I spent 20 years leading teams - in law firms, retail, FMCG, and architecture. Different industries, same question: how do you help good people become consistently great at working together?

The training workshops were fine. The books made sense. But Monday morning always won. The insights faded, the habits never formed, and everyone went back to doing what they’d always done.

It took me a while to see why. We kept sending people back into the same work. The roles were still unclear, the handoffs were still messy and the meetings were still the same. You can’t train people out of a system that keeps pulling them back in.

So I went looking for answers. I became an ICF-certified coach and enrolled in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne. There I’m studying how teams work best, how the design of work shapes both performance and wellbeing, and how habits actually form.

Strengths as Habit is where all of that comes together. I work with whole teams, and the leaders who run them, to change how their work is set up: who does what, who decides, how work moves between people, and the routines that keep it on track. We build on what the team already does well. Then we turn the changes into habits that keep going after I’ve left.

More and more, that includes AI. New tools are changing who does what, and teams need a deliberate way to reshape their work together instead of leaving it to chance.

The aim is simple. Teams that perform well and stay well.

If your team is working hard but not working well together, I’d like to hear about it.