Under pressure, people at work start to feel distrusting. Decisions no longer seem fair. It feels costly to speak up. Sometimes no one really knows the best thing to do next. We call these signs of internal damage. The signs aren’t physical, and won’t show up on your balance sheet until the next crisis.

But left alone, internal damage worsens. It doesn’t fix itself with a new policy or a better press line; trust erodes further, people leave without saying why, and eventually another incident happens that catches everyone by surprise, because the real cause of the first one was never addressed.

Every organisation communicates what it expects of itself: in its annual report, strategy, terms of reference, employment contracts, in the mission and values it states publicly. That’s usually the first place worth looking, because what an organisation committed to and what it did under pressure rarely match exactly; finding where they diverge is where repair starts.

The WayFinders Group is Britain’s only specialist organisational repair firm. 

At some point, most leaders are able to sense something has changed but often can’t name what. Usually, this happens because what your organisation says and what it does have stopped lining up, and that’s what breaks trust between the people inside it. 

We work with chairs, senior independent directors and chief executives who want it fixed properly.