There is a conversation happening in organizations across Europe, in the Netherlands, in the UK, in Germany and beyond, that is long overdue. It is a conversation about the biological reality of the people who show up to work every day. About the hormones that govern their energy, their cognition, their emotional regulation and their resilience. About the stress responses that erode their capacity for creative thought. About the sleep deprivation that most professional cultures have normalized so thoroughly that nobody recognizes it as impairment anymore.
It is a conversation most leadership programs have never had.
That is why I built Biology in the Boardroom: Understanding Hormones, Performance and Empathy at Work and why I am genuinely proud to announce that it is now available on both LearnFormula and Udemy.
The idea that started it all
For years, I have worked at the intersection of behavioral systems analysis, intelligence research and human risk. My professional life has been built around a single core discipline: looking beneath the surface of human behavior to find what is actually driving it. The narratives beneath the decisions. The vulnerabilities beneath the performance. The signals that most people overlook because they are looking in the wrong place.
When I turned that same analytical lens toward organizational life, toward the teams, the managers, the HR professionals and the senior leaders I work with and teach; I kept seeing the same pattern. People were misreading each other constantly. High performers were being managed as if their decline were motivational when it was physiological. Experienced leaders were being assessed as disengaged when they were hormonally shifting. Teams were being driven into chronic stress activation by organizational design choices that nobody had ever examined through a biological lens.
The problem was not a lack of empathy. It was a lack of accurate information.
And accurate information, in my world, is everything.
What the course covers
Biology in the Boardroom is a two and a half-hour, six-module course designed for managers, HR professionals, senior leaders and anyone who is responsible for the performance and wellbeing of other human beings at work. It is CPD and CE eligible, and it is built for professionals across industries; not just those in healthcare or people-facing roles.
Here is what we cover across the six modules:
Module 1: What nobody told you about your team We begin by challenging the myth of the rational employee; one of the most persistent and costly fictions in professional culture. We introduce the concept of biological empathy: the ability to understand that performance is shaped by physiology, and to lead from that understanding.
Module 2: The female hormonal landscape at work We explore the four phases of the menstrual cycle and their distinct cognitive and emotional profiles. We examine perimenopause and menopause as professional performance issues; not personal health matters to be hidden behind closed doors. And we look at what biologically literate leadership actually looks like in practice.
Module 3: The male hormonal landscape at work We bring the same depth and honesty to the male hormonal experience. Daily testosterone rhythms, the gradual lifespan decline that begins in a man’s thirties, and andropause; the silent performance shift that is consistently misread as disengagement, complacency or loss of drive. This is territory that almost no professional development program touches. It should.
Module 4: Stress hormones: the universal disruptor Cortisol and adrenaline affect every single person on your team, every day. We explore what chronic stress activation does to the prefrontal cortex, how it systematically dismantles the cognitive and emotional capacities that performance depends on, and how leaders can design environments, meetings and communication cultures that work with the stress response rather than constantly triggering it.
Module 5: Sleep, circadian rhythms and peak performance Sleep is the biological foundation beneath every other topic in this course. We explore the architecture of sleep, the role of melatonin, the cognitive cost of deprivation, and the science of chronotypes; the genetically influenced biological differences that determine when individuals are at their cognitive peak. We examine why the default professional schedule systematically advantages some people and disadvantages others; not based on commitment or capability, but based on biology.
Module 6: Leading with biological empathy This is where everything comes together as action rather than knowledge. We explore the personal habits, cultural levers and policy interventions that translate biological literacy into measurable organisational change. And every learner leaves with a personal 30-day experiment; a specific, structured commitment to leading differently.
Who this course is for and who it is not for
I want to be direct about this, because it matters.
This course is not for people who want to become amateur endocrinologists. It is not for people who want to medicalize their leadership or start diagnosing their team members. And it is absolutely not for people who want a new category of excuse for poor performance or difficult behavior.
This course is for leaders who want better data. Who understand that every decision they make about a team member, every performance conversation, every scheduling choice, every response to a behavioral change, is based on a model of what is driving that person. And who are ready to make that model more accurate, more complete, and more honest.
It is for the HR director who has watched talented women leave their organization at exactly the point in their careers when they should be thriving and who has never had the language to understand why, or the tools to respond differently.
It is for the manager who has sensed for years that something was shaping his team’s performance that he could not name and who is ready to name it.
It is for the senior leader who has quietly wondered whether what she is experiencing, the cognitive fog, the disrupted sleep, the emotional variability, is something she should be able to push through, or something that deserves a more honest and informed response.
It is, in short, for anyone who is ready to lead the whole person.
Why now
The timing of this course is not accidental. Across Europe, and particularly in the Netherlands, there is a growing recognition that the biological realities of the workforce can no longer be treated as private matters that politely stay outside the professional conversation. Several leading Dutch and European employers have already introduced menopause policies. The research on chronotype diversity and flexible working is influencing scheduling decisions at the most progressive organizations. The science of stress hormones and burnout is reshaping how the most forward-thinking HR functions think about culture and workload design.
The conversation is beginning. This course is designed to give leaders the biological literacy to participate in it and to lead it.
Where to find it
Biology in the Boardroom is now available on two platforms:
LearnFormula: the professional CPD and CE platform, where the course is eligible for continuing professional development credits across a range of industries and professional bodies. LearnFormula is the platform of choice for professionals who need documented CPD hours and are looking for substantive, rigorous content to meet those requirements.
Udemy: the world’s largest online learning marketplace, where the course is available to a global audience of professionals seeking practical, accessible, high-quality leadership development content.
Whether you are purchasing for yourself, for your team, or as part of a broader leadership development programme, both platforms offer a straightforward enrollment process and immediate access to all six modules.
A personal note
I have built a number of courses over the years; on AI and technology, on generational dynamics in the workplace, on future-ready leadership. Each one has been an attempt to bring the same discipline I apply in my analytical and intelligence work to the questions that matter most in professional life: what is actually driving human behavior, and what can leaders do with that understanding?
Biology in the Boardroom is the course I am most proud of. Not because it is the most technically complex; it is deliberately accessible. But because it goes somewhere that most leadership development is still afraid to go. It takes the biological reality of human beings seriously. It treats that reality as a professional matter rather than a personal one. And it trusts leaders with information that, in my experience, they have always been capable of handling; they were simply never given it.
I hope you will join me there.