Resources and energy
People can be grieving, frightened, lonely or questioning everything – and still turn up for work. As leaders, we do not always know what people are carrying.
People can be grieving, frightened, lonely or questioning everything – and still turn up for work.
As leaders, we do not always know what people are carrying. They may still be doing their job, looking after their team and getting on with things, while life is happening underneath.
Through my chaplaincy work, I have sat with people who did not need another service or referral. They needed someone to be there – without an agenda, without judgement, and without needing them to become a problem first. Sometimes, simply being present creates the trust for a conversation that may never happen formally.
This has shaped the way I understand leadership. People are more than their role, their performance or the issue in front of us. They bring their whole lives to work.
After years in this work, I believe we need more humanity in how we lead – not only when someone is struggling, but from the beginning. That is why I believe in HBA’s approach: it brings the human being into leadership from the start.
Financial services
I have learnt that stepping away is not stepping out. It is how I come back – to my work, my family and the life I love.
I love my work. I have four children and people who matter enormously to me. I can keep going for a very long time. Sometimes too long.
When your attention is constantly moving between work, home and people who depend on you, you can miss your own state until you are exhausted.
I don't always want to talk about it. The people who know me best often know without asking me to explain. Sometimes I just need to get outside and walk.
I have learnt that stepping away is not stepping out. It is how I come back – to my work, my family and the life I love. It gives me something back that constantly being available cannot. Perhaps that is why HBA approach made immediate sense to me.
Financial services
It is not necessarily because they are no longer successful, but because their definition of success has changed.
People come into financial markets knowing the work is demanding, offering competitive compensation and meaningful challenges.
People may feel that their contribution is no longer recognised or rewarded in a way they consider fair, which can lead them to seek a different environment or direction. Sometimes priorities change, or people reach a point where the traditional measures of success no longer motivate them in the same way. I have seen senior leaders walk away from comfortable corporate careers to pursue entrepreneurship or a different calling. It is not necessarily because they are no longer successful, but because their definition of success has changed.
I think several factors are at play, but culture – both societal and organisational – plays a big part. In Singapore, the dynamics of a multicultural workplace can also depend on the composition of the team and which cultural norms are more dominant. Many of us still carry fairly traditional Asian values when it comes to hierarchy and seniority. Challenging someone more senior, especially someone who may influence your career, does not always come naturally and is not always encouraged. I think what helps is building trust and creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up. Employees need to know that having a different view, or respectfully challenging someone senior, is okay and will not work against them. That confidence takes time to build.
Financial services
I do not look for reasons to excuse the behaviour, but rather stay open to other explanations and be willing to listen before reaching a conclusion.
I try to remind myself not to judge someone's behaviour based on what I can see, particularly when it seems unreasonable. I find it more useful to ask myself what might be happening for that person that I don't know about. I do not look for reasons to excuse the behaviour, but rather stay open to other explanations and be willing to listen before reaching a conclusion.
My work over the years has taught me to question things that do not look right or seem inconsistent. I try to treat those moments as a reason to investigate further rather than immediately decide what they mean. I look at the facts from different sides, ask what I might be missing, who else might see it differently, and whether there is something I have not considered.
A performance or conduct problem is not always fixed by working on one person.
Before we suggest anything, we find where the problem actually sits:
SELF (Individual)
One leader's judgement and behaviour under pressure, like the call made late in the day with half the facts.
WE (Relational)
How your senior leadership team challenges, decides, and works together.
SYSTEM (Structural)
The rules, workloads, reporting lines and physical setting that limit what people can reasonably do.
Fix what is actually in the way. Don't ask one leader to make up for a broken system.
b%20(1).jpg)
Backed by Science, Delivered by Experience.
Leadership relationship quality is associated with people actually leaving, not merely intending to.
ρ = −.24 [−.29, −.19] · 42 samples · 28,637 employees · actual voluntary turnoverSurveying the forest: A meta-analysis of the antecedents of voluntary employee turnover. Personnel Psychology, 71(1), 23–65.
LimitsAssociation, not cause. North American samples.
Challenge sits here because it is what the four days actually do. No meta-analysis links it to attrition, so it is marked as practice rather than evidence.
Working conditions predict future sick leave, measured over time rather than at a single moment.
burnout OR 2.34 [1.59–3.45] · low job satisfaction OR 1.92 · low decision authority OR 1.49 · 20 prospective cohortsA meta-analysis of observational studies identifies predictors of sickness absence. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 60(11), 1105–1115.
LimitsJob conditions, not leader behaviour. Prospective, not experimental.
Lost productivity is not listed here. We could not find a meta-analysis linking these levers to a presenteeism outcome, so we do not claim one.
Safety climate is associated with the incident count itself, across the largest study of its kind.
safety climate → accidents and injuries ρ = .24 · leadership → burnout ρ = −.36 · 203 samples · 186,440 workersSafety at work: A meta-analytic investigation of the link between job demands, job resources, burnout, engagement, and safety outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(1), 71–94.
LimitsIndustrial workforces. The read across to psychosocial risk is by analogy.
Where followers see their leader as ethical, self-reported deviance is lower.
workplace deviance ρ = −.34 · 8 samples · 1,807 people · overall review 134 samples, 54,920 peopleA meta-analytic review of ethical leadership outcomes and moderators. Journal of Business Ethics, 139(3), 517–536.
LimitsPerceptions of ethical leadership, not audited conduct.
Role ambiguity degrades performance. Role conflict, which is often treated as the same thing, does not.
role ambiguity → performance r = −.21 · role conflict → performance r = −.07, described as negligibleJackson and Schuler (1985) revisited: A meta-analysis of the relationships between role ambiguity, role conflict, and job performance. Journal of Management, 26(1), 155–169.
LimitsGeneral job performance.
This row rests on the least direct evidence of the eight. Structured discussion is known to improve what a group knows (Mesmer-Magnus and DeChurch, 2009, across 72 studies and 4,795 teams), and the operational indicator is agreed with you rather than assumed.
Trust inside a team predicts team performance, and it holds even after controlling for how the team performed before.
ρ = .30 · 112 studies · 7,763 teamsTrust and team performance: A meta-analysis of main effects, moderators, and covariates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1134–1150.
LimitsAssociation, not cause. The largest in this set.
Business units in the top quartile of engagement differ from those in the bottom quartile on every operational measure the business already tracks.
absenteeism 78% · turnover 51% (low-turnover firms) / 21% (high) · safety incidents 63% · quality defects 32% · productivity 18% · profitability 23%Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition. 736 studies · 347 organisations · 183,806 business units · 3,354,784 employees · 90 countries.
LimitsGallup owns the instrument. A quartile gap, not an intervention effect.
How a manager receives challenge predicts whether people bring the next problem, measured at a later point in time rather than the same one.
managerial openness predicts subsequent employee voice · psychological safety → voice ρ = .31 · leader relations → psychological safety ρ = .44 (30 samples, 10,180 people)Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869–884. With Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165.
LimitsVoice measured as behaviour, not concerns logged in a system.
The one randomised trial we found where training managers changed a hard outcome.
cluster randomised trial · 88 managers · about 4,000 employees · significant reduction in work-related sick leave, p = 0.049 · reported return of £9.98 per £1Workplace mental health training for managers and its effect on sick leave in employees: A cluster randomised controlled trial. The Lancet Psychiatry.
LimitsOne trial. One emergency service. p = .049.
And the finding that runs the other way, which we publish alongside it.
participatory organisational interventions: mental health SMD = −0.04 · work performance SMD = 0.01 · 8 cluster randomised trials · null across all outcomesEffects of participatory organizational interventions on mental health and work performance. Journal of Occupational Health, 68(1).
LimitsParticipatory interventions, not leadership development. Mostly Japanese workplaces.
A meta-analysis of 335 leadership training studies covering 26,573 leaders identified the design features that separate development which transfers into the workplace from development which does not.
Lacerenza, Reyes, Marlow, Joseph & Salas (2017), Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1686–1718. Transfer δ = .82, organisational results δ = .72, no evidence of publication bias.
Five factors · 67.4% of the variance
Five things coaching changed in these executives. The one involving their own manager came last.
And half reported no change at all in how that manager communicated back.
Executive coaching: It works! Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 60(1), 78–90. 114 executives and 42 coaches in one global pharmaceutical company. Principal component analysis, α = .95, isolated five factors accounting for 67.4% of cumulative variance. 98% gained insight into how their actions are perceived and 91% reported better results with direct reports, but only about 50% saw improvement in how their supervisor communicated back.
LimitsSelf-reported. One company. No control group. Variance in a questionnaire, not in outcomes.
HBA works on the system, not only the leader
Self-motivated managers still stall
The most intrinsically driven managers in the unsupported group did no better, and on some measures worse.
Wanting to grow is not the same as being able to do it alone.
Do I need coaching to achieve a learning goal? Coaching, goal orientation, and goal framing: A randomized control trial study. Current Psychology, 44(16), 13574–13590. Randomised controlled trial, 202 managers across 13 organisations, 43 external coaches.
LimitsThe mastery finding sits just outside significance (p = .087). One country. Self-rated at a single point.
HBA builds the support they are missing
686 executives · 300+ organisations
Asked in their own words what coaching changed, senior executives did not describe insight. They described running a team.
Executive leaders' perspectives on the impact of executive coaching on their leadership development. European Journal of Training and Development, 50(10), 127–145. 1,130 open-ended responses from 686 executives and 158 coaches across more than 300 organisations, predominantly Fortune 500, spanning North America, EMEA, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.
LimitsCoded descriptions, not measured outcomes. Lead author runs the firm studied.
ALLIANCE across difference.
BRIDGE across what we have learned to keep separate.
HOME for the whole.
OUR MANIFESTO
Homebridge® Alliance (HBA) exists to widen what consequential executive decisions take into account: people, relationships, systems, future generations, and the natural world.
By bringing analytical, emotional, and collective intelligence into alignment, we ensure the leader remains accountable while the decision takes more of reality into account.
GATEWAYS TO CHANGE
We do not sell pre-packaged programmes.
We solve specific leadership challenges.
Path I
The first read
A short, anonymous reflection that maps where you are before anything is proposed. Strictly private: no employer scoring, no record on file, and no unsolicited follow-up.
Play SignalPath II
The interactive learning practicum
An online simulator for senior cohorts that establishes objective behavioural baselines.
Hard-coded privacy and zero gamified badges.
Path III
The liminal residential intensive
Deep residential immersions for senior leaders changing direction or facing a critical transition. The Serpent Path is four days living in, then eleven weeks of integration back at work.
For individuals and organisations: Serpent Path for women & Whale Path (for mixed-gender cohorts). For Family/Intergenerational pathways: Swan (female), Eagle (male) · Raven (mixed-gender / inclusive).
Path IV
The bespoke enterprise evidence-to-change cycle
An evidence-backed integration of behavioural, wellbeing, and psychosocial-risk analysis to co-design structural workplace interventions and re-measure progress.
Initiate EnquiryBuilt from experience
Homebridge Alliance was founded by Ina MacKinnon, a mother shaped by Eastern and Western cultures, with two decades advising financial institutions on governance, risk and compliance across Australia, Singapore and the UK. She specialised in financial crime and forensics, and holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. She created REINA® to connect personal development with the decisions, relationships and working conditions through which people shape culture.
