If you feel more stressed at work than ever before, you’re not alone. In fact, several recent Gallup polls reveal that workplace stress is at an all-time high due in part to declines in employee engagement, a growing mental health and well-being crisis and poor management. The remedy? Intentional leadership and supportive managers who can restore connection, clarity and culture.
That’s where Verosa comes in. The London-based company offers leadership and management training programs that equip professionals with practical neuroscience-based strategies and tools to make the most of their teams. Since Verosa was established in 2019, founder and CEO Beth Hood and her team have blended deep executive coaching expertise with interactive, thought-provoking methods to help participants around the world—including individuals and companies in Europe, the Middle East and the United States—make a better impact on their teams and wider organizations.
Image of Beth Hood
Verosa was born after Hood left a career with the British government and moved into the field of organizational psychology. While working as an executive coach, she noticed the gap between offerings for leaders that were either very focused on inner stability and personal development or business acumen, foresight and critical thinking.
“I felt like there was a gap where those two things could meet quite neatly and that was where Verosa was born and actually also where the ‘relationship cycle’ came from that informed our philosophy,” Hood says.
With support from a group of like-minded colleagues, Hood built programs that moved away from the one-on-one executive coaching and the traditional leadership training that’s offered in a lot of workplaces. Instead, Verosa’s hands-on, human-centered experiences help managers and leaders utilize the relationship cycle, a process that starts by understanding today’s “VUCA” environment.
VUCA is a situation characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. While VUCA is based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, it was first introduced more broadly in the late 1980s by the U.S. Army War College to describe the complex and unpredictable environment after the Cold War. The term has been widely adapted by the business world to describe the challenges of leading in an unpredictable environment. (Sometimes a “H” is added to the acronym, for “hyperconnectivity,” to incorporate the age of social media, smart phones and the internet.)
With predictability at an all-time low, Hood says VUCA+H describes the environment everyone seems to constantly live in now—a “permacrisis” marked by unforeseen and unpredictable events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, conflicts in the Middle East and economic uncertainty. All these things impact organizational culture, making the modality of risk aversion that companies used to manage disruption in the early 2000s and before ineffective.
“Those jump scares that we get in horror films weren’t just happening then, now they’re happening all the time,” she says. “So, because of that, we need to create a leadership methodology, a way of being, that responds to that reality well.”
In Verosa’s programs, the relationship cycle comes down to leaders’ abilities to pause and develop the mindset, skills and strategies to navigate uncertainty with confidence rather than have all the answers. “It’s not actually rocket science,” Hood says. “It’s simple neuroscience.”
Rather than follow their natural human instincts to move into a mode of fight or flight in chaotic times, which can lead to burnout, individuals learn how to choose pause over pace, depth over breadth and clarity over urgency. But this mindful approach isn’t new. It’s based on many historic ways of thinking, such as Buddhist teachings, businessman Stephen Covey’s stoic rhetoric—and, notably, psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s ideas on the System 1 and System 2 modes of the human mind.
“[Kahneman] essentially identified that we have these two working systems in the brain where we’re either working very instinctively, which is often what’s happening in the fight, flight, freeze phenomena,” Hood says. “Or we can move into a System 2 space, where we are taking in data and using our prefrontal cortex in a more sophisticated way. And when we’re able to move and stay into that space, we make better decisions.”
To get leaders to a place where they can essentially be the “calm” in a mad world, Verosa offers programs tailored to clients’ needs that can be completed within various time frames, whether that’s four days, 12 months or multiple years. No matter what path participants take, though, progress always starts with self-awareness.
“We’ll start with the individual and then we’ll look more relational—the immediate relationships,” Hood says. “Then we’ll start to look at the system beyond the relationships, and then finally take an enterprise lens.”
One of Verosa’s greatest challenges is working with talented leaders who struggle to think differently from the ways that have brought them success in the past but aren’t serving them now. But Hood says taking small steps is key and even tiny changes can make a big impact, such as implementing mindfulness or deep breathing or periods of reflection before meetings. “If there was a golden thread running through all this, it is emotional intelligence because emotional intelligence starts with self,” she says.
If leaders can turn within, tune into their strengths and weaknesses and develop emotional intelligence, they can hopefully make the workplace a less stressful place for employees, too.
How to Succeed in the VUCA+H Environment
Hood offers four tips for navigating today’s unpredictable world.
Call out what you’re afraid of. “What is it in your environment that’s unpredictable?” Hood says. “Move along each one and just jot down some notes. Unless you can name it, you can’t actually deal with it.”
Make peace with your fears. Accepting what you can’t change on your list of “monsters” is important. To cope, Hood recommends turning to mindfulness. “Getting present in the moment that you’re in and not thinking either backward or forward,” she says.
Develop optimism. While humans have a horrible negativity bias, gratitude works wonders in fast-moving environments. “It serves us better to be thoughtful about all the great things around us that we are blessed with,” she says.
Build in periods of pause. Give yourself the permission and time to collect the right data, which will help you make better decisions in the long run. “Spaciousness is the antidote to VUCA+H,” Hood says.
Image courtesy of GorgeV/Shutterstock
This article was first published in the January/February 2026 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Get your copy here.
