BA Psych · MSW(Q) · AMHSW · AICD
Twenty years inside healthcare, government, community services, and high-stakes corporate environments. Currently advising the C-suites of mid-to-large Australian organisations on psychosocial risk and their WHS duty.
After two decades inside care systems — therapeutic teams, homelessness services, hospital floors, executive boardrooms — the same pattern kept showing up. Organisations had EAPs. They had wellbeing programs. They had codes of conduct, incident reporting, governance committees.
And people still fell through.
Not the visible ones — the visible ones got referred, supported, helped. The ones who fell through were the supervisors quietly carrying their teams. The frontline workers most at risk and least likely to call a hotline. The high-performers whose departure surprised everyone except, in retrospect, the colleagues who'd been worried for months.
The question that wouldn't go away: what would it take to make that gap visible? Not in a survey. Not in an annual culture review. In the operating model. In the cadence executives already had. In language a CFO could sign off on.
Improve Your Team is the practice that grew out of that question. It is what happens when twenty years of clinical, applied-psychology, and systems-leadership experience gets focused on a single problem: making psychosocial risk visible inside organisations that already think they have it covered.
"I don't read slides. I read rooms. By the end of an hour with an executive team, I usually know more about where the gap is sitting than the engagement survey did."
The practice has evolved from Leila's earlier work as Cinnamon Consultancy into Improve Your Team — a deliberate sharpening of focus, from broad team-and-culture consulting to dedicated psychosocial risk and WHS capability for mid-to-large organisations. Same practitioner, same diagnostic lens, much narrower category. The change in name reflects a change in what we do, who we do it for, and the standard we hold the work to.
Leila's clinical and academic credentials are the load-bearing layer underneath the advisory work. They are not the headline — but they are why the headline holds.
An applied psychology foundation (BA Psych) built on with a qualifying Master of Social Work, MSW(Q). Trauma-informed practice training. Continuing professional development across psychosocial-hazard regulation, organisational psychology, and systems leadership.
Therapeutic team leadership across Sydney's homelessness and mental-health sectors. Senior specialist roles supporting Aboriginal services. Current contribution to nationwide rapid-response capability.
C-suite advisory across major NSW aged-care, principal contractors on Sydney infrastructure projects, national community-services operators. Engagements range from one-off Discovery to retained Strategic Partnership.
Accredited Mental Health Social Worker (AMHSW) and member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD). Professional indemnity and public liability insurance certificates supplied on request to procurement teams.
Diagnostic before prescriptive. The first move is always to understand the operating model, the pressures, and the gap as it actually sits — not as a generic framework would describe it.
Calmly authoritative. Direct, not blunt. The voice of a senior advisor who has seen every variation of "we have an EAP, we're fine" and has the patience to explain why it isn't enough.
Equally comfortable in a board meeting and a pre-start briefing. Reads people fast; reads operating models faster. The work happens through conversation, observation, and the questions nobody else is asking.
Refuses generic. If a workshop won't hold without the diagnostic context, we will say so. If you are in better shape than you think, we will tell you that too.
Quotes are chosen for substance, not sentiment. Named references travel privately with a signed scope.
"She walked into the executive room, and within twenty minutes she was naming the things we'd been talking around for eighteen months. Not in a confronting way — in a way that gave us permission to actually deal with them."
— CEO, multi-site aged-care provider [permission pending for naming]
"The Wellbeing Champion program actually stuck. We've run three external programs before this one. This is the first one our supervisors are still using six months later."
— RTW Coordinator, principal contractor, major Sydney project [permission pending for naming]
[Placeholder testimonials — to be replaced with approved, verbatim quotes once written client permissions are secured.]
A growing collection of podcast appearances, articles, and speaking engagements. Listed in full on the Insights page (joining v3.0 in Release 2).
[Placeholder — Insights / Press & Podcasts module joins in Release 2 of the build sequence.]
A Discovery Call with Leila is thirty minutes. No obligation. We tell you whether we're a fit — and what we'd do about your specific gap.
Find out where your risk lives with Leila