Ehlers-Danlos Society culture, values & behaviours workshop
Client: The Ehlers-Danlos Society
Project: Senior Leadership Culture Workshop | August 2025
What they needed: Align senior leaders around organisational values, strengthen trust, and deepen understanding of culture as a leadership responsibility.
What we delivered: A half-day, in-person workshop combining practical insight, models, and interactive reflection on culture, trust, and collaboration.
Result: Leaders clarified values and aligned behind their meaning, co-created a practical framework of behaviours, built a plan to embed and communicate them, and committed to lead culture from the top.
“It was a great culture workshop and it’s given us a strong place to start and some meaningful actions to put in place. We really enjoyed the interactive elements, and it was valuable to hear such diverse perspectives around the room. ”
The Context
The Ehlers-Danlos Society (EDS) is a global charity dedicated to advancing research, care, and education for those living with Ehlers-Danlos syndromes and hypermobility spectrum disorders. The leadership team is dispersed across the UK and the US, all working remotely, including long-serving executives and newly appointed directors.
As the organisation grows, there is a clear need to ensure its values aren’t just words, but how values are brought to life, so the organisation could work more cohesively across regions. Leaders needed to understand their role in shaping culture and building trust.
Employee survey data and feedback highlighted gaps in alignment, differences in how leadership was experienced across levels, and a need for greater psychological safety. The timing was right for a reset: to move from principles to behaviours, and from intention to consistency.
Discovery & Design:
We began with scoping conversations with the COO and People Operations Manager to clarify objectives, review internal values, and reflect on insights from staff surveys and culture analysis. We agreed on three objectives:
To improve leaders’ understanding of workplace culture and their role in shaping it.
To strengthen psychological safety and trust within the senior team.
To enhance alignment with values and cross-functional collaboration
The design focused on creating a psychologically safe, practical, and thought-provoking space. Activities were chosen to balance reflection and co-creation: values-to-behaviours mapping, group dialogue, and designing cultural rituals.
Delivery:
12 leaders from the US and the UK had gathered for a 3-day offsite
The workshop blended short bursts of theory with individual reflection, small group discussion and whole rooom sharing. Leaders explored how culture is shaped by daily behaviours, what builds or breaks trust, and how values show up in practice. They shared examples from their own leadership, mapped where collaboration was working, and where silos held them back, and co-created habits and commitments to strengthen alignment.
We used the Say, Do, Don’t Do Ladder framework and the Stop, Start, Improve model to identify specific changes and improvements. The session was highly interactive, encouraging honest reflection alongside structured learning. Leaders shared diverse perspectives, debated challenges, and left with visible commitments.
The atmosphere was candid and constructive, with space for diverse perspectives.
What They Achieved:
The workshop delivered both individual and team-level outcomes.
Shared understanding of culture as a leadership responsibility.
Stronger trust and openness within the senior team.
Clear, values-aligned expectations for working across functions.
Greater confidence in leadership roles.
Alignment and connection as a collective team.
Heightened awareness of what builds or breaks trust in their context.
Visible personal and team commitments to values-based leadership.
Practical habits identified to improve collaboration across functions.
Key insights:
Culture lives in our daily behaviours.
Trust is the foundation of effective collaboration.
Leaders set the tone, especially under pressure.
The Impact
A co-created framework of leadership behaviours and commitments, now serving as a foundation for accountability and alignment across the senior team.
The leadership team is revisiting the commitments in regular meetings and beginning to embed behaviours into decision-making, meetings, and feedback practices. The Society plans to extend the work to middle managers, ensuring values and behaviours are cascaded consistently across functions and locations.
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