Relational Leadership Consulting
Your team isn't broken.
It's unspoken.
Fixed-scope engagements that surface what your team isn't saying — and turn it into something they can act on
The Problem
Organizations are good at structure. They're less good at people.
Most leadership development optimizes for performance metrics, process management, and output. It assumes the hard part is knowing what to do.
It isn't.
The hard part is the room. The unspoken tension that shapes every meeting. The feedback that never quite lands. The conflict that goes underground instead of getting resolved. The trust that has to be rebuilt after it erodes. The leader who knows exactly what to say and can't quite say it.
These dynamics determine whether your strategy actually works — whether your frameworks get used, whether your best people stay, whether alignment is real or performed.
They live beneath the surface of every organization. And most organizations leave them entirely unmanaged.
Our Belief
The quality of your leadership culture is the quality of everything else.
Not as a nice sentiment. As a structural reality.
The relational patterns your leaders establish — how they navigate tension, give feedback, make decisions together, hold each other accountable — become the invisible architecture that either accelerates or erodes everything you build.
Actually Humans develops the human capacities that make that architecture strong.
Our Approach
Within five days, we surface what your team can't see on its own.
Every engagement begins with a structured, multi-perspective stakeholder diagnostic. Team members, peers, and sponsors each complete a depth interview on their own time. Within five days of kickoff, we deliver a synthesized read — with themes, role-based comparison, and the actual quotes that matter.
Not a survey. Not a personality assessment. A real diagnostic that tells you what's happening beneath the surface of your team — from the perspectives of the people who live it every day.
That diagnostic becomes the foundation for everything that follows: the readout, the working sessions, the coaching, the charter. Your team isn't working from a generic curriculum. They're working from their own data.
Depth, not breadth
Structured interviews that go beneath the surface — not a form with rating scales.
Every perspective
Role-based comparison across leaders, direct reports, peers, and sponsors.
Progress you can see
Midpoint pulses and 90-day check-ins so the sponsor knows what shifted and what didn't.
What You Get
Three engagements. Fixed scope. Fixed price.
Every engagement includes a structured stakeholder diagnostic, skilled facilitation, and concrete deliverables your sponsor can point to.
For a stuck, conflicted, or post-disruption team
The Team Reset
The most common buy. For teams where the unspoken dynamics are driving everything — and everyone feels it but no one's named it.
Currently booking Q3 engagements
What's included
Synthesized stakeholder diagnostic within 5 days — direct reports, peers, and cross-functional perspectives
Diagnostic readout to the leader, then to the team
Five 90-minute working sessions with the team
Five 60-minute 1:1 coaching sessions with the team leader
Midpoint pulse at Week 4 — what's shifted, what hasn't
Closing session with written team charter
Sponsor debrief with synthesized outcomes
90-day check-in — what stuck and what didn't
Price includes everything above. Travel for in-person sessions and personality assessments available as add-ons.
For a new leader who needs to hit the ground running
New Leader Integration
A new leader shouldn't spend their first two weeks in back-to-back 1:1s. They should spend their first week absorbing a synthesized read on what their people actually think — then have the right conversations with the right people.
Currently booking Q3 engagements
What's included
Synthesized stakeholder diagnostic within 5 days — direct reports, peers, and sponsor perspectives
Biweekly 1:1 coaching for the new leader across 12 weeks
Two facilitated team sessions
Sponsor checkpoints throughout the engagement
Targeted follow-up plan based on stakeholder data
90-day check-in on integration progress
Price includes everything above. Travel for in-person sessions and personality assessments available as add-ons.
For a C-suite that's aligned on paper and not in the room
Executive Team Tune-Up
Executive teams don't fail from lack of strategy. They fail from dynamics nobody is senior enough — or safe enough — to name in the room. Six months is what it takes to build the trust that makes those conversations possible and the habits that make them stick.
Currently booking Q3 engagements
What's included
Synthesized stakeholder diagnostic within 5 days — all perspectives, all levels
60-day and 120-day progress pulses
Extended 1:1 coaching for each team member
Quarterly facilitated sessions with the full team
Ongoing sponsor reporting at each milestone
Written six-month roadmap at kickoff
Starts at $90,000, scoped to your situation. Travel for in-person sessions and personality assessments available as add-ons.
Start Here
The Team Pulse
Not sure which engagement fits? Start with a Team Pulse — a focused mini-diagnostic that shows you what's actually happening on your team.
Three respondents. Five questions. A synthesized read delivered within three days — with themes, patterns, and a clear point of view on what's going on. Useful whether or not you work with us.
3
Respondents
Leader, direct report, peer — the perspectives that matter most.
5
Questions
Depth interviews, not a survey. Each respondent spends about five minutes.
3
Days
From kickoff to a synthesized diagnostic in your hands.
Free for qualifying organizations. No commitment required.
What We Keep Finding
Three patterns, in almost every team that isn't working.
It's never what's on the table.
When a team is stuck, the conversation in the room is almost never the conversation that matters. Whatever's on the table — the missed deadline, the strategy disagreement, the person everyone's frustrated with — is real, but it's the surface. The thing that's actually getting in the way is below the table, and the team can feel it but won't talk about it. So they keep building plans on top of partial information. And goals built on partial information are partially successful at best.
Every team runs on invisible rules.
We all carry rules about how other people should behave in meetings, in conflict, in decisions. We don't say them out loud — and then we quietly punish people for breaking rules they were never told and never agreed to. One person speaks first in every meeting because they believe that's how you establish credibility. Another holds back because they believe you gather information before you take a position. Each one privately distrusts the other: the talker thinks the listener is concealing; the listener thinks the talker isn't taking anything in. Neither says it. And the team starts to feel friction it can't locate, distance it can't explain, and churn it can't account for. Multiply this by a dozen unspoken rules across a dozen people, and you have most of what looks like dysfunction in most teams.
The work is to lower the cost of truth.
Teams don't get unstuck by trying harder, aligning more, or running another offsite. They get unstuck when the cost of saying the true thing drops far enough that the true thing can be said. Our entire approach is built around this: give every person on the team a private, low-stakes place to say what they actually see, then give the team a synthesized version they can look at together without anyone having to be the one who said it first. Once the invisible is visible, the team can do the thing they couldn't do before — design forward from a complete picture instead of a partial one.
Who We Are
Built from two decades at the intersection of human transformation and organizational life.
Actually Humans was founded by Dayna Seraye and Christopher Gray — practitioners who have spent their careers working at the place where inner development meets organizational reality.
Dayna Seraye
Co-Founder, Practice Lead
For more than twenty years I've worked at the intersection of leadership, embodiment, and relational practice — supporting hundreds of leaders to develop the capacities that make hard conversations possible: presence, congruence, the ability to stay in the room when things get uncomfortable. I developed the R.E.A.L. framework — Relational, Embodied, Authentic Leadership — which is the practice foundation underneath how we work with teams at Actually Humans.
My role is the craft. The methodology our engagements rest on, the depth of practice behind the facilitation, the rigor of the relational work itself. Cross-disciplinary training in somatics, psychology, and contemplative practice grounds everything we deliver, and ensures that the work is substantive where it needs to be — not just structured.
Christopher Gray
Co-Founder
I've spent two decades inside organizations — at PeopleSoft, Symantec, Asana, and Meta — watching how teams actually make decisions and how much of what matters stays unspoken. At Asana I led the Conscious Leadership practice and pioneered one of the earliest uses of AI in executive coaching, where I learned something that became the foundation of this firm: people reveal to a structured, private interview what they'll never say out loud to each other or to a consultant in the room.
I built Actually Humans to put that insight to work — combining the depth interviews that surface what teams actually think with the human work of helping them say it to each other and do something about it. I lead engagements with leaders and teams navigating the moments where the relational layer is the thing standing between them and what they're trying to build.
Jamie Lynn Grant
Co-Founder, Operations & Client Relations
I make sure the work actually lands. That means everything from the first conversation a sponsor has with us, through scheduling and logistics across multi-month engagements, through the operational rhythm that keeps the work on time and on scope. Before Actually Humans I spent nearly a decade leading operations for nonprofit organizations focused on mentoring, education, and workforce development — work that taught me how much of an organization's effectiveness lives in the unglamorous parts: the follow-through, the coordination, the things that have to happen consistently for the substantive work to matter.
Productized engagements only work if the operational layer is reliable. That's what I'm here for.
Together, they work with leaders and teams who are ready for something more substantive than a workshop — and more practical than therapy.
Get In Touch
If your people are the work, let's talk.
We work with a small number of organizations at a time. If you're navigating a moment that requires your leaders and teams to operate at a genuinely higher level — we'd like to be part of it.