Dr Natalie Isaia, Empresa Psychology
Specialism: Leadership
I help professional services firms to strengthen performance, resilience and leadership skills in high-pressure environments, by delivering specialist evidence-based training to teams and leaders on topics like psychological safety and presenteeism to reduce disengagement, attrition and interpersonal conflict.
About
Empresa Psychology partners with professional services companies to help them strengthen leadership, performance and resilience in high-pressure roles.
We help leaders who:
- Find it difficult to give direct and effective feedback;
- Struggle to balance being supportive with holding teams accountable;
- Are trying to maintain motivation and engagement through prolonged periods of change and uncertainty;
- Struggle to effectively de-escalate conflicts; or
- New managers who find it hard to create safe spaces for their teams to disclose sensitive information.
Our training will benefit:
- Companies going through restructures and redundancy.
- Companies who are growing and have new managers or bigger teams.
- Teams working in a high-pressure environment or remote teams at risk of disengagement.
- Companies wishing to gain a competitive advantage to retain talent and boost productivity.
Workshops are tailored to your organisational context, are designed to enhance existing L&D and HR programmes and focus on practical skills that can be implemented immediately.
We go beneath the surface to create meaningful, measurable impact. Our training targets the psychological and neurobiological drivers of the business-critical challenges organisations face, so that change is sustainable not superficial.
- Our highly specialist, evidence-based psychological training packages: Enhance performance under pressure so that talent can thrive;
- Upskill leaders to develop psychological safety so that engagement is optimised;
- Build team resilience so that burnout is reduced; and
- Reduce absenteeism, presenteeism and attrition.
Our founder, Dr Natalie Isaia, is a Clinical Psychologist with over 1500 hours of experience delivering training to teams in high-pressure environments. Her expertise underpins our science-backed workshops, which drive business-critical outcomes including improved performance, retention and effective leadership during periods of change.
Leadership development programmes
Our Compassionate Leadership training equips leaders with the skills to cultivate Psychological Safety so that team performance is optimised, while leader and employee wellbeing is protected.
When Psychological Safety is low, teams operate in a threat state, reducing the brain’s ability to problem solve, communicate and make decisions. In this state, teams have significantly reduced capacity to adapt to, or effectively manage organisational change.
For leaders and HR, this means more time spent dealing with conflicts, miscommunication, burnout and change resistance.
In the current economic climate, many organisations are pivoting to focus on growth and efficiency, which can heighten stress throughout the company. A time of change and strategic redirection is when you most need your employees to be performing at their best!
In a psychologically safe workplace, teams are held to high standards whilst also feeling supported. Accountability and psychological health coexist, allowing performance, engagement, and innovation to flourish.
To achieve this, compassionate leadership provides a highly effective leadership framework. Our interactive workshops equip managers, directors and C-Suite with the leadership skills and qualities required to bring out the best in their team whilst protecting their own resilience.
Training for teams
Compared with universal wellbeing interventions like EAPs and MHFA, tailored group training has been shown to deliver significantly greater return on investment, achieving an average £7:1 ROI, up to £10:1 ROI (Deloitte, 2020).
Our team workshops go beyond generic stress management to address the psychological drivers of burnout, disengagement, and underperformance in demanding roles.
In addition to core topics such as stress management and resilience, we offer highly specialist topics to augment your existing wellbeing and development programmes.
Workshop topics include:
- Understanding the neuroscience of stress: Equip staff with science-backed strategies to perform effectively under sustained or acute pressure, to reduce burnout risk, errors, and attrition.
- Sustainable resilience in demanding roles: Increase engagement and enhance team coping mechanisms by training teams to identify signs of burnout and to build individual and collective resilience. This will benefit teams operating in high-pressure environments and remote teams at risk of disengagement.
- Mitigating the impact of moral injury: Moral injury is extremely common in many roles and yet is largely unrecognised. Left unaddressed it drives burnout, disengagement, and withdrawal.
- Tame your self-critic: Excessive self-criticism fuels burnout, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism. This workshop equips staff with psychological skills that protect staff against imposter syndrome and perfectionism, ensuring your top talent can thrive without self-sabotage.
Workshop feedback highlights how applicable and impactful teams find our content:
“[Natalie’s] insights were not only practical but also deeply impactful, equipping our [staff] with the tools to handle difficult conversations with confidence and professionalism.”
“A scientific explanation of how threat systems work followed by lots of practical tips, delivered in a very open and engaging way.”
SPECIALISMS
- Upskilling leaders with the competencies required to navigate the Employment Rights Act implications: I make sure your leaders are equipped to manage the human and psychological demands that will come with prolonged disputes, heightened client expectations, and systemic delay.
- Managing high-emotion conversations with both empathy and assertiveness: Most workplace disputes escalate not because of the issue itself but because of how it is handled. I help reduce escalation of formal HR processes by training staff in emotional intelligence skills, so that communication and conflict resolution are improved.
- Balancing support with holding teams accountable: Many leaders think they either need to be hard on teams to get results, or be soft and supportive. I train leaders to find the sweet spot of high psychological safety, so that they can lead through periods of prolonged ambiguity and change while sustaining motivation.
- Leader wellbeing & sustainable performance: I train leaders to apply evidence-based strategies to manage their own stress so they can perform at a high level, model healthy behaviours, and sustain effective leadership.
- Performance under pressure: I empower teams to understand the neuroscience of stress and harness their physiological stress response, so that they can perform effectively in high-pressure situations.
- Burnout prevention and sustainable resilience: I help retain talent by equipping teams with evidence-based resilience strategies that reduce burnout risk, absenteeism, and staff attrition.
- Perfectionism, imposter syndrome & internal barriers to performance: I deliver highly-specialist workshops to address psychological barriers such as perfectionism and imposter syndrome, enabling talent to perform, progress, and thrive.
- Facilitated discussions: In addition to tailored team training, I can facilitate sessions that strengthen team dynamics and reduce interpersonal friction. These can be implemented as diagnostics, stand-alone interventions or within away days.
- Wellbeing strategy & senior leadership consulting: I advise senior leaders and HR teams on evidence-based wellbeing strategies to ensure investment delivers meaningful impact on performance, retention, and engagement.
- Psychological diagnostics & measurement: I measure key psychological metrics (including burnout and psychological safety) to ensure training is data-driven, targeted, and delivers maximum ROI.
