Tom Day
Partner Consumer Goods and Front End Innovation, PA Consulting
Innovation Leader & Partner @ PA Consulting | Tech Advocate, Consumer Champion
Tom Day shares practical advice on difficult conversations, leadership and communication. Learn how better conversations build trust, improve performance and strengthen teams.
Tom Day is a Partner at PA Consulting, where he helps organisations solve complex problems through innovation. Over more than 25 years, he has worked across consumer goods, financial services, retail and government, leading teams through uncertainty and change. Outside work, he’s an endurance athlete, obstacle course racer, and someone who believes that most conflict can be prevented through better communication.
Episodes featuring Tom Day
How to Have Difficult Conversations Before They Blow Up
Practical advice for handling difficult conversations at work, at home, and in life.
Learn how to handle difficult conversations with confidence. Tom Day shares practical strategies for building trust, preventing conflict, and creating stronger teams through better communication at work and at home.
Free downloads created by Tom Day
Download Tom Day’s Manual of Me to help your team understand your working style, strengths, communication preferences, and motivations. A practical template for building trust, improving teamwork, and preventing conflict before it starts.
The Manual of Me is a simple one-page template that helps colleagues understand how to get the best out of you. Rather than waiting for misunderstandings or conflict to arise, it encourages honest conversations about your working style, strengths, motivations, communication preferences, and anything happening outside work that may affect how you show up.
Created by Tom Day, this practical tool includes prompts such as:
- This is what I’m like on a project
- I do my best work when…
- People say I’m good at…
- I don’t respond well to…
- I’ve got some stuff going on…
By sharing this information at the start of a project, teams can build trust faster, play to each other’s strengths, and avoid many of the difficult conversations that normally emerge later.
Download Tom Day’s Manual of Us to align your team before a project begins. Define roles, objectives, values, ways of working, and success criteria to improve collaboration, build trust, and prevent conflict in high-performing teams.
The Manual of Us is a team planning canvas designed to create alignment before work begins. Instead of assuming everyone shares the same expectations, it guides teams through the conversations that matter most:
- Purpose;
- Objectives;
- Roles;
- Deliverables;
- Ways of working;
- Values;
- Strengths;
- Risks;
- Time commitments; and
- What success looks like.
By completing the canvas together, every team member contributes to a shared understanding of how the project will operate. The result is greater clarity, stronger collaboration, and fewer misunderstandings. It’s a practical framework for building high-performing teams and preventing conflict before it has a chance to develop.