For academic leaders
Your team is full of talented academics who are exhausted. The workload conversation keeps going in circles. And since 2025, the conditions your team works in are your responsibility, in writing. You can't change your people. You can change the conditions they work in.
"Working harder is not the way through. Changing how the work is made is."
Your world
You know your discipline, you can read a room, and you carry a load most people never see. And yet the part of the job that should be the most rewarding, leading talented people through genuinely demanding work, is harder than it should be. Does any of this sound familiar?
Your team is stretched. You can't keep loading them, and you can't see what else to cut.
Your best people carry too much, go quiet, or start looking elsewhere.
You keep having the same conversation about workload and nothing actually changes.
You need to be able to show, now, that you're managing the load your team carries.
None of that is a flaw in your leadership. It is what happens to a good team under real pressure: a studio of talented people quietly turns into a factory, where everyone hand-makes everything until the work suffers and the people fray.
The shift
A sculptor makes one extraordinary piece, and is commissioned to make ten more, as recognition for how good it is. If she tries to hand-make all ten the same way, the work suffers and the maker breaks. The answer is a studio: make the molds, bring in hands, reserve your signature.
Good academics are in exactly that position. The sector asks more of them precisely because they are good. Under that pressure, talented people start working like a factory, doing more and more themselves, by hand, until their own research gets pushed to never and the marking owns their evenings. That is where the exhaustion comes from, and why no wellbeing day has ever fixed it.
Your job as a leader is not to rescue your people one at a time. It is to build the studio they work in: the beliefs, the relationships, and the design of the work itself. Your team's job is then to learn to craft their own work inside it. I'm a behavioural scientist, and helping with both halves is the whole of what I do with academic leaders.
Three ways in
Free
The full argument, the research, and the model. Useful on its own, and worth circulating with your leadership group before we ever talk.
Request the whitepaperFor you, the leader
A 90-day coaching cluster. Six conversations, one real change made and proven in your actual team, and a model for reading your people that you keep long after we finish.
Ask about coachingFor your team
A workshop series across a term that teaches your academics how to meet real demand without grinding themselves down. This is a change in method, not a wellbeing day.
Ask about the workshopsMake an enquiry
Tell me a little about your team and what you're weighing up. I'll reply personally, usually within a day or two, and we'll work out together whether there's a fit.
Thank you.
Your enquiry is with Brad. You'll hear back personally, usually within a day or two.
The whitepaper
Leave your details and the whitepaper lands in your inbox, with a personal note from Brad.
Done.
The whitepaper is on its way to your inbox.
Bring the situation in your team as it actually is. I'll tell you honestly whether this is a fit, and you'll leave with at least one thing you can use either way.