Your Workforce Is a Library... Start Using It! With Emma Tolhurst

Maria Dinu, fractional HR and culture expert, joins Louise for a fascinating conversation about why most transformation projects fail - and the surprisingly small tipping point that makes them succeed.Drawing on twenty years of experience including leading culture at the Coca-Cola Company, Maria explains why you only need 25% of your people to genuinely adopt a change before it starts to ripple out on its own, why the plan alone is never enough without the signal from leadership and the systems to back it up, and why AI fear is entirely funded and leaders need to stop pretending otherwise.

Emma Redfern, ER and Change Lead at Leeds Building Society, joins Felix to talk about what it takes to prepare a workforce for transformation before the restructure lands on their desk. Three months into a new role with a brand new exec team and a major digital transformation underway, Emma shares why pre-deployment beats redeployment, how Leeds is launching a skills fest to shift towards a skills-based organisation, and why the leaders who struggle most with change are often the ones you forget to bring into the tent early enough.

Lucile Flamand, partner at Perfect Rebel, joins Felix to challenge the idea that culture is something that just happens. Drawing on a career spent redesigning organisations alongside technology, Lucile makes the case that culture is the single biggest driver of high performance - and that without psychological safety, leadership alignment, and real clarity, most AI transformations are dead on arrival. They also get into why decision making is a skill nobody gets trained on, where consultancies add value versus where they make things worse, and why smaller businesses might have the edge in this new world.

Eve-Lynn Ansley, People Director at UCC Coffee, joins Louise to talk about what she found when she walked into an HR team that sat behind a closed door, never spoke to each other, and was only ever approached with complaints. From ripping directors out of their private offices to creating an environment where making mistakes is encouraged, Evelyn shares how she transformed the function from the inside out. They also get into why some people in HR simply don’t like people, how to support employees through relentless change without the usual spin, and why leading by example is the only thing that actually shifts culture.

Louise Rogerson, CPO at law firm DWF, joins Felix to talk about what happens when a legal business goes from LLP to publicly traded to private equity backed - and what that means for the people function.Louise shares how she's transforming management capability in a profession that was never designed for it, why her team has seen an 80% year-on-year increase in grievances and a 100% increase in disciplinaries thanks to AI, and what she found when she tested one of the new AI legal platforms as a fake disgruntled employee!

Stuart Price, Chief People, Product & Transformation Officer at Zenith Vehicles, joins Louise to share what he learned from running both the people and technology functions - and why merging the two isn't as straightforward as the headlines suggest. Stuart also makes a compelling case for empowering leaders to make judgment calls rather than hiding behind policy, explains why inclusion shouldn't fall off the agenda just because the political mood has shifted, and shares how Zenith moved female senior leadership representation from under 10% to over 40% in five years.

Steph Evans Hill, People Director at William Jackson Food Group, joins Felix to talk about what it's really like to leave the corporate machine and join a sixth generation family business. After nearly two decades at the likes of Nestlé and PPG, Steph shares what she gained from big corporate, what she had to shed, and why building a high performance culture and treating people well aren't mutually exclusive. They also get into the advantage of thinking in decades rather than quarters, why family businesses need to stop being shy about their employer brand, and how to develop the seventh generation of family shareholders.

Emma Tolhurst, independent consultant specialising in culture, communications, and transformation, joins Felix to explore the concept of the human library - and why most organisations are sitting on a goldmine of generational knowledge they're not tapping into. From reverse mentoring programmes that cost nothing to scale, to why AI is consuming transformation bandwidth at the expense of more human priorities, Emma makes a compelling case for putting knowledge transfer back at the heart of people strategy.

Emmy Rumble-Mettle, VP of People and Culture at Aristocrat, joins Louise to explore a model that could change the way you think about every interaction at work. The transactional analysis framework - parent, adult or child - is a simple idea with profound implications for power dynamics, conflict, and how leaders show up. Emmy also gets into why burnout has become so normalised, why boundaries have all but disappeared since the pandemic, and what happens when you democratise power at the top of an organisation. An honest, energising conversation from someone who's spent 20-plus years being enchanted by people.

Sophie Tolley, VP of People and Culture for EMEA at RES, joins Felix to explore what a career in HR actually looks like in 2026, and where it's heading. From how grad roles are being reshaped by AI to the reality of working four days a week while staying ambitious, Sophie shares an honest take on trade-offs, career breaks, and why the organisations cutting entry-level HR roles now are storing up succession gaps for later. They also get into the Gartner HR operating model and what changes when you separate strategic partnering from operations.