Hi, I’m Anne-Marie Burbidge, it’s great to meet you.

I help businesses and their people keep pace with growth and change.

I come into businesses that are growing, changing or trying to do something differently, working across individuals, teams and the organisation to build the capability and conditions people need to deliver.

A quick hello…

A CV can tell you where I’ve worked. This page is to help you find out who I am, how I think and what it’s like to work with me.

I believe the best people development starts with understanding what good performance looks like in the context of business goals, not with deciding what training to give people.

Discovery over assumptions

Get curious before jumping to solutions. Ask questions, listen and understand what’s really happening, and what needs to be different.
Design with people over design for people

Involve the people closest to the challenge. Better ideas emerge, and people are more invested in solutions they’ve helped to shape.
Practical application over theory

Ideas, tools and experiences should stand up in the real world. If people can’t use something in their work, it’s unlikely to change much.
Impact over attendance

Success isn’t attendance, completion or great feedback. It’s what people do differently and the difference it makes to performance.
Test and iterate over big-bang rollouts

Start somewhere. Test, learn, iterate. Get useful things into people’s hands early rather than waiting for a perfect finished solution.

What it looks like in practice

From training menu to people performance partnership

Brought in to deliver learning for a growing organisation, I used the early work as discovery to understand what people actually needed to perform. What followed was a broader, evolving partnership spanning capability, leadership, practical tools and organisational insight, designed, tested and adapted as the business grew.

From ‘HR for non HR managers’ to managers who actually manage

Asked to deliver a pre-designed programme in a fast-growing global financial services business, I stepped back to understand what success really looked like. The result was a practical manager development ecosystem combining workshops, peer learning, real business challenges, clinics, playbooks and community, building capability and ownership.

From learning about leadership to leading through real work

Taking over the development experience within a senior talent programme, I designed the work around genuine organisational challenges rather than hypothetical leadership content. Leaders identified and tackled real business problems together, using collaboration, experimentation and peer learning to develop leadership capability through the work itself.