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...

How one team used The ECD to lead people through change, and what it means for every leader.

When organisations face big change, the default response is usually strategic.

Plans. Timelines. Communications frameworks.

But one bold team in a major New Zealand government agency tried something different.

They made emotion the centre of their change strategy. Not a side note.

In partnership with riders&elephants and Professor Michael Parke from Wharton Business School, this team used The Emotional Culture Deck Change Programme to support a team within a 4,000-person organisation through a high-stakes consultation.

The results speak for themselves:

•  +7.3% increase in engagement
• +10.3% stronger emotional support from leaders
• +20.7% improvement in emotional awareness
• 94% of employees felt their leader promoted wellbeing
• 0 reports of burnout

They didn’t follow a traditional change playbook. They flipped it.

This white paper tells the story, and why emotional culture is now ess...

In 2024, a leading public organisation in New Zealand faced a significant change process affecting 4,000 employees. Understanding that emotions play a critical role during periods of transformation, one of their teams turned to The Emotional Culture Deck Change Readiness Programme to guide them through the journey. Partnering with Professor Michael Parke from Wharton Business School, we set out to measure how The Emotional Culture Deck impacted employee engagement, psychological safety, and overall wellbeing throughout the process.

The outcomes of this intervention—our ECD Change Readiness Programme—highlight the strategic value and personal importance of supporting teams in recognising and managing both individual and collective emotions during change.

Below, we’ve outlined the key results and insights, along with a concise one-page summary of our findings.

ECD Intervention Results Overview

We conducted a field intervention to examine how The ECD workshop impacts key employee en...