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From the evidence to the decision — vendor-neutral research, summarised and sourced, for the people who build organisations.
Latest Decision Briefs
How much of a company's success is really down to its leaders?
We celebrate leaders as if they author outcomes, and we cut them slack — and pay — on the same assumption. The evidence says leaders matter, but less like heroes and more like weather systems. Studies that partition firm performance find the person at the top explains a real but bounded share — roughly 15% to a third — and that the share swings with how much discretion the role actually has, not with charisma. And where leaders do move results, they do it indirectly: by building engagement, trust, and team capability, not by force of will. Verdict: leaders matter materially, but their effect is a product of the conditions they create and the discretion the system gives them. The leverage is not hiring a hero — it is building leaders who shape the right conditions, and designing roles so that good leadership can actually show up in results.
Read→Should employees be able to go over their manager's head?
When someone complains about their manager, the person with authority over the outcome is usually the person being complained about. The evidence shows speaking up can itself provoke supervisory hostility — one field study finds employee voice raises abusive supervision through a leader identity threat, and only where the supervisor is high in traditionality. The harm from bad supervision is heavily documented; whether organisations respond to it effectively is barely studied at all. So an escalation route is a design decision, not an evidence-backed fix — worth building only if someone other than the manager holds authority over the outcome and the employee is protected afterwards.
Read→We spend on wellbeing apps, resilience training and mindfulness — is any of it moving employee wellbeing, or are we paying to look caring?
The workplace wellbeing industry sells apps, resilience training and mindfulness at scale — and the largest single test to date (46,336 workers across 233 UK organisations) finds participants in those programs no better off than colleagues who never took part. The honest picture is layered: in meta-analysis, web-based psychological interventions show a small positive effect (g≈0.37), and short individualized counseling measurably reduces absenteeism — but effects shrink as study quality rises, and the well-evidenced levers sit at the organisational level: workload, scheduling, manager practice, job design. Verdict: fix the work, not just the worker — keep clinical support for people who need it, stop treating app seats as the wellbeing strategy, move the next budget riyal to work design, and measure any program like a trial.
Read→What we don’t do
We don’t sell software, run certifications, or publish anything we can’t source. When the evidence is thin the brief says so, and when a study sits behind a paywall we cite it rather than reprint it.
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