[Be Exceptional] Shining the Light on Employee Experience Consultant, Melanie Marshall
Meet Melanie Marshall, Adaptive Culture Expert, Employee Experience Consultant, Speaker, Author, Thought Leader and Advisor
Translating and working between strategy and operations is Melanie's thing, so think of her as like a personal trainer and coach for closing the gap between reality and vision.
Life is too short to be stuck in organisations where we can't add value, or feel like we're always in the losing team. As an adaptive culture expert and employee experience consultant, she loves growing people and improving how they work.
After 20+ years working as an internal and external coach for leadership, management, service improvement, and ICT change, the journey travelled hasn't always gone to plan.
Melanie is an improver by nature, and her energy comes from sharing how organisations and the people in them can be adaptive. According to her, work makes up a large chunk of our life so we need to make it worth our effort - why settle for average when we can feel trusted and free?
The psychological and practical game to shift thinking, change behaviour, and get results can be tough. She was crazy enough to compete in two bodybuilding competitions just to prove to herself that she can adapt emotionally, mentally, and physically!
With an extensive public sector background in complex, large-scale organisations, and private industry experience, she understands the clarity, systemised approach, and discipline needed to make the most of what people have and adapt for sustainable high performance.
As an Air Force veteran, she's also passionate about helping private companies create veteran-ready cultures that benefit everyone and partner with Mission Bridge for this.
Why Melanie focuses on trust
According to Melanie, everything we do is based on trust. It's risky, contextual, emotional, and essential for leveraging our skills and growing further. For her, and the people she worked with, they don't always have trust when they need it and are dedicated to creating more of it. They often struggle to trust themselves, and/or others to make significant changes, even with a clear vision and strong reasons to do things differently.
On the corporate side, she has experienced ridiculous amounts of time, money, and sanity wasted on disconnected and unsustainable 'solutions'. She's also suffered from the overuse of external experts to implement and improve things with limited success. As a previous public servant, and after experiencing client pain and frustration as a consultant, she doubled down hard to create a practical and evidence-based approach for achieving better outcomes at scale.
According to her, the primary reason so many improvement plans fail is that 'leadership, performance, and culture is everyone's responsibility'. It can’t be outsourced, led, or sustained by anyone other than you and your teams. This is the employee experience — and her focus as an employee experience consultant.
Another big reason for failure that she is emphasising is a lack of dedicated resourcing and skills. She has seen many clients fail because they are overwhelmed by expectations, don't trust the changes to be made, and aren't set up for success.
Seeing and feeling the pain of distrust due to massive gaps between big-picture strategies and operational realities, she wrote her book Trust as a practical guide to bring people together.
She's passionate about starting with one thing and building confidence by developing and growing what leaders at all levels can do now.
What I love most about Melanie is her incisive wisdom and warmth.
She has so much empathy for her clients coupled with a depth of expertise on trust and what intakes to create exceptional customer and employee experiences. She can cut to the core of an issue in an instant.
As a leader she shines in complexity and uncertainty, not only helping to build psychological safety and trust with others, but teaching us to trust ourselves. After all, as Lao Tzu says "He who does not trust enough, Will not be trusted".
You can connect with Melanie on her LinkedIn profile here!
As an employee experience consultant and a Woman with Influence, Melanie is part of our Women with Influence Community, maybe you can see yourself being part of this community too!?