organisations you’re working with, where do you see people leaders spending time versus where they’re actually adding the most value?
Often the challenge isn’t that leaders don’t know where they can be adding more value, it’s that they don’t have enough space or the right tools to move in that direction. One of the patterns I see most often is that people leaders are spending a disproportionate amount of time on operational activity and inadvertently neglecting their people. Whilst this is imperative to commercial output and deliverables need to be met, people leaders create the greatest value when aligning team performance to their people strategy. Once you get the leadership right, the operational output follows suit.
The leaders who have the biggest impact are the ones who spend time building capability, nurturing stronger connections and having meaningful conversations with their teams. These are the leaders who are driving performance through genuine trust and engagement. They understand what motivates their people and what inspires them to perform beyond expectations.
What feels structurally harder about the HRD role today compared to even two or three years ago?
HR has evolved significantly over the years, moving away from providing a primarily transactional function to a strategic business partner. However, with the increasing challenge AI brings to ER work, and the impact employment law changes are having on dispute matters, it is becoming challenging for HR teams to strike that balance of fire fighting vs proactive organisation development.
Similarly to how we had to adapt to navigate workplace impact through a global pandemic, HR professionals are again facing a shift in focus and need to be innovative to retain a strategic business partnership whilst combatting increasing employee relation complications.
Where do you see leadership teams unintentionally undermining their own people strategy?
Leadership teams usually have the best intentions when endorsing or implementing a people strategy. The challenge comes when leaders don’t follow through with their commitments made within their people strategy because it can affect the trust of their workforce.
For example, organisations will often talk about the importance of wellbeing, inclusion or professional development, but leader’s behaviours, decisions and investment choices don’t always reflect those messages. Employees are quick to spot when the lived experience or actions don’t match the narrative.
Another common challenge is trying to solve cultural issues through programmes and initiatives rather than leadership behaviours. People strategies succeed when leaders role model the values, communicate consistently and hold themselves accountable. If that doesn’t happen, even the best designed people strategy will struggle to deliver meaningful impact.
Most organisations would say they understand the importance of culture, engagement and resilience, where do you see the gap between intent and reality?
Most organisations genuinely recognise the importance of culture, engagement and resilience in their people. My observation is that the gap isn’t usually a lack of intent, but the difference between what leaders say and what employees experience in reality.
The organisations which make the greatest impact in these areas are those that treat culture as something that is actively shaped through everyday actions, not something that exists alongside the business and not something which is owned by HR alone. When culture, engagement and resilience are embedded into leadership practices and business decisions, that’s when intent becomes reality.
When you’re working with Executive teams, what tends to unlock progress, Is it clarity, capability, or something else entirely?
There is certainly an element of all of those things. Executive teams are rightly focused on driving the business forward and don’t have the time or space to walk around the edge of an idea.
To gain ‘buy in’ or endorsement from executive teams you need to be clear and direct, on both the message you want to get across and the impact you believe this will have on the business. Providing clarity on both the strategic benefit and risk of taking forward a people initiative is what executive teams need to make a decision and the art of influencing as a HR professional is making sure you are aligning to your audience.
What are you seeing in leadership teams under sustained pressure. What holds, and what tends to fracture?
When leadership teams are under pressure, there is a risk that their leadership style can shift to reflect this. It’s a natural response for many of us under pressure to temporarily become more direct, to have less empathy, to become more introverted whilst we navigate the issue at hand.
When leaders lack maturity in emotional intelligence, they tend to struggle with emotional regulation under pressure and this is where you start to see disengagement creeping in from their teams and a fear culture start to grow.
For people leaders it’s crucial that they understand their own triggers when it comes to their performance and communication styles under pressure, because how they respond in those situations can be very influential to workplace culture and have a significant impact on the psychological safety they have with their teams.
You’ve developed the SPACE resilience model. What was missing from existing approaches that led you to create something new?
I have consistently seen a disconnection between people on a human level in the workplace, usually caused by a lack of understanding of the context or the ‘why’ behind human behaviour. This misunderstanding almost always leads to escalating disputes and conflict between individuals and teams. This escalation often means disruptive grievance processes and costly tribunal claims for organisations, which could be avoided in the early stages if people leaders had perceived the situation through a different, more humanistic, lens.
The model I have developed works in two learning journeys. The first guides individuals to understand their own behaviour patterns, learn how to keep themselves professionally resilient and recognise when they may be out of balance. This is a key part of the learning journey for people leaders as it encourages a higher level of maturity in emotional intelligence.
The second part is around understanding how, as a people leader, you can effectively lead a team of people who are navigating their own S.P.A.C.E balance. This model gives a holistic learning journey which takes leaders on a full cognitive shift which really embeds the humanistic leadership principles. This is what I believe differentiates this model from others out there.
At a high level, what does SPACE allow leaders to see or diagnose that they might otherwise miss?
This model equips leaders with the skills to recognise where and how they are able to provide early intervention in performance, conduct or grievance cases to achieve constructive outcomes rather than suffer unnecessary escalation. Most often these cases start with a breakdown in communication, conflict of interpretation or a relationship fracture, and the S.P.A.C.E model enables leaders to dig under the surface on a human level to reach resolution sooner.
Without unpacking the full model, which element tends to create the biggest ‘lightbulb moment’ for senior leaders?
Where I see this model suddenly spark that ‘lightbulb moment’ is when we talk through practical examples of how the S.P.A.C.E principles play out in real life scenarios. Those situations that people leaders have either felt personally or have observed in their team and after discussion around the model, the behaviours and responses they recall from those situations now make sense where previously it was an entirely misunderstood experience.
If an HR leader wanted to pressure-test their organisation’s resilience, what’s one question they should be asking their leadership team?
Resilience isn’t measured by how an organisation performs when things are going well. It’s measured by what happens when they’re not. So, the question I’d encourage every leadership team to ask is: ‘’If we faced a significant business challenge tomorrow, how confident are we that our people would trust us to lead them through it?’.
We often think of resilience as a single, consistent state, but I believe it moves on a continuum basis, and that it is the role of the people leader to help calibrate that. Like steering a ship through a storm. Organisational resilience is fundamentally built on trust and when employees trust their leaders, understand the direction of travel and feel supported, organisations are far better equipped to navigate uncertainty, change and pressure.
Where do you typically start when an organisation believes it has a resilience issue, but can’t quite define it?
My suggestion would be to conduct a culture and engagement audit. An organisation needs to really dive into the nuts and bolts of the business in order to diagnose what the issues are before they can treat the symptoms.
This would usually involve a combination of approaches such as anonymous employee feedback, structured conversations with the leadership teams and reviewing a range of people metrics.
More often than not, there is an upskilling requirement in the leadership hierarchy somewhere, and so my focus is typically on how we can empower the leaders within the business to drive forward the opportunities diagnosed from the culture and engagement audit. When an organisation’s leadership structure is working effectively, the operational output and culture will follow.
What’s the part of the SPACE model you’re most looking forward to exploring in the webinar?
I am most looking forward to delving into the Self-Continuum of Professional Resilience because this is where I most often see people leaders resonate with the model and start to see how this mindset shift can help them individually as well as enhancing their leadership capabilities.
For someone joining the session, what will they leave with that changes how they operate as a people leader?
My aim is for attendees to leave the session inspired to learn more about themselves most importantly, and how they can optimise that learning experience to become an empowered leader of people. A good leader is a reflective leader, someone who is open to change, confident to challenge and intervene constructively. Attendees will be inspired to view leadership through a humanistic lens and understand how they can utilise this skill to drive a new level of high performance in their organisation.
Register for the Webinar
Want to learn how to move beyond managing behaviour and start addressing the underlying factors driving performance, engagement and attrition?
Join Louise Mortimer for Beyond Behaviour Management, where she’ll introduce the S.P.A.C.E Professional Resilience Model and share practical insights to help HR leaders create more resilient, engaged and psychologically safe workplaces.
