Author profile
Gemma George
Co-Director & Client Service Manager
Co-Director and Client Service Manager at Growth Performance, maintaining and growing client relationships and acting as the liaison between clients and facilitators to enhance client satisfaction across the business.
About Gemma
Gemma is Co-Director and Client Service Manager at Growth Performance. She helps maintain existing business with current clients, grow those relationships over time, and assist in bringing new clients on board.
She works closely with clients to help them understand the full potential of the company's services, acting as the liaison between clients and facilitators. She is also responsible for improving customer support programmes and enhancing client satisfaction across the business.
Articles by Gemma
Human Capability Development
Cognitive Offloading: Protecting Critical Thinking in the Age of AI
New research suggests the more people trust AI, the less they think critically. Here is why the most valuable skill in your organisation is now the willingness to doubt a fluent answer.
Human Capability Development
The Reskilling Clock: The Shrinking Half-Life of Skills
The World Economic Forum estimates 39% of workers' core skills will change by 2030, and 59% will need retraining. The organisations that win will treat learning as infrastructure, not an event.
Mindset Readiness
Learning Velocity: Why Adaptability Is Overtaking Expertise
When the tools change every few months, the most valuable thing a person brings is not what they know, but how fast they can learn. Here is how to build learning velocity into a team.
Human Capability Development
The Creativity Paradox: AI Makes Individuals More Creative and Everyone More Alike
A 2024 study in Science Advances found generative AI boosts individual creativity while making the collective pool of ideas more similar. For organisations that compete on originality, that is a warning.
Human Capability Development
Building Resilience in an Age of Algorithmic Anxiety
Research links AI adoption to real rises in job insecurity and stress. Resilience is not about asking people to cope harder. It is a capability leaders can build deliberately.
Mindset Readiness
Shadow AI: Why Your Best People Are Hiding How They Use It
Most employees already use AI at work, and many do not tell their managers. This shadow AI economy is a signal about trust and psychological safety, not just a security problem.
Human Capability Development
Active Listening: The Leadership Skill That Builds Trust and Drives Performance
Most managers hear without listening. Active listening is a learnable discipline that transforms relationships, surfaces hidden information, and makes every conversation more productive.
Human Capability Development
Time Management for Managers: How to Lead Without Losing Control of Your Day
Managers who cannot manage their own time cannot lead their teams effectively. Here are the evidence-based strategies that actually work — and the habits that silently destroy leadership capacity.
Organisational Performance
How to Create an Employee Development Plan That Actually Works
Most development plans are written once and forgotten. A genuinely effective employee development plan is a living document that drives real capability growth — here is how to build one.
Human Capability Development
Stakeholder Management: How Leaders Build Influence and Navigate Complexity
The leaders who execute strategy most effectively are not necessarily the cleverest. They are the ones who have mastered the art of understanding, engaging, and aligning the people whose support they need.
AI + Leadership
Algorithmic Anxiety: Why AI Adoption Creates a Distinct Kind of Workplace Stress
Research published in Nature identifies a stress profile specific to AI adoption that differs from general change anxiety and earlier technostress. Understanding the distinction changes how managers respond, and why the usual interventions often fall short.
Human Capability Development
Conscience: What Ethical AI Leadership Actually Looks Like When You Are Not Setting Policy
Governance frameworks and AI ethics policies are written for boardrooms. But the ethical questions of AI adoption show up every day on the front line. Here is what Conscience as a leadership practice actually requires.
Organisational Performance
How to Build Trust in a Team
Trust is the foundation of every high-performing team. Without it, collaboration is transactional and performance plateaus. This guide draws on research from Google, Harvard, and the Centre for Creative Leadership to explain what trust-building actually requires.
Human Capability Development
Conflict Management in the Workplace: A Practical Guide
UK employees spend an average of 2.1 hours per week dealing with workplace conflict. This guide explains the types of conflict, why managers avoid it, and a practical framework for resolving it constructively.
Human Capability Development
How to Create a Feedback Culture in Your Organisation
Only 26 percent of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them do better work. Building a genuine feedback culture requires more than training managers to give better feedback. It requires structural change.
Mindset Readiness
Imposter Syndrome at Work: What It Is and What Leaders Can Do
An estimated 70 percent of people experience imposter syndrome at some point in their career, including high-performing leaders. Understanding it and knowing what to do about it is increasingly important for L&D professionals.
Human Capability Development
Emotional Intelligence at Work: A Practical Guide for Leaders
Emotional intelligence is one of the strongest predictors of leadership effectiveness, team cohesion, and individual resilience. Here is what the research says — and what to actually do about it.
Organisational Performance
Employee Experience: What It Is and Why It Matters More Than Engagement
Employee experience has become the dominant frame through which forward-thinking HR Directors are thinking about the relationship between organisations and their people. It is broader, more honest, and more useful than employee engagement.
Organisational Performance
Leading Hybrid Teams: A Practical Guide for Managers
Hybrid working has shifted from an emergency response to a permanent feature of organisational life. Most managers were not developed for this context. The skills required to lead hybrid teams well are learnable, but they require deliberate effort.
Human Capability Development
Coaching vs Mentoring: Understanding the Difference and Choosing the Right Approach
Coaching and mentoring are often used interchangeably, but they describe different relationships with different purposes. Choosing the wrong approach for the situation reduces the benefit for the individual and wastes organisational investment.
Organisational Performance
Talent Management Strategy: How to Attract, Develop and Retain Top Talent
Talent management is one of the most consequential people strategies an organisation can get right or wrong. The difference between a coherent talent strategy and a collection of disconnected HR initiatives is significant, and most organisations are closer to the latter.
AI + Leadership
Strategic Oversight and Ethical Governance in AI Orchestration
Technology capability has outpaced ethical frameworks and accountability structures. Orchestrators are the first line of ethical defence, and the EU AI Act makes governance a legal requirement, not a philosophical aspiration.
AI + Leadership
Situational Judgement and Exception Handling in Human-AI Teams
In any system where AI operates with autonomy, the most consequential human contribution is knowing when to intervene. The Exception Triage Framework and pre-mortem thinking give orchestrators a structured approach.
Human Capability Development
How to Build a Learning and Development Strategy That Delivers Results
Many organisations invest heavily in learning and development and see limited return. The difference between L&D that transforms capability and L&D that fills a calendar lies almost entirely in strategy. Building one that works starts with understanding where most L&D goes wrong.
Human Capability Development
Mentoring in the Workplace: How to Make It Work for Organisations and Individuals
Mentoring is one of the most consistently effective development interventions available to organisations. When designed well, it accelerates career progression, builds capability, and strengthens culture. What good mentoring actually looks like is worth understanding in detail.
Organisational Performance
How to Run Effective Meetings: A Research-Based Guide for Managers
Most professionals spend a significant portion of their working week in meetings, and a significant portion of that time is wasted. The research on what makes meetings work is clear, and most of the fixes are within any manager's reach.
Human Capability Development
The Manager's Guide to Difficult Conversations at Work
Most managers avoid difficult conversations. Research is clear on the consequences: underperformance persists, trust erodes, and team effectiveness suffers. Learning to have these conversations well is one of the highest-return leadership skills you can develop.
Human Capability Development
Building Resilience at Work: A Guide for Managers and HR Leaders
The most effective resilience approaches build organisational and leadership conditions that prevent unnecessary stress and support genuine recovery. Endurance alone is not the goal.
Human Capability Development
Coaching Skills for Managers: Why Telling People the Answer Is Rarely the Right Move
The shift from a directive management style to a coaching approach is one of the most valuable transitions a manager can make. It is also one of the hardest. Here is why it matters and how to make it.
Human Capability Development
How to Give Feedback to Employees: A Research-Backed Guide for Managers
Most managers give feedback badly, too vague, too infrequent, too late, or so hedged it carries no useful information. Here's what the research says actually works.
Organisational Performance
What Is Psychological Safety? Definition, Research, and How to Build It in Your Team
Google's Project Aristotle found it was the single strongest predictor of team performance. Amy Edmondson has studied it for 25 years. Here's everything you need to know about psychological safety, and how to build it.
Human Capability Development
Beyond Personality Types: How Self-Awareness Transforms Teams
Personality profiling tools are widely used and widely misapplied. The value is not in the label but in the self-awareness and mutual understanding that a well-facilitated profiling process can build.
Organisational Performance
Beyond the Training Event: Why Learning in the Flow of Work Is the Future
The 30-year-old model of event-based training is collapsing. The future is learning embedded in workflows, supported by AI, and measured by performance impact, not completion rates.
Human Capability Development
Empathy at Scale: How Human Connection Drives Performance in an Automated World
As more interactions become automated, moments of genuine human connection become more valuable, not less. Empathy at scale is the capability that makes teams resilient, customers loyal, and organisations adaptable.
Human Capability Development
Psychological Safety in AI-Augmented Teams: What Leaders Need to Know
Psychological safety, the belief that you can take interpersonal risks without fear, is the foundation of high performance. And AI adoption is actively eroding it.
Human Capability Development
Emotional Intelligence in the AI Era: Why EQ Is Your Organisation’s Greatest Asset
As AI handles data, analysis, and increasingly, decision-making, the competitive advantage shifts to overwhelmingly human capabilities. Emotional intelligence isn’t soft, it’s the most commercially valuable skill your leaders can develop.