Client Spotlight: Welldoing OS for La Fosse
Improving individual, team and company performance
This isn't just productivity training.
It's the missing system between deciding what matters and actually getting it done. Most people know how to set priorities. The harder part is having something trustworthy enough to turn those priorities into action, day after day, without carrying it all around in your head.
There's a specific kind of relief in watching someone go from scattered to sorted.
A few years ago, I worked with the then CEO of the London-based recruitment firm, La Fosse, on his own personal productivity - the kind of one-to-one coaching that starts with one person trying to get their head above water. Sixteen hours, one-to-one, working through everything from his inbox to his sense of where the company was actually heading.
It went well enough that he asked for more. Not more coaching for him - a whole company version of it.
What followed was an 12-month programme built into the fabric of how La Fosse worked. Not a workshop. Not a one-off away day. A system.
What I built
Everything ran on two questions.
What do you actually do, the CARE system: Capture, Arrange, Review, Execute.
A practical answer to the daily flood of tasks, ideas, and half-finished threads that every growing company generates.
Why do you do it, PROVE: Projects, Roles, Objectives, Vision, Essence.
The part that stops "productive" from meaning "busy." The part that asks what any of it is actually for.
I rolled it out in layers. Sixteen hours one-to-one with the CEO. Workshops and one-to-one for the eight directors. Group sessions for the 22 managers, then smaller groups to make it stick. Extra time for the four people already excited enough to spread it themselves - the evangelists. A lunchtime talk for everyone else. And, at the end, a Train the Trainer programme - three people from L&D given everything they needed to keep running it without me.
That last part mattered most. The programme didn't end when I left the building. It went on to onboard over 100 new starters.
What people said
The director who took over as CEO partway through put it this way:
“You left a profound impact on my personal productivity... simple tools I still use today that have helped grow my career and the La Fosse business.”
One director put it more simply:
“I’m feeling far more proactive... rather than reactive and getting bogged down. I now have more room to breathe.”
That's the whole point, really. Not just more output. More room.
A second director described the specific relief of no longer carrying two separate mental loads:
“Mixing home and work life has already had a positive effect on all my ‘home’ jobs that normally I have a niggle about when I’m at work. Now I know they’re all plugged in, I just forget about them”
A third was more deadpan about it:
“His email method has changed my life. (Seriously).”
And a fourth found something less expected in it - a way of handling the ordinary overreactions that come with a stressful job:
“It’s really helped me no end in handling the stressful - and somewhat natural - overreaction to problems that aren’t really problems, just issues that need actions.”
Different people, different sticking points.
That's usually how it goes - nobody needs the system for the same reason.
Years on, one of them put the whole thing more plainly than I ever have:
“I still use this system years later. Most people know how to set priorities; the much harder bit is having a trusted system for turning those priorities into action consistently. That’s what Welldoing OS gave me. It wasn’t just a better version of the way I already worked - it felt like a category difference. The missing system between knowing what matters and actually getting it done.”
Why I'm telling you this now
I built Welldoing OS out of exactly this kind of work - not as a product first, but as something that happened to companies who needed it, one careful implementation at a time. La Fosse is one of the clearest examples I have of what it looks like when a team doesn't just hear the idea, but actually lives inside it long enough to change how they work.
If your team is drowning in doing and light on direction, that gap is exactly where this lives.
If your team’s in that place, you can reach me here.
Breathe well. Be well. Do well.
Michael