High-Performing Teams · Psychosocial Safety Workshop
A three-hour, customised workshop for leaders in high-performance environments. Leaders learn to tell productive pressure apart from preventable psychosocial risk — and to design and lead work in ways that sustain results, retain capability and meet their legal duties.
The premise
Standards stay high. The risk is managed in how work is designed and led.
Strategic positioning
High-performance environments are built on demanding standards, ambitious expectations, strong individual accountability, candid feedback and disciplined execution. Well designed and well led, those conditions attract and retain high-calibre people, sharpen decision-making and deepen client confidence.
They also carry foreseeable psychosocial risks — some structural, arising from how work is designed and managed; others emerging from the way sustained pressure shapes behaviour, relationships and people's willingness to raise concerns. These risks are characteristic of funds management, investment banking, law and professional services, and they are recognised hazards under Australian work health and safety law.
Reform-grade Respect at Work, delivered at the heart of government.
NSW Parliament
Culture Plus Consulting was engaged by NSW Parliament to design and deliver Respect at Work and Trauma Informed Response training across its workforce — a flagship reform initiative responding to the Broderick Review of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in NSW parliamentary workplaces. This engagement represents a proud achievement in delivering reform-grade Respect at Work training in high-scrutiny environments.
NSW Premier's Department
In an ongoing engagement, Culture Plus Consulting delivers Respect at Work training to the Premier, Ministers and Ministerial staff — a key recommendation of the Goward Review aimed at building respectful, safe and accountable workplaces at the heart of government.
Programme snapshot
People leaders, team heads, partners, directors and executives in high-performance commercial environments — funds management, real estate and investment, banking, law, consulting, accounting and professional services.
Endorsed capability partner
Culture Plus Consulting is proud to design and deliver flagship DEI programmes for the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) — Australia's peak HR professional body — supporting HR leaders and practitioners to build capability for inclusive leadership and organisational change.
Connect with us to explore how evidence-based DEI training can help your organisation build capability, strengthen culture, and deliver meaningful, measurable change.
How this differs
Culture Plus runs several programmes that touch psychosocial risk. They are not interchangeable. This one is purpose-built for organisations that intend to remain high-performance and need their leaders to keep pressure productive rather than harmful.
Written for cultures where demanding standards and strong individual accountability are deliberate design features — not problems to be dismantled.
Starts from the business case for the high-performance model, then names the foreseeable risks it carries. Leaders are not asked to trade performance for safety.
Concentrates on the hazards that cluster in high-pressure commercial settings: role overload, low job control, poor role clarity, inadequate recognition, procedural injustice, conflict and interpersonal harm.
Treats leader behaviour under pressure as a control in its own right — including how standards are held, how feedback is given and how a leader's own stress response sets the emotional tone.
Extends to third parties, client interactions and work social events, where power imbalance and alcohol elevate risk.
Three hours, single session, senior-audience pacing — built to be practicable for leaders who cannot be released for a multi-day journey.
This programme · Leading Performance Safely
Sustaining performance in a demanding culture without creating psychosocial harm.
Leaders in high-performance commercial environments.
High performance is the context and psychosocial risk must be managed within it.
Broad capability build across the fifteen recognised psychosocial hazards, hazard identification, risk assessment, controls and consultation.
All people leaders and managers, any sector.
You need a whole-of-organisation baseline in psychosocial risk management.
Mental health as an operational safety competency — recognising early warning signs, supportive conversations, mental health risks that originate outside work.
Operational and frontline leaders where poor mental health is a safety risk.
Human-factor risk, fatigue and impaired judgement drive incidents.
Team climate: speaking up, admitting error, challenging decisions, learning from failure.
Intact teams and their leaders.
Silence, low candour or poor learning from mistakes is the presenting problem.
Positive Duty, sexual harassment and sex-based harassment prevention, receiving disclosures, bystander action.
People leaders with conduct responsibilities.
Respect@Work compliance and conduct prevention is the driver.
These programmes are complementary. Many clients run this workshop for senior commercial leaders and our broader psychosocial safety leadership programme across the wider management population, or combine all three streams through the integrated Safety · Respect · Inclusion pathway.
What's at stake
Chronic high demands without adequate resources or recovery contribute to burnout, absence and presenteeism. Over time these conditions diminish the energy, attention and judgement high performance depends on, put the retention of sought-after people at risk, and reduce capacity exactly when it is most needed.
Unmanaged pressure creates the conditions for interpersonal harm. Sustained stress, competition, power imbalance and a culture where raising concerns feels risky are recognised risk factors for bullying and harassment — damaging the trust and collaboration high-performing teams depend on.
Employers must protect psychological as well as physical health and eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, prioritising elimination and work redesign over administrative responses and individual coping. The Positive Duty requires proactive measures to eliminate sexual and sex-based harassment, sex discrimination and related conduct.
Sustaining high performance requires treating psychosocial risk management as a practical leadership capability, built into how work is designed and led. The legal obligations reinforce this.
Programme architecture
A single continuing scenario runs across the modules, developing with each session so the learning compounds. The case is drawn from your operating context and co-designed before delivery.
Why does psychosocial safety matter in a high-performance environment, and what are leaders responsible for managing?
What leaders leave with
Practical toolkit
Every framework used in the workshop is provided as a practical, one-page tool. Leaders leave with specific, low-burden commitments to their teams — the transfer mechanism that turns a session into a capability shift.
Work design and management, interpersonal, and traumatic content and environment hazards, in one reference.
Elimination through to individual support, with worked examples of higher-order controls for each hazard.
What are we noticing? What is creating the hazard? Who is exposed, how often and how severely? What can we change?
A structured approach to consultation on psychosocial risk, including what to escalate and when.
A five-step sequence for leaders to steady themselves before responding to a difficult interaction.
Six principles for holding standards and giving feedback without amplifying harm.
Six trauma-informed leadership principles adapted for a commercial leadership context.
What to ask, what not to say, and how to receive a disclosure safely and refer.
Distinguishing incivility, microaggressions, unlawful conduct and serious misconduct — and why the base matters.
Direct, distract, delegate and delayed responses, including third-party and social-event settings.
Before, during and after obligations for work functions, alcohol and client entertaining.
A closing self-diagnostic that turns the programme into a personal leadership commitment.
Regulatory alignment
The duty to protect psychological as well as physical health, and to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable — applying the hierarchy of controls and consulting workers on risk.
Controls taught in the workshop are consistent with the SafeWork NSW Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work. They are indicative rather than prescribed — duty holders must assess and control risk based on their own circumstances. For background reading, see our psychosocial hazards guide, risk assessment guide and ISO 45003 guide.
Measuring impact
Early signals of change in leader behaviour
Downstream outcomes visible at organisational level
Moving forward
Organisations work within real constraints — time away from delivery, budget, logistics and operational pressure. The programme is designed around your context so impact is maximised within what is actually available to you. Optional pre/post evaluation design and reporting is available.
We meet your stakeholders, review relevant risk, engagement and conduct data, and confirm the leadership behaviours you need to shift.
Scenarios, language, examples and tools are built around your operating environment, values and risk profile.
Facilitator briefing, participant pre-work and logistics agreed within your operational constraints.
One representative cohort completes the full workshop — approximately four to six weeks from appointment.
Participant feedback, facilitator refinement and your sign-off on the final design.
Subsequent cohorts on the agreed schedule, each with a post-delivery debrief and an optional 60-day follow-up check-in.
Design and facilitation
Sessions are facilitated so senior leaders can be candid about their own behaviour under pressure without exposure or judgement. That candour is where the shift happens.
A unified leader pathway. One specialist, one continuing case scenario, and 6.5 live hours across three integrated modules — psychosocial safety, respectful workplaces and inclusive leadership — replacing three separate programs with one compounding capability build.
Selected work
Trusted partners
Felicity, you are always excellent and have such a lovely way of running the workshops. You are the clear authority in the room and yet never make anyone feel wrong or uninformed — it's great to watch the way you manage the content and people. You are very generous and create a great space.
Our methodology
Every Culture Plus programme is built on the same evidence-based methodology. Hover any step for detail:
Your facilitator
CEO, Author and Principal Consultant
Every Culture Plus engagement is delivered with behavioural rigour and practical relevance by Felicity Menzies — organisational psychologist, author, and specialist facilitator, and a former senior executive in financial services.
Credentials
Verified accreditation to deliver Cultural Intelligence (CQ) assessments and training from the global standard-setter.
Frequently asked questions
If you have a question we haven't covered, write to us — a real human responds within one working day.
A three-hour, customised leadership workshop built for high-performance environments. It equips leaders to distinguish productive challenge from preventable psychosocial risk, and to design and lead work in ways that sustain performance over time. Around 80% of the session is application, discussion and practice.
Still have questions?
Talk to FelicityWhile you're here
Equip leaders to manage psychosocial hazards under WHS Regulations, ISO 45003 and Positive Duty.
Psychosocial Hazards & Safety Training for Leaders →Build speak-up culture, constructive challenge and high-performing teams — based on Amy Edmondson's research.
Psychological Safety Training for Teams →Manager-level capability to set standards, respond to disclosures and meet the positive duty.
Respect at Work Training for Managers →Further reading
Keep pressure productive
Talk to us about a three-hour workshop customised to your operating environment, leadership expectations and risk profile — starting with a pilot cohort.
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