Last week, inside our Elephant Rider Community, we hosted an inspiring Elephant Rider Showcase featuring Chelsea Lang (Certified Consultant in Training) and Danii Garrett (Emotional Culture Practitioner).

In this brave and deeply human conversation, Chelsea and Danii walked us through the Reset & Elevate programme they designed, delivered, and refined over the past year — a bold emotional culture transformation at Sanitarium that has achieved extraordinary outcomes.

They shared how they brought The Emotional Culture Deck to life at scale, from designing the programme to rolling it out across teams, navigating challenges, and learning from every step along the way.

What unfolded is a story of courage, data, and deep human connection. One that shows how The Emotional Culture Deck can turn conversation into measurable change.

It was timely reminder that when culture work gets hard, it’s often because we’ve forgotten one simple truth: every transformation begins with emotion. 

That’s ...

Congratulations to Katherine Riddoch for becoming an official Expert ECD Leadership Consultant!

Reaching this latest milestone on your ECD Certified Pathway is no small feat, full of lessons and impact that ripple so much further than the leaders and teams you serve.

Katherine’s work with leaders is the kind of facilitation that shifts people into better conversations, and into new levels of awareness - emotional and rational! She’s using The Emotional Culture Deck as a lens for emotional insight, behavioural change, and culture-shaping leadership that inspires so many of us to do more than we thought was possible. 

Here are just a few gems from her recent reflections as she unlocked her latest ECD Certified Pathway badge:

- “I’ve shifted from facilitating the tool to facilitating awareness.”
- “Emotional leadership starts with awareness, not action.”
- “The quality of reflection determines the quality of insight.”

In one standout moment, she shared the story of a leadership participant ...

Over the past few months, Kate has quietly but powerfully led 12+ ECD Leadership Workshops across New Zealand, working with emerging leaders, senior management teams, and cross-functional leadership groups to help them lead themselves and others with more intention, empathy, and emotional literacy.

In her own words, she’s grown from “scripted and second-guessing” to confidently leading unscripted, emotionally rich leadership conversations using The Emotional Culture Decj.

“My role is to create the space and ask the questions.”

Whether she’s guiding a 1:1 or a full-room workshop, she’s creating space for people to pause, reflect, and find clarity and gently humanising the workplace one session at a time.

We feel proud & inspired by the way Kate is applying The ECD to shape emotional leadership conversations, and culture & change programmes.

It’s such a joy to watch and learn from her as she goes from strength to strength! Thank you Kate for everything you’re contributing to our...

Welcome to Emotions Science Simplified! This month, we’re looking at how the timing of emotional expression from leaders influences team performance.

Research Spotlight: Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance by Jacob S. Levitt,a,* Constantinos G. V. Coutifaris,b Paul I. Green, Jr.,b Sigal G. Barsadea,†

The big idea: 

Early emotional expressions (especially positive ones) shape how respected, safe, and motivated people feel. 

Emotional Expression Timing

What if the emotions leaders express early in a team’s journey could shape performance outcomes months down the track? New research suggests that not only do leader emotions influence team members’ motivation and success, but the timing of those emotions plays a crucial role in shaping respect, status, and performance.

A new study by Levitt, Coutifaris, Green, and Barsade (2024) explores how leaders' emotional expressions creat...

When Sanitarium opened its new state-of-the-art national distribution centre they faced more than just an operational shift. Two distinct teams were coming together for the first time with different habits, relationships, and expectations.

They saw a unique opportunity: not just to manage the transition, but to reset how the team connects, communicates, and leads.

So they launched Reset & Elevate. A bold, human-centred culture programme designed by Chelsea Lang and Dani Garrett, Elephant Riders inside Sanitarium. Their goal: bring people together, rebuild trust, and lay the foundation for a team culture where everyone feels respected, supported, and proud to belong.

The results were extraordinary.

The Emotional & Cultural Shifts

Chelsea and Danii embedded The Emotional Culture Deck into the programme helping leaders and team members have more honest conversations, build emotional literacy, and set a clear tone for how the team wants to work together.

Over the course of the prog...

Inside the 6-Week Emotional Culture Pilot Programme

We recently wrapped up an Emotional Culture pilot programme that shows real, tangible results of a brand-new team crafting their emotional culture…fast!

When this leader returned from parental leave early this year, she inherited a brand-new team spread across three continents. The team had:

• Zero shared history – members came from three different predecessor groups.

• Tight delivery deadlines – first programmes for AMET, APAC & LATAM due in eight weeks.

• Lean head count – each person owned the workload of ~3 peers in North America teams.

• No face-to-face cadence – 11-hour time-zone swing made quick trust-building hard.

Rather than run a standard “ways-of-working” session, Susannah chose The Emotional Culture Deck to surface the feelings that would fuel the mission (Connected, Rebellious, Valued & Seen) and those that could stall it (Paralysed, Overwhelmed, Incapable).

The Goal: Prove that one immersive emotional ...

Exploring Emotion Science. Numbers v Narratives. 

Most emotion research at work falls into two camps. One counts emotions. The other listens to stories. And according to Stephen Fineman, only one of these truly captures the messy, human reality of how we feel at work.

In his paper “Appreciating Emotion at Work: Paradigm Tensions,” Fineman critiques the over-simplification of emotion in organisational science. He makes a passionate case for moving beyond tidy surveys and into the rich, political, uncomfortable truth of workplace emotion.

Two Ways to Study Emotion at Work

Fineman defines a key tension:

• Essentialist approach: Emotions are seen as internal states inside individuals. Researchers try to measure them like any other variable through surveys, tests, and scores. This is where emotional intelligence and positive psychology usually sit.

• Interpretivist approach: Emotions are shaped by the world around us, our culture, relationships, language, and power dynamics. Resea

  ...

What Happens When Leaders Listen Without Fixing 

Last month, Professor Michael Parke (The Wharton School) and R&E teamed up with Chelsea Lang  and Danii Garrett at Sanitarium to deliver a brand new 60-minute Unspoken Conversation Workshop with one of their production teams on the factory floor in Australia (read to the bottom if you’re interested in taking part in an upcoming opportunity with this workshop).

The workshop’s simple in design, but powerful in effect:

→ Employees choose a concern they haven’t felt able to raise

→ They name how it makes them feel

→ Then they sit down with their leader and share

→ The leader listens without fixing, reacting, or jumping in

It’s one conversation. But the shift can be real. And at the same time, we see what changes are possible; when we create structured conversations about emotions at work.

So what changed?

Here’s what leaders and employees told us in the Check-Out Surveys after the session.

LEADERS SAID:

🟠 100% said it helped the...

Something special happens when Elephant Riders gather in person.

Stories get shared. Cards get played. And conversations that rarely happen in workplaces—finally do.

We’re kicking off the second half of 2025 with a packed calendar of Local Elephant Rider Chapter Meetups across Aotearoa, Australia, and beyond. These events are hosted by our incredible community of volunteer Chapter Leads in cities around the world. They create space for connection, shared learning, and growing the movement to humanise work—one conversation at a time.

Some highlights from our Q2 Meetups

What are Chapter Meetups all about?

Our Chapter Meetups are 90-minute in-person gatherings created for the Elephant Rider community. They’re a chance to reconnect with the tools and each other, hear Bright Spot stories, and explore how emotional culture is showing up in the real world.

Here’s what to expect:

• We play with The Emotional Culture Deck (always!)

• We explore real workplace challenges and emotio

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