Who is Julia?

Julia Felton is a business consultant who has built a reputation for identifying the real issues behind her clients’ challenges. While companies often approach her with concerns about team dysfunction, lack of trust, and poor collaboration, Julia quickly uncovers that these surface symptoms stem from deeper underlying causes. With her insightful approach, she helps organizations move beyond treating just the symptoms—enabling teams to break free from silos, improve communication, and achieve the results they desire. Julia’s clients rely on her expertise to foster genuine trust and collaboration within their teams.

Key Takeaways

* Is your team chasing results but feeling disconnected? Julia Felton says it’s all about energy alignment, not just process. Slow down, reset, and watch collaboration grow.

* Most trust issues in teams don’t come from lack of tools, but from not investing enough in relationships. Build social capital, even if it feels “frivolous”—it’s critical for flow.

* True leadership isn’t about controlling everything. Julia Felton reminds us: empower your team, step back, and let the natural talents shine for real productivity.

* Vision isn’t a one-time message. Keep communicating your purpose so everyone knows where you’re heading. As Julia Felton notes, clarity builds trust and connection.

* Take inspiration from nature: humans, like herds, thrive when leadership is shared. Health, harmony, unity—let these guide your team to higher trust and adaptability.

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Transcript

Note, this was transcribed using transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

trust issues, team building, rewilding leadership, misaligned energy, team dynamics, collaboration, silos in business, business productivity, meeting fatigue, leadership styles, performance paradox, shared leadership, empowerment, micromanagement, business culture, teamship, employee engagement, organizational trust, social capital, remote work challenges, communication in teams, business vision, talent management, role alignment, leveraging strengths, sustainable leadership, natural leadership, flow in teams, founder-led business, relationship building

SPEAKER

Julia Felton, Stuart Webb

Stuart Webb [00:00:01]:

Hopefully. Hi, and welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science. Five questions over coffee. I’m delighted. Today I’ve been joined by Julia Felton. Julia is an expert in, well, helping to fix trust issues within teams using rewilding leadership. She’s really going to help us to understand exactly how we can rebuild those trust issues which so often dog startups, even rapidly scaling a growing company. So, Julia, welcome to It’s Not Rocket Science.

Stuart Webb [00:01:01]:

Five questions over coffee. I hope you’ve got your coffee in front of you. I’ve actually got a fruit tea at the moment, but that’s because it’s after Christmas. I try to be careful with my body.

Julia Felton [00:01:12]:

Well, me too, Stuart. I’m, I’ve got ginger and lemon here.

Stuart Webb [00:01:15]:

So I’ve been off your only way to live. Let’s start by understanding, you know, the sort of person you’re trying to help. You obviously, you’re obviously trying to help somebody that’s got a problem. But how do, how would you recognize them? What would they, what would they be saying? What would they be doing in order to sort of, you know, for you to be able to say, well, that’s exactly the sort of person I’m trying to help.

Julia Felton [00:01:42]:

Yeah, that’s such a great question. Because I think what typically happens is what people come to me with and what actually the problem is, are very different. And I think often what we find in business, isn’t it, we, we, we, we of treating the symptom rather than the cause. So sort of people come to me and they go, oh, my team’s not functioning properly, Julia. You know, and people don’t trust each other. There’s a lot of bickering going on, we’re not getting the results we want. You know, there’s people are working in silos, nobody collaborates together. Those are the sorts of things that my clients are saying.

Julia Felton [00:02:19]:

And my clients range from, you know, smaller SMEs up to larger corporates, you know, and this, these kinds of problems exist throughout many types of organizations. So anywhere where you’ve got people involved, really. Because at the end of the day, trust drives everything in business. Right.

Stuart Webb [00:02:41]:

So what would some of those, I mean, you just talked about sort of smaller SMEs, large corporates. I mean, they’ve tried everything before, haven’t they? They’ve done the courses, they’ve sent people off on the training courses, they’ve, they’ve done that, they’ve done the online stuff, they’ve done everything they can and it’s still not fixing it. So what are the sort of things that they are trying that you break through and you find that even having done this stuff, they’ve still got these issues.

Julia Felton [00:03:08]:

Sure. So I think if we distill it back down and we go to, well, what’s really the cause of what’s going on in the business? Rather the biggest challenge, if I was to sum it up like that, is it’s, it’s not this lack of skill or ambition or desire, but it’s actually all to do with misaligned energy. So we’ve got brilliant purpose driven leaders out there. They built often fast growing businesses, but somewhere along the way this momentum turns into mayhem, right? And the team’s busy, but it’s not productive. People, you know, having loads and loads of meetings. We know this meeting fatigue, right? The progress stalls, everyone’s working harder, but people aren’t working collectively together, they’re not pulling in the same direction. So I call that the performance paradox. Because what we’re seeing is companies chasing these results so hard, but they’ve become really disconnected from the very people and the energy that creates them.

Julia Felton [00:04:08]:

So what happens is these businesses start running on logic and process rather when what we really need is this connection and trust and flow, Flow. And so I think what I really see leaders craving is a much more natural, sustainable way of leading where we get everyone pulling in the same direction and we stop forcing the results and we start getting the results flowing naturally because everyone’s working in their right energy. And as you know, Stuart, you know, I’m very passionate about nature. I reference everything back to the natural world. And, and you know, when we look at the natural world, the natural world understands the ebb and flow of energy and how it goes inside cycles. And that’s what we’re not really seeing in business right now is leaders really understanding that. And it’s interesting, we’re recording this right after Christmas, right, where people have actually had an opportunity to kind of rest and re reset themselves for this year. But we tend to wait till Christmas, right.

Julia Felton [00:05:10]:

And we take a week or two weeks off, try and rest and reset and then we don’t. Then we try and go for another whole year and, and that’s not feasible for people.

Stuart Webb [00:05:21]:

So what are some of the things that you then introduce into the business in order for them to, to understand that it’s that, you know, to develop that ebb and flow. What is it you do to help them essentially reset on a more regular basis?

Julia Felton [00:05:36]:

Yeah, well, obviously as we, as we just talked about there, you know, reset the rhythm and flow and recovery. So for me, that’s actually about leaders taking time out to rest and relax and, and it’s that psychology of slowing down to speed up that, you know, instinctively we know that, but everything’s saying to us, oh, you know, if I, if I take the afternoon off, I’m not going to get everything done. But I don’t know about you, Stuart, but I know when I step away from my desk, if I’m really struggling with something, all of a sudden when I’m away from, from my work and what I’m doing, I get all these insights. So it’s about understanding that in order to get into flow, we actually have to go through a period of resetting ourselves and resting and stepping away from the problem in order to get back. You know, it’s a good old adage, isn’t it? You know, we get our best ideas in the shower, wherever it is, out on walks and stuff like that. So I think it’s about really purposefully crafting time into our weekly schedules to do that. Because I think most people, they go into the office, you know, foot to the metal, go, go, go all day and we get to the end of the day and then they’re like, I’m not even sure what I’ve accomplished because we’ve just been being that busy fool that, you know, you and I know, I’ve talked about, you know, we’re spending all this time doing things, but we’re not doing the right things that we need to do.

Stuart Webb [00:07:05]:

Yeah.

Julia Felton [00:07:05]:

So, you know, if we look at some of the mistakes that people are making around, this is the first thing we often see companies doing, is we put all these tools right. We’ve got problems. Like you said, you know, teams are working in silos, there’s no collaboration. So we throw tools at the problem. You know, we maybe buy, you know, a collaboration platform like Trello or Asana or something like that to try and make everyone work more effectively together. And that rarely solves the problem. Right. Or we send people on team building away days or training courses, and all of these can have some marginal gain for the business, but they don’t really get to the shifting the underlying energy or trust dynamics that are actually blocking performance.

Julia Felton [00:07:52]:

And for me, the way that we change those trust dynamics is actually by really slowing down and investing time in building relationships. It’s this importance of social capital within business. Right. And sometimes it seems a bit frivolous. Right. You know, oh, we, we’re stopping and we’re talking to somebody in the corridor. But I don’t know about you, but you know, in the days when we were all in the office and I was in the corporate world, I got all my information from those informal chats. That’s where you knew what was going on.

Julia Felton [00:08:23]:

Of course the trouble that we’ve got right now is with so many people working remotely, all of that informal communication you might want to say isn’t getting shared and you don’t know what’s going on in another team, which you would have found out because you walk with somebody and you went and grabbed lunch with them when we used to go out to the sandwich bars for lunch or whatever or you were making your coffee. So I think there’s a big problem there that we’re not spending enough time investing in building that social capital.

Stuart Webb [00:08:54]:

Yeah.

Julia Felton [00:08:55]:

And go. I’m sorry.

Stuart Webb [00:08:57]:

No indeed. I’m just agreeing with you. Absolutely agreeing with you.

Julia Felton [00:09:00]:

Yeah. And I think one of the other mistakes I’m seeing companies make is that they, when things aren’t going well, there’s a tendency, particularly if it’s a smaller founder led business for the founders want to take everything back, to control everything. Right. You know, if I control everything, it’s going to work better, better. More meetings, more KPIs, more oversight. But actually all that’s doing is draining the founders energy. But more importantly it’s signaling to your team members that you don’t trust them. We’re not allowing them to get on.

Julia Felton [00:09:32]:

They don’t feel empowered because there’s so much micromanagement. And actually really what our team members are looking for is for us to trust them and to empower them to get the job done and then get out their way and leave them to do it. And when we’ve got that, then people will get on and do the job. And then the other lens that I often see going on here is when again when we’ve got problems we want to fix the people, we always think it’s a people problem. And rather than think about, well, what is the potential our team members have got to unlock, how can we leverage them more effectively in the business? What new responsibilities can we give them? What new opportunities can we give them to help them thrive? You know, can we redefine their roles to give them a role which is more naturally aligned to what they love to do? Because we all know we’ve got more energy for the things we love to do. Right. And so if your role, you’re spending 50% of your time doing things you don’t love to do, in it, you’re never going to be as productive as if you’ve got a role maybe where you’ve got 80 or 90% of things time doing the things you love. Now, the caveat I would just say against this is we’re all going to have to do things in our role that we don’t love.

Julia Felton [00:10:50]:

That’s just life. But, you know, we want to spend the vast proportion of our time and when we can start redefining roles so that people do that, it makes a massive difference to their performance, their, you know, their productivity and then ultimately the productivity of the business. So, you know, I reflect back often to my corporate role where I didn’t understand about energy and the best roles that people could go in. And I had this data manager, her name’s Jane. And every single appraisal I was like, jane, you need to get better at spreadsheets, you know, because, you know, you’re running the data center and that’s what you need to do. Failing to realize that her complete zone of genius and what she bought to my business was actually her ability to rally the troops around. She was a great collaborator, a great people person, and I didn’t leverage her skills effectively. So she wasn’t as happy as she could be and I wasn’t getting the best results out of her.

Stuart Webb [00:11:46]:

Yeah, I know. I remember very early on, in one of the first businesses that I, that I founded, somebody took me home on time. It was one of the non executives that sort of came in to help the business, said, are you asking the people that you’re working with anything about, you know, what they do when they go home? And I, I sort of looked at, I’ll be honest, I looked at him. What’s that got to do with this? As in somehow, you know, he was talking complete nonsense. He said, you’ll find those people go home and they run scout groups, they run, they run charity bazaars, they run charities and they run them brilliantly. All of those skills are open to you. If you only knew about them. And I looked at him and thought, that’s a huge insight that I’ve got to think about.

Stuart Webb [00:12:30]:

And it was back to what you were saying there. It’s about communication, isn’t it? I haven’t bothered to say to these people, what else are you up to? And, you know, they turn us, oh, I run a scout group. Are you good at admin? And that’s a really useful thing to know because oftentimes people come into work and they sort of drop all these skills over their shoulder at the front door and then walk in and sort of just come in and do their job, don’t they? Because they don’t think they have to bring any of those skills with them because I’m at work now. And then they go home, they pick up all those skills again and they take them home and they use them very, very effectively. So sometimes it does mean that we’ve just got to speak to each other, ask what’s going on and then go, wow, that’s a really useful skill that we could use and then learn to let them get on with it.

Julia Felton [00:13:17]:

Yeah. And then, and then they feel more empowered, they feel trusted, you know, they know that they’ve been heard and you know, it’s a win, win all round at the end of. But yet so important for us to, to really know our team members, like you say, what motivates them, what’s inspires them and what the skills are that they’ve got that they’re not bringing to the workplace that we could really leverage more effectively.

Stuart Webb [00:13:39]:

Yeah, brilliant. Julia, I’m sure that there’s a. And I’m. I know you’ve given us some very valuable information to stick into our vault, which is at www.systemize.me/free stuff. Gosh, there’s an awful lot of words in there. Immediately after the longish break, talk to us about what you’ve got available for people to be able to sort of advice, guidance that you could give people which they can tap into. And all of this will be available in the vault.

Julia Felton [00:14:14]:

Yeah, sure. So where I always suggest that people start is I’ve got a turbocharge your team quiz, which you can get at businesshorsepower.com forward/quiz. And it’s. What is it? It’s about 15 questions that just really helps you identify where your team’s energy is getting drained. And what I often talk about is something called Team Ship, which we’ll get onto in a minute when we talk about books and stuff. But Team Ship is about how do you. How do you run your business? Rather than leadership, it’s all about teamship, people getting together. And then when you take the quiz, you actually get a free copy of my ebook on how to create a business that runs on teamship and the three pillars that actually underpin that.

Julia Felton [00:15:01]:

And then anyone who’s taken the quiz is also welcome to join me for a Turbocharger quiz audit where I help you unpack the results of the quiz in more detail so that you can start to put together a kind of a short plan on how to how you want to change things in your business going forward.

Stuart Webb [00:15:18]:

And I can, I can assure you because I’ve been on, had a look, good look at that stuff. If you go to systemize me free stuff, you’ll see all of the details of that. And Julia is really good at this stuff. So you will be pleasantly surprised when you see the level of detail that this goes into. Julia, yes, you’re right. We’re about to get on to other things. What was it that brought you to your understanding? You talked about your corporate career, you’ve talked a little bit about your passion for nature. How did you get to now books, courses, programs that enabled you to understand that teamship was actually the thing which needed to drive your day to day existence in your life now.

Julia Felton [00:16:10]:

Yeah, such a great question because I think, you know, once I left the corporate world, you know, like so many of us do, you know, you see things in the rear view mirror, right, that you didn’t see when you were in it. And you know, I look back and I just got really frustrated with the way that we were running and leading businesses. And as everything I looked to nature and horses were a big part of my life. And what I looked to was the way that horses actually operate as a unity in unity, you know, that a team is a horse herd is always concerned with the health, harmony and unity of the herd, how to keep it all together. And they employ something called, I call shared leadership at the time. And shared leadership is this concept of as a leader you don’t need to know everything. And let’s face it, you know, in the good old days before Mr. Google, you know, and we were in the industrial era, it was probably true that the factory manager, they did know everything, right? But that doesn’t exist today.

Julia Felton [00:17:13]:

So I think for any leader today, they want to know that it’s okay to share the leadership with each other. And horse herds do this so well. And we see this in a lot of other dynamics of animals in nature, but they share the leadership. They realize that not one animal can keep the whole herd safe. So in the horse herd, they share the leadership between everybody. But there is a lead marine and a lead stallion within the herd that, you know, have pacific roles and then everyone else in the herd looks for the danger. And I was like, well that would be so much better if that was a model that happened in business where everybody in the organization is responsible for the health and safety of the organization. So even though you are, you know, on the production line or, you know, you’re in the admin team or whatever it might be, you still have a duty of care to ensure that the business is going to stay successful.

Julia Felton [00:18:08]:

So if you see a competitor doing something, you should be able to speak up and say, did anyone else notice that going on over there? That could be a threat for us, you know, so it’s all these eyes and ears looking out. So it was when I read Keith Freshley’s book, Never Lead Alone. He t. He introduces this concept of teamship, which is effectively shared leadership. And I was like, it gave me kind of a framework and some language to use. So I’ve now created my own framework. It’s called the unbridled Teamship roadmap, which helps leaders create this high level of trust, adaptability and shared energy within their teams that we see within, particularly within horse herds, for example. So Keith Farazi, I have to acknowledge him, he kind of gave me the language for this, but it was my life experience of partnering with the horses and seeing things in the natural world, particularly when I lived in Africa, that that kind of bought these two worlds together.

Julia Felton [00:19:03]:

And I was like, yeah, this is a new framework for how we need to lead in the 21st century that is just going to be much more compelling and engaging for people.

Stuart Webb [00:19:13]:

And I think you’re right. The, the, the, the, the days of the command and control have largely gone, haven’t they? Because there are so too many, too many moving parts, too quickly moving for you to be able to make, to be able to control everything. And so unless you’re prepared to allow the leadership to spread, it will be impossible.

Julia Felton [00:19:38]:

And you just become a bottleneck as well as the leader. If you try and keep it all together, right, because everything’s moving so fast, you’ve just not got the capacity to make that many decisions all day, every day. So we’ve got to share it out. Otherwise your business is likely to, to stumble and falter just because you’ve just not got the brain power to do it. All right? So, you know, you can actually end up being the biggest risk factor in your business if you don’t share the leadership.

Stuart Webb [00:20:06]:

Yeah, that’s the challenge. So, Julie, there must be one question that I haven’t yet asked you that you really want me to ask, which will sort of open up, open up the eyes of people who are currently thinking, this is kind of me, but I’m not sure what is the question that you think I should have asked. And, and as you obviously know the question, you probably also know the answer. So what would the answer to that question be?

Julia Felton [00:20:35]:

Well, I hope I know the answer. I think it. I think it’s this reframe about how do we reframe leadership? Because we’re still seeing leadership through this lens of performance and results. And I get that. We’ve got to get that. But actually, how can we reframe leadership to be the role of a leader is more about how do you direct and orchestrate the energy of the people around you? Because performance is the byproduct of where our energy goes. So if we’re really clear on where our energy goes, where our attention is going, then we can get better results. And we see this all the time, don’t we, where you get leaders that something happens and they go, you know, they go in.

Julia Felton [00:21:17]:

This is frenetic, scattered energy all over the place. And that ripples through the team. It causes confusion and nobody knows what they’re doing, and everyone starts running around like headless chickens. And we’ve seen this so often in businesses, you know, when this firefighting throws in, but actually it just causes disarray. And how would it be if the leader recognized in. Actually, in that moment is the moment that you need to become more grounded, more coherent and really pause to go back to the rest and set and pause and. And just be discerning about what’s going on? Is this something that I really need to get frantic about right now, or is this something that I can just slow down, pay attention to and realize there’s different ways I can approach it? And that kind of coherence is very, very contagious within the team, and it slows all the team down. And then we’ve got.

Julia Felton [00:22:14]:

We can be just a lot more discerning then about the decisions that we really need to take. So I think for from when we start looking at leadership, my question would be that you didn’t ask is, you know, what if leadership isn’t about performance anymore, it’s about how do we orchestrate the ebb and flow of the energy of the team so that everyone can work from their natural stance. And therefore we’re shifting from this control stance to getting connection. We’re moving from burnout to flow, and we’re moving into really true leadership that is sustainable for everybody.

Stuart Webb [00:22:50]:

And do you therefore think, and I’m sorry, that I’m going to ask you a question when you’ve just answered a question, do you think in order to sort of support that the leader has to have been able to transmit their vision for the business to everybody. So that when they get into that state of flow, they’re able to operate without constantly referring back and saying, why are we doing this again? I’ve forgotten.

Julia Felton [00:23:14]:

Yeah, absolutely. That’s 100% at the top of everything. If nobody knows where they’re going, nobody knows where we’re going to end up. You know, I often when my clients, you know, I say, well, you know, there’s so many different ways that we could maybe get to. I’m in the uk, so I could get to London at the end of. End of this call, right? But I got to know I’m going to London, otherwise the team will end up in Edinburgh or somebody will end up in Dublin or somebody will fly to New York. Right? And I think having that really clear purpose and vision absolutely underpins everything because it’s. That, for me, is the glue that pulls everyone in the right direction.

Julia Felton [00:23:48]:

And we need to remember that. We need to continually articulate that to come back to communication. It’s very easy for people to go, I’ve told everyone the vision and we expect people to remember it, right? But we have to be embedded into absolutely everything. Everything we do day in, day out needs to be aligned with the vision because people don’t remember, you know, and I know from, you know, having run workshops with clients, I. I remember I run the same workshop, I hosted the same venue, like, four, no, five or six times in a row, and my client attended as a guest each time because it was her venue and it was a particular workshop. Actually, I was running with the horses. And she said to me on the sixth workshop, she goes, that bit you said about xyz, that was a genius, Julia. And I was like, God, that has been in every single workshop.

Stuart Webb [00:24:36]:

It’s such cool content.

Julia Felton [00:24:38]:

And she hadn’t heard it. And of course, this is what we forget about communication. People only hear what they want to hear when they want to hear it. So we’ve got to keep repeating the vision where we want to go to the strategy. And sometimes I think as leaders, we. You can feel a bit like a broken record. We’re like, I’ve told everyone that. But people only hear it and get it when they want to hear it.

Julia Felton [00:25:00]:

Yes, absolutely. Underpins everything, Stuart. Yeah, And. And I think, you know, when we put that clear purpose, that really builds trust because people know, right? People have got that clarity about where we’re going. We know what the outcomes are, we know where we’re heading. So people have got trust that what’s going to happen. We. We’ve got a.

Julia Felton [00:25:18]:

We’ve got a vision, we’ve got a plan. And so that really helps.

Stuart Webb [00:25:20]:

Wonderful, wonderful. Julia, this has been really, really, really wonderful. It’s a really great way to sort of. For me to kick off what we do this year. Just one small thing from me, if you don’t mind.

Julia Felton [00:25:36]:

Yeah.

Stuart Webb [00:25:37]:

I send out about one email a week on the weeks where we’re doing a podcast, and it just. It just tells you who’s coming up and why you need to get in front of the. And be live. We’ve had a number of people, tens of people watching this today. So they got that from, you know, they’ve sat at the desk. They hopefully some of them have gone away and thought, I’ve got some problems I need to resolve. So if you would like to be one of those people who gets the email that sort of says, somebody’s coming up, go to www.systemize. that’s S Y S T E M I S E.com forward slash, subscribe.

Stuart Webb [00:26:13]:

Simple form. It asks you for just your first name and an email address. I don’t want any more than that because I just want to send you an email which basically says it’s coming up, so please go do that. Julia, this has been really enlightening to start with. Wonderful reset of what we should be doing as leaders. Thinking about trying to sort of allow the energy and allow the natural talents to sort of dominate rather than somehow trying to force everybody down into a narrow path in order to sort of make things happen. So thank you so much for bringing that to us, and I really appreciate you spending some time with it. No problem at all.

Julia Felton [00:26:48]:

Thank you so much.

Stuart Webb [00:26:49]:

Thank you very much.

Julia Felton [00:26:50]:

Thank you so much indeed, Stuart. Really appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.

Stuart Webb [00:27:19]:

So I can talk to you.

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