Francis Lake

Francis is founder of Green Juniper Limited, a people consultancy focused on making work brilliant.  This means enabling people to work at their best individually, form strong teams and come together in a high performing organisation.  His focus is on identifying the work challenges, understanding context, applying psychology, and trying to shape human-centric and future focused solutions.  

He built his skills and experience at Lloyds Banking Group and Virgin Money, during which time he’s gone through merger and both sides of acquisition.  He has been a leading voice on continuous performance management for around a decade, with award-winning success.  His approach to shaping purpose at Virgin Money has become the benchmark for Virgin Companies and the work he led in relation to smarter hybrid at Virgin Money was seen as “bleeding edge” practice by Gartner and appeared in Harvard business review.  

Since founding Green Juniper Limited he’s worked with organisations in heritage, the arts, tourism, health, technology and financial services.  Over the last twelve months he’s balanced the consultancy with operating as Interim Chief People Officer for Border to Coast Pensions Partnership, giving yet another lens on work and working life.  He complements this with acting as trustee for charities including Homelink Family Support and the Lens - both charities doing incredible work.  He is an occasional guest lecturer at Edinburgh University Business School, intermittent blogger, and conference speaker.  He has written guidance for the CIPD in relation to AI policy and applying AI into HR practice.  All of these give more insight into the working practices and lives of different people, helping to shape his approach.

Outside work, he’s an empty nester and accidental endurance athlete.  In the last six months he has run 225km in five days in Northern Sweden and cycled across South America covering 1000 miles (and the Andes) in nine days.  He’d like to kid himself that committing to these challenges has nothing to do with turning 50....