Willow Ethos
Making Culture More Than Just Words

Every organisation has a culture. The challenge is understanding the one that really exists— rather than the one leaders hope or assume exists.

People can work in the same organisation and experience it very differently. What feels positive from the boardroom may look quite different elsewhere, and even organisations that actively seek feedback do not always hear what people genuinely think.

Willow Ethos helps organisations understand that reality.

“Understanding people” is both the consultancy’s purpose and the principle behind its work. It means looking beyond values statements and engagement scores to understand how people actually experience an organisation: the behaviours they see, the decisions that get made and the things that are sometimes left unsaid.

A Closer Look At Culture

Willow Ethos deliberately operates as a boutique consultancy. Its founding partners remain closely involved throughout an engagement - from the first conversation with a client to listening to employees, analysing the evidence and working with leaders on what happens next.

“You can’t go in with a template. People will always surprise you,” says Matthew Bennett, Founding Partner.

Rather than starting with a predetermined answer, Willow Ethos begins by listening. Its work reaches across organisations, creating opportunities for people at different levels, in different roles and locations to describe their experience of working there.

Independence matters. People will often say things to someone outside the organisation that they may hesitate to say internally, particularly when the conversation concerns leadership or established ways of working.

Those qualitative insights are combined with quantitative evidence. Surveys can show where something may be happening; conversations help uncover why.

In one recent engagement with a large industrial organisation, Willow Ethos worked across multiple levels of the business. A consistent theme emerged: employees wanted a stronger sense that their experience and expertise genuinely influenced what happened.

The important part was not simply identifying the issue, but helping leaders understand the behaviours behind it, agree what needed to change and create accountability for following through.

For Willow Ethos, asking people for their views creates an expectation that something will happen as a result. When organisations listen but fail to act, people quickly learn that speaking up achieves little.

From Behaviour To Organisational Development

Understanding culture also means understanding behaviour.

Willow Ethos uses CultureScope, a behavioural assessment tool developed by iPsychTec, to explore the relationship between the behaviours people bring to their work and the behaviours the see in the environment around them.

An organisation may, for example, say it wants innovation while continuing to reward caution and risk avoidance. It may recruit entrepreneurial people into an environment that makes it difficult for them to operate entrepreneurially. Over time, those contradictions affect performance, engagement and retention.

CultureScope helps make those dynamics visible, giving organisations a more evidence-based understanding of the behavioural environment they have created.

But Willow Ethos does not see behavioural data as an end in itself.

“Our role as consultants is often very close to that of an executive coach,” says Paul Bennett, Founding Partner. “We spend time understanding leaders not simply in terms of their role, but as people—how they think, how they behave and the impact that has on those around them.”

That understanding helps leadership teams move from broad statements about culture and values towards something more practical: the behaviours, decisions and everyday actions that make those ideas real.

The same challenge becomes particularly important when organisations grow, internationalise or acquire other businesses. Culture cannot simply be copied and pasted. In an acquisition, the culture of the organisation being acquired may be part of what made it successful in the first place.

For Willow Ethos, understanding people is the starting point. The real value lies in turning insight into action—helping leaders see their organisation more clearly, make better-informed decisions and strengthen the behaviours that support performance.