Blaire Palmer is a renowned workplace culture speaker, leadership expert and organisational change specialist whose work challenges conventional thinking about work, leadership and human connection in business.

With more than two decades of experience coaching boards and senior leaders and helping organisations rethink how they lead and empower their people, Blaire combines hard-won insights with practical strategies that foster stronger collaboration, psychological safety and inclusive environments.

Her career began as a producer on the BBC’s Today Programme, and she later trained as one of Europe’s first corporate coaches, working with companies including GSK, Mattel, Airbus and the FA to drive real cultural transformation.

A prolific author of books such as What’s Wrong With Work?, The Recipes for Success and The Hyper Creative Personality, as well as host of The Human Revolutionaries Show, Blaire draws on both journalistic curiosity and coaching rigour to help leaders create workplaces where employees can thrive.

In this exclusive interview with the Champions Speakers Agency, Blaire Palmer discusses how leaders can empower their teams, build inclusive cultures and create truly safe spaces for people to share ideas and concerns.

In environments characterised by constant pressure and speed, how can leaders genuinely empower employees rather than defaulting to top-down control?

The first question I have actually is why is everything so fast-paced and high pressure? I think that we’ve got into this way of thinking as business owners or as business leaders that everything has to be done and it all has to be done yesterday, and every day is just a race to get things complete. And actually, not everything should be like that.

I think we have to slow business down. We have to slow our thinking down and we have to look at what’s making it so busy. So that’s the first piece. Yes, there are going to be priorities. Yes, there are going to be deadlines. But not everything has to be urgent and important. And if it is, we have to look at why that is.

But given that we work in this high-paced, high-pressure environment, I think that we need to distribute decision-making. When all the decision-making has to be pushed up the hierarchy so that senior people can sign it off, then that’s very slow. You need to be able to empower your people with information so that they can make decisions, because they’re the ones that know their job best.

From your experience, what are the most critical leadership behaviours required to build truly inclusive cultures, particularly for women in senior roles?

I think the most important quality that leaders need if they want to create inclusivity is that they need to be willing to listen. We all think we’re listening, but we’re not. We’re not really going and standing in the shoes of other people in our businesses, and the kinds of people we would like to have in our businesses but, for some reason, they’re not coming to work for us.

Listening is more than just understanding. Listening is about really putting yourself in their shoes and actually looking at the world through a different lens. I talk about going and standing on someone else’s mountain. You’re standing on a mountain and you see the world your way. When you go and stand on someone else’s mountain, you see it from a different angle.

Then all of a sudden you can start to see the barriers and the unintentional things that you’re doing that make it difficult for those people either to work for you in the first place or to bring their uniqueness to the job that you’ve brought them in to do.

So go and stand on other people’s mountains, really listen, and start to see the world through their lens. Then together you can come up with solutions for making the organisation more inclusive to them and a whole variety of other people.

What practical steps can leaders take to create psychologically safe environments where people feel able to speak honestly and challenge upwards?

I do talk a lot about listening, and I think that’s the first element of creating a safe space. It sounds really cliché. It sounds like surely I’ve got something more cutting-edge than that. But I don’t see a lot of real listening going on.

What I see is an environment where people feel it’s unsafe to share what they really think. So they say what feels safe, which might be a little flavour of how they’re really feeling, but isn’t the whole picture. The whole picture would be very uncomfortable to senior people and therefore to the people who are making decisions about that person’s future. So no one wants to shake things up in that way.

Listening is where it starts. The other element is to be aware of something called the power gradient. It’s a lot safer to speak your mind when you are senior to junior people than it is for junior people to speak their minds to senior people, because there’s just more at stake for those junior people.

So you might say you’re senior, you might say, “My door is always open. Come to me. Tell me what you really think.” But that’s easy for you to say. You’ve got nothing to lose. They have a huge amount to lose.

So you have to demonstrate by your actions that you are willing to hear the very uncomfortable things, and not try to brush them away or present a counterargument. You have to be willing to really hear what they’re telling you, sit with the discomfort, and accept that it may well be you that’s making it hard for them.

When leaders leave one of your talks, what fundamental shift in mindset or behaviour do you most want to see them adopt?

I hope that audiences feel a sense of confidence when they’ve been to my speeches. What I talk about is revolutionary in the sense that so many business leaders aren’t doing it, but actually it’s pretty simple. It’s about being a more enlightened person.

Anything that audience members can do that enhances their empathy, their self-awareness, their ability to connect and communicate with other people, and to bring out the best in other people, that’s leadership. I think we over-complicate leadership. We try to turn it into a science. It’s not a science. It’s about authentic human connection with yourself and with other people.

So if people leave one of my speeches feeling reassured that all they really need to do is work on themselves as a person, and that this will help them be a more impactful leader, then I’m delighted.

Practically speaking, if they listen a little harder, listen with a willingness to change their mind, look at the limits they’re putting on their willingness to trust people and loosen the reins a bit, and create an environment where they can bug-fix solutions rather than needing solutions to be right first time, then that’s the icing on the cake.

This exclusive interview with Blaire Palmer was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.