On this particular day, I was struck by the clear and pristine beauty of Middleton Beach, while just across the peninsula, much of our South Australian coast is struggling under a toxic algal bloom.
It got me thinking about the different workplace cultures I encounter through my coaching work. Some are clear, positive, and energising, with a healthy, forward rhythm like the Middleton’s waves. Others feel murky, stagnant, and even unsafe, much like parts of our Gulf at the moment.

So, what can you do if you’re a leader trying to make a positive impact within a toxic workplace?

1. Reset expectations around behaviour and accountability:
   Be clear about what good looks like. Involve your people in defining the standards and hold everyone, including leaders, accountable.
2. Model the behaviours you want to see:
   Demonstrate respect, openness, and integrity. Have the courage to call out toxic behaviours, even when they appear in your peers or those above you.
3. Ramp up your self-care:
   Toxic environments can take a toll. Prioritise exercise, rest, and positive social connections outside of work. Without strong self-care, it’s easy to become part of the problem.
4. Focus on what you can influence:
   Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and stay clear about the difference. Influence grows from clarity, not frustration.
5. Know when to move on:
   If the culture has reached a point of no return, look outward. Find your own “patch of coast” – the environment that allows you to thrive and lead in alignment with your values. Sometimes, it’s just across the peninsula.

Even in toxic waters, renewal is possible. But it starts with courageous leadership and a clear commitment to creating safer, healthier currents.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

An effective leader

• Understands the capacity and potential of their reports, and supports them to challenge themselves to grow and learn without feeling like they’ve been thrown in the deep end without a life jacket.
• Understands and promotes the value of a strong feedback culture, providing clear, kind and actionable feedback without shaming, blaming or humiliating people for mistakes
• Is clear about expectations, and holds people to account for agreed deliverables and behaviours, whilst providing the required coaching and support to enable people to meet those agreements.
• Can express feelings and emotions to aid understanding and trust in a style, tone and setting that is not intimidating or provocative
• Seeks support from their Manager, People and Culture team or external coach to navigate what can be very nuanced and sensitive scenarios.

What other examples can you think of? I’d love to hear about your experiences?

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

Change projects are essentially about people. A successful change depends on getting people on board. But this takes us into the murky area of psychosocial risk. Should we stop initiating change because of the risk? Absolutely not. Whether you’re a leader or a senior technical expert, a core part of your role is to find new ways to create value for your organisation. If you stagnate, you don’t survive.
To keep people psychologically safe during change, I believe we need to support them in two distinct domains which I’ve named Change Agility and Change Stability.

1. Change Agility
This involves building the capacity to adapt and engage. It includes three key activities:
a) Context – Help people understand why the change is needed, framed within the organisation’s strategy.
b) Conversations – Create opportunities for one-on-one or small-group discussions. People don’t resist change because they’re change-resistant—they resist when they can’t make sense of the change within their personal frame of reference. Encourage questions and dialogue to help people align their mindset with the proposed change.
c) Contribution – Give people the opportunity to contribute. They might help design solutions to the challenge driving the change or shape how the change strategy is implemented. Involvement builds ownership.

2. Change Stability
This focuses on giving people psychological anchors during change. It includes three key activities:
d) Familiarity – Highlight what’s staying the same: familiar processes, systems, people, or routines. These act as a tether in unfamiliar waters.
e) Alignment – Reinforce how the change supports the organisation’s purpose, and how each person’s work continues to contribute to that purpose.
f) Grounding – Anchor the change in the organisation’s values. Not only should the outcome of the change align with the values—but the process of change should also consistently reflect them.

Managing change safely means recognising and addressing psychosocial risk. By supporting both agility and stability, I believe we can create the conditions for people to not just survive change, but engage, adapt, and thrive.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

While managing these risks is a shared responsibility, managers and leaders are uniquely positioned to create meaningful change. With the right support they can become powerful agents for psychosocial safety.

Why Psychosocial Risk Matters

Unlike physical hazards, psychosocial risks are often hidden within culture, systems, or leadership behaviours, making them harder to detect until harm occurs. Yet their impacts are real: mental health conditions now account for 9% of serious workplace injury claims in Australia (WorkSafe, 2024), and burnout is rising across industries.

Common psychosocial hazards include:

• High emotional demands or workload
• Low job control or unclear roles
• Bullying, harassment, or unresolved conflict
• Lack of recognition or leadership support
• Poor organisational change practices.

Left unaddressed, these issues lead to low productivity, absenteeism, high turnover, and long-term mental health impacts—posing legal, ethical, and business risks in addition to the obvious personal costs to an injured worker.

Managers: A Frontline Defence

Managers play a critical role in shaping safe, supportive team environments. They’re responsible for setting expectations, structuring roles, resolving conflict, and ensuring people are treated fairly. But many managers, particularly if new to people leadership or in an already emotionally demanding role,  feel under-equipped to identify and manage psychological risks—especially when they’re dealing with emotionally complex situations.

Rather than seeing unwell staff as “problems,” managers can learn to recognise them, just like the canary in the coal mine, as important signals – early warnings of deeper systemic issues. When someone shows signs of distress, it’s a cue to ask: Is the workload too high? Are expectations unclear? Is the team culture healthy?

How Coaching Can Support Managers?

Coaching can help equip managers with the awareness, tools, and confidence to effectively prevent, identify and reduce psychosocial risk. Here are four possible areas you might relate to:

1. Raising Awareness
   Coaches help managers step back and identify hidden risks in their team dynamics—such as unresolved tension or unclear responsibilities—before they escalate.
2. Building Skills
   Many managers avoid emotional or interpersonal issues due to discomfort. Coaching develops their confidence and communication skills to address concerns early and effectively. One leader, for example, learned through coaching to confront a long-standing team conflict that had been eroding trust and morale.
3. Encouraging Strategic Thinking
   Rather than reacting to issues as they arise, coaching supports long-term planning. For example, during organisational change, a leader was coached to build better consultation and feedback processes that reduced stress and confusion.
4. Shaping Culture
   Coaching helps managers create psychological safety and model healthy behaviours—setting boundaries, encouraging breaks, and resisting an “always-on” culture. These visible actions show teams that wellbeing is not just encouraged but expected.

From Individual Fixes to Organisational Responsibility

Often, organisations place the burden of managing stress on individual workers—offering resilience training, fruit bowls or wellbeing apps. While helpful, these don’t address the root causes of harm.

At an organisational level, People and Culture teams can help identify where risks exist across teams, job clusters or geographical locations. This data enables smarter strategic decisions like redesigning roles, skill development for leaders, or improving support systems.

But it’s my belief that true change starts with leadership. Coaching empowers managers to take responsibility for the things they can influence—team dynamics, role clarity, communication, and culture, thereby embedding psychosocial safety from the ground up.

If we want to reduce psychological harm at work, we need to support the people who shape workplace culture every day—our leaders and managers.

If you’re a manager, ask yourself:

• Do I know what psychosocial risks exist in my team?
• Can I influence the conditions causing them?
• Do I have the skills to intervene early?
• Am I creating a culture that supports wellbeing?

If any of these give you pause to reflect, coaching might be the next step.

Coaching provides a confidential, practical space for leaders to develop the awareness, skills, and strategies needed to create psychologically safe environments, supporting them to shift from reactive problem solving to leading proactively with intention.

If you’d like to explore how coaching could support you or your team, please get in touch to arrange a complimentary virtual coffee – I’d love to connect.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

All my face to face training has been cancelled
Coaching provides a deeper and more personal learning experience than many group training programs; the coaching agenda is set by the client based on what they need at the time, rather than a pre-set group learning agenda that may or may not be relevant to every participant.

I’m working from home, I’ll have to wait till I get back to the office for any development
Coaching sessions can be arranged at any time and from anywhere that suits you. If you have a private space, whether its at your home office, in your garden or walking along the beach, we can coach.

I’m Zoomed out – please, no more staring at little people on a screen!
Me too. It’s draining physically and mentally if you’re trying to run group meetings or participate in on-line learning all day. One on one coaching can be done via any video call platform that works for you, using your favourite portable device, and means you’re just focusing in on one other person. Not such a strain on the eyes or brain – or ditch the camera completely and just use the audio, tapping into deep listening skills.

I’m completely pre-occupied in keeping the business afloat, I don’t have time for development
This is exactly the time for development; there is no road map to guide us through a pandemic, so we need the skills to lead, manage and work within a completely uncertain and rapidly changing world. We also need resilience more than ever coaching can help maintain both performance and well-being even during a crisis.

I’m overwhelmed with challenges
It can be hard to work out what to do and in what order during a crisis, we’re so busy reacting to the next challenge, everyone is expecting things from us, we’re constantly second guessing, and may be plagued with self-doubt. Now is the time to get some support to help plan, prioritise and get back on the front foot.

Work has slowed right down, I’m finding it hard to know how to productively use my time
This is a great opportunity to use the time to focus on your own personal, professional and career development; identify some development goals, grab yourself a coach and use the time to develop your capability.

I’ve been stood down temporarily while the business gets back on its feet
This is a difficult time socially and emotionally, our self-worth can take a battering, and it can be easy to lose hope and motivation; working with a coach at this time can help to formulate some achievable goals and provide the support and motivation you need to get back on track.

I’m desperately missing human connection
Coaching, apart from all its other benefits, offers deep and genuine engagement with another human being. Coaching validates our sense of who we are, nourishes the soul and satisfies our need for authentic human connection. Who wants some of that?

What are you waiting for? Now is your opportunity. Now is the time!

For a confidential conversation about how coaching can support you right now, Contact Jo

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

“Organisations don’t change… People do”.

So, no matter how lean your thinking, how strategic your restructuring, how good your process re-engineering, or how innovative your system design, change efforts will come to nothing if our people aren’t supported to change their behaviour. And often that means more than providing them with information or training – it means helping people to adapt, by facilitating a shift in the thinking, beliefs and assumptions which keep them wedded to the old ways.

We know communication is critical to the success of a change project, but what does this mean in reality? At the strategic level we need a detailed stakeholder engagement plan, a comprehensive training plan and some inspirational sermons from the CEO about burning platforms and melting icebergs. But this is not where the real business of change takes place – the engine room of change is fuelled by the day to day conversations between the Executive Team and their senior managers, between the senior managers and their team leaders, and between the team leaders and the front line staff who report to them.

It’s in these conversations that staff discover and process the reality of the change and how it will impact on them. And it’s in these conversations that staff have the opportunity to have their personal concerns addressed, their questions answered, their frustrations aired, their fears disclosed and their ideas heard. I believe these conversations are the real heart of organisational change.

So, do our leaders and managers feel skilled and motivated to engage in the kind of conversations that will support their people to understand, engage with and adapt to the changes expected of them? A spate of recent horror stories from my clients has led me to believe that perhaps not. Here’s a few examples:

• My client was emailed by his manager (on the weekend) asking him to include some data in an attached executive paper – the paper included a recommendation, which my client was oblivious to, that his job was to be redundant in a proposed re-structure
• An operations executive, who knew her job was to be abolished as part of a shift in organisational strategy, had been told she would be redeployed into a newly created stakeholder engagement role. In an executive meeting to discuss the proposed new roles, the HR manager inadvertently distributed the wrong version of the new structure document, on which the CEO had handwritten the names of his preferred occupants against all of the executive roles – my client’s name was not on the chart!
• A service delivery manager found out, whilst watching an all-staff video message from the CEO, that the program he’d successfully led for three years was to be abolished due to lack of alignment with a change initiative
• A learning and development manager found out her full year budget had been slashed by half, when her manager made an off-hand remark about perceived program credibility at a team meeting.

These examples are careless and disrespectful at best, but threatening, anxiety-provoking and disengaging at worst. Is it any wonder we see resistance to change if this is how it’s managed?

If we want change projects to succeed, we need to give our leaders, particularly our middle managers, the information, the tools, the skills and the confidence to have what can be challenging and emotionally charged one on one conversations with their staff. If you’re a manager, and this is not what you signed up for, you may want to re-evaluate whether you’re in the right role, since leading people through change is a crucial and ongoing leadership competency.

If you’re up for this important and satisfying work, keep in mind the following tips:

• Share information about change directly and personally with the people who are impacted most by it – that means face to face, one on one, not in a team meeting, public forum, via email, or (god-forbid) a text message
• Prioritise your conversations – communicate with those most impacted by the change first, and more frequently
• Tell your staff as much as you know about the why, when and how of change, as soon as you can – don’t wait for something big to announce or for the glossy presentation from the Comms team before you start your conversations
• If you don’t know something, communicate that you don’t know, don’t just not communicate – faced with an uncertain future and a communication void, staff will fill in the gaps with their own interpretation, which could be way off the mark
• Show empathy during your conversations – practice recognising and acknowledging what the staff member may be feeling as a result of the actual or perceived impact of the change. Fear, anxiety, grief, frustration, exhaustion and self-doubt are just some of the legitimate feelings that staff may be openly expressing or doing their best to hide
• These conversations are not just a channel for you to convey information, but a critical opportunity for you to engage deeply with your staff member about their concerns and fears as well as their hopes, ideas and expectations – remember, you have two ears and one mouth – listening is just as important, if not more so, than talking.

Whether you’re leading change, implementing change or being impacted by change, start talking about it directly, openly and constructively, and let’s get to the real heart of successful change.

Got a Question?
Need a Coach?
Looking for staff training?
Not sure what to do?

Email to arrange a confidential, no obligation discussion

PB Performance

But isn’t the job of a manager, as with the plant, to nurture employee growth and development so they can do their best? If your employee isn’t performing, what can you do to create the optimum environment for them to survive and thrive at work?

Put yourself in your staff member’s shoes, and ask yourself these three questions:

1. Do I know what’s expected of me?
Staff do best when they are clear about what’s expected of them in their job – the tasks they must do, the behavioural standards expected, the priorities they should apply, the outcomes they are expected to achieve, and the timeframes they are required to work within. Managers usually think these expectations have been made clear, but in reality, staff may be confused, or can have quite different perceptions about what’s expected of them.

Having conversations in which you clearly describe your expectations of your staff, and then writing down what has been agreed, will help to overcome these differences in perception, and ensure your staff are doing the work that’s needed to achieve individual and team goals. If circumstances change, have another conversation and update your written agreement to reflect the changes.

2. Am I able to do what’s expected of me?
Employees need to be capable of doing the job. That is, they need the skills, knowledge, experience and ability to meet the expectations you’ve agreed on. Don’t assume the person has all the capabilities they need just because they were recruited to the job or they’ve been in it for a while – there are many reasons why capability gaps exist, and your job as the manager is to identify and address these. You should also carefully consider whether the workplace environment supports the employee’s performance. Do they have all the necessary tools and resources to do the job, do organisational processes and systems support or work against them meeting expectations, and is the workplace culture that you have created conducive to the worker performing at their best? If not, what do you, as manager, need to change to create the optimum performance conditions?

3. Do I want to do what’s expected of me?
Staff can perform well and remain resilient, even under difficult circumstances, when they feel a strong sense of commitment to what they’re doing. Try to understand what drives and motivates each one of your staff, and where possible, respond to these motives. If an employee is motivated by helping others, you could build in a training or mentoring component to their role. And since most of us do better when we feel part of something bigger than ourselves,  you can facilitate a sense of meaning and purpose by helping  your staff clearly see the alignment between their work and the organisation’s goals.

Performance management systems often fail because organisations spend enormous resources on forms and review cycles and ratings and IT systems, but fail to support managers to learn the basic behaviours needed to get the best out of staff. If you’re a manager, be clear about what you expect of your staff, help  them develop the required capabilities, provide the resources and environment they need to succeed, and help them see the importance of what they’re doing. If you’re a staff member struggling with your own performance, share this article with your manager!

PB Performance

Is it suitable for me?
Resilience Re-boot has been designed for people who are:

• Looking for sustainable ways to manage the challenges of their job
• Needing an extra boost to their resilience
• Busy but willing to invest 3-4 hours in their well-being and performance
• Wanting flexible learning – working at their own pace when and where they choose
• Open to working with a coach who will challenge their thinking and behavior.

What is involved?
Resilience Re-boot includes:

• Assessment of your personal resilience levels using the Resilience at Work (R@W) Scale
• A confidential telephone or face-to-face coaching session with an expert resilience coach
• Development of a customised plan for resilience that recognises your unique work context
• Six informative self-paced videos outlining proven resilience-building strategies
• Reflection sheets that ensure the video strategies are translated into actions
• Optional follow-up coaching to review and consolidate progress.

How do I complete the program?

1. Contact us to book in your coaching session at a time that suits you
2. We’ll send you a link and login details so you can complete your personal on-line resilience assessment
3. Once you’ve completed your assessment, you’ll meet with your coach to receive your assessment report, review your results and work out your personal resilience plan
4. After the coaching session, watch the 6 on-line modules and complete the associated worksheets at your own pace
5. Contact us when you’ve completed the program if you need anything further.

How do I get started?
Phone Jo on 0412 319 394, or contact us via email, for a confidential, no-obligation discussion about pricing options and suitability of the program to your needs.

PB Performance

But increasingly, resilience is being called upon by ordinary people in ordinary circumstances to help them get by. In the workplace, it’s resilience that’s going to help us deal with demanding customers, challenging client groups, high stress work, difficult managers, toxic work environments, constant change, uncertainty and increasing pressure to do more with less …..you get the picture.

Being resilient at work means that you can

• Manage the inevitable, every day stress of work while staying healthy;
• Rebound and learn from unexpected setbacks; and
• Proactively prepare for future challenges that you’re likely to face.

Essentially, workplace resilience is about being the best you can be in the environment in which you work. Imagine how much more comfortable, satisfying and even enjoyable, our work-life could be if we faced the inevitable bumps and hurdles from a foundation of resilience.

Recent research has shown that our level of resilience at work is not a fixed attribute or personality trait. You can increase resilience through changing your thoughts and behaviour, and by developing and deploying a ‘toolkit’ of strategies to meet the challenges you are facing.

The Resilience At Work (R@W Sustain 7) model, developed by Adelaide Organisational Psychologist Kathryn McEwen and colleagues,  comprises seven components which interrelate and contribute to your overall work resilience.  Understanding and investing in each of these components enables you to sustain performance while preserving your well being.

The 7 Resilience At Work components are:

Authenticity
You know and hold onto your personal values, deploy your strengths, and have a good level of emotional awareness and regulation.

Purpose
Your work offers purpose and a sense of belonging.  It also aligns with your core values and beliefs.

Adaptability
You stay optimistic and keep a solution-focus when things go wrong. You reframe setbacks and minimise the impact of any negativity around you.

Self-care
You have work and life routines that help you manage your everyday stressors.  You work to create work-life balance and ensure time for relaxation and recovery.

Support
You seek feedback, advice and support and also provide support readily to others.

Energy
You maintain a good level of physical fitness, have a healthy diet and get adequate sleep.

Networks
You develop and maintain the personal and professional support networks you need at home and at work in order to perform well in your job.

Every single one of these components can be developed if you have the motivation and tools to do so. Which one do you need to invest in, to have the biggest impact on your resilience at work?

PB Performance

Employees are facing increasing pressure to keep up, to do more with less, and to respond to constant change, ambiguity and challenge. Supporting our staff to become more resilient so they bounce-back from set-backs, maintain productivity and positivity, and survive and even thrive during tough times, is perhaps the most critical workplace development strategy we can offer.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”
Charles Darwin

Resilient staff

• are better at solving problems and overcoming challenges
• are able to maintain performance under pressure
• are less likely to be absent from work
• positively influence the people around them
• have a positive impact on team and organisation performance.

PB Performance Coaching offers a range of programs based on the Resilience At Work (R@W)^® Toolkit to help build resilient employees, teams, leaders and organisations. The toolkit is a complem-entary suite of measures that recognises the inter-relatedness of employee, leader and team behaviour at work.

Measuring Resilience At Work

Start building resilience at work by taking the internationally recognised, scientifically validated, Resilience At Work (R@W) Scale. It’s the only scale that measures resilience specifically within the work context. The assessment is done on-line and takes less than 15 minutes. A personal, leader or team profile report is generated, enabling staff to benchmark their current resilience against each of the seven components of resilience at work. The profile can be used by staff to enhance the outcomes from resilience workshops or individual coaching by enabling them to focus their learning and action on strategies most relevant to them.

The three assessment scales are:

R@W Individual: assesses an individual employee’s resilience at work against the 7 Resilience At Work factors

R@W Team: assesses the group practices that promote team resilience, against the 7 Resilience At Work (Team) factors

R@W Leader: assesses the leader behaviours that support and foster resilience in the employees and teams they lead, against the 7 Resilience At Work (Leader) factors

Building Resilience At Work

Workshops for groups of individuals

Half or full day workshops teach practical, evidence based strategies targeting  each of the seven components that contribute to high levels of Resilience At Work. Strategies are underpinned by the science of positive psychology, and can be easily learnt and immediately applied by staff at all levels. Prior to the workshop staff complete the Resilience at Work Scale which enables them to focus their workshop learning on the strategies most relevant to them. Staff leave the workshop with an individual action plan for enhancing their own personal resilience.

Workshops for teams

Half or full day workshops teach practical, evidence based strategies targeting each of the seven components that contribute to high levels of Resilient teams. Strategies are underpinned by the science of positive psychology, and can be easily learnt and immediately applied by staff and teams at all levels. Prior to the workshop staff complete the Resilience at Work Team Scale which enables them to focus their workshop learning on the strategies most relevant to their team. Staff leave the workshop with individual and team action plans for enhancing their team resilience.

Coaching for Staff and Leaders

Individual coaching is a fantastic supplement to the Resilience At Work Workshops, providing staff with personalised, confidential support to put their personal resilience plan into action. Even if staff haven’t participated in a workshop, they can still take the Resilience At Work Scale and be coached to identify and implement resilience strategies that will most benefit them. Personal coaching is goal oriented, motivational and solution focused, and is therefore highly effective in bringing about lasting, significant and positive change.

Resilience Re-boot: On-line resilience program

Want to build your resilience in your own time and at your own pace? Our on-line program might suit you.

Click here for details and registration.

Who For?

Resilience At Work Programs benefit Leaders, Executives, Managers, Professionals, Professional Support Staff, Business Owners, Boards and Board Chairs, Tertiary Students and Tertiary Graduates seeking to enter the workforce.

Resilience at Work Workshops benefit teams experiencing change or challenge, for example: downsizing; restructuring; funding challenges; difficulty meeting demand for services; increasing competition; staff shortages; challenging client groups.

What Next?

Resilience is increasingly being taught to kids throughout our school system, is being implemented throughout the entire US Army via the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Training Program, and is now considered a critical indicator of success and prosperity by Governments around the world, including South Australia.

Check out some of our recent Resilience and Wellbeing projects here.

Please get in touch now by phone: 0412 319 394 or via our email enquiry page to discuss how best to structure a Resilience At Work Program for yourself or your staff.

Investing in Resilience At Work could be the smartest business decision you make. 

PB Performance