Chief Spirit Officer at Awake Conscious Play | HR & Conscious Leadership Architect | HR Consultant | Change Manager | Leadership Developer | Executive Coach | Strategist
She had hired 600 people in a single year at a company that was doubling in size around her. By any conventional measure, she had already won. And yet the question kept surfacing, in boardrooms, in coaching sessions, in the quiet moments after a transformation launch when everyone applauded and nothing actually changed. Somewhere along the way, Zhanna Zhuravleva stopped trying to fix organizations from the outside in.
Zhanna Zhuravleva is now Chief Spirit Officer at Awake Conscious Play, a role that did not exist when she started her career, and one she essentially had to invent the language for. Before that, she was HR Director at Akvelon, a distributed technology company whose client roster includes Microsoft, Google, and Reddit. She has worked across more than 30 countries, holds a Master’s in International Human Resources Management from Kingston University, and is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD. The most powerful thing about her is not any single credential. It is that she built her authority in the hardest, most measurable version of HR before deciding the real work was somewhere else entirely.
From St Petersburg to Cornwall, the Long Way Around
Born in Georgia, she went on to live in St Petersburg,, and eventually London, before settling in Cornwall in 2021 after visiting the UK and, as she puts it, falling in love with it. Her early academic life was spent as a postgraduate researcher and lecturer at the International Banking Institute in St Petersburg, and fThat gap became her specialty. At ELSO, employees, standing up a leadership development center and supporting three mergers and acquisitions, each one requiring a new organizational structure. At KORUS Consulting, the ambition scaled further. The company was doubling, and Zhanna Zhuravleva was tasked with hiring roughly 600 people in a single year while building the entire people function underneath them: grades, competency models, development plans, a team of 19 HR specialists. She was named Best Leader of the Year in 2020 for how she embedded the company’s mission and values into that growth, not despite the speed of hiring but inside it.
By the time she reached Akvelon in 2023, her remit covered a business entity of 300 employees within a larger, distributed global organization. That shift, paired with a sharper focus on individual employee experience and motivation, contributed to a 38 percent improvement in talent acquisition performance and a 10 percent reduction in turnover.
The Balance She Refuses to Trade Away
What made the results durable, in her account, was not choosing between the business and the people inside it. It was refusing to separate them. “The aim was to build a system that created value for all stakeholders, the business, clients and employees, at the same time,” she explains. “For me, this balance is at the heart of effective HR.” It is a simple sentence carrying a complicated discipline: most transformation efforts pick a side, either optimizing for the business case or the employee experience, and Zhanna Zhuravleva has built her reputation on refusing that trade.
That discipline is also what she now teaches to HR leaders directly, and what she brings into rooms far less comfortable with spreadsheets. As Chief Spirit Officer at Awake Conscious Play, she works with leaders and teams on presence, spiritual intelligence, and Integral Spiral Dynamics diagnostics, tools designed to surface the value systems and cultural tensions that sit beneath an org chart. To an executive audience trained to be skeptical of anything that sounds abstract, she does not lead with mysticism. She leads with a business observation.
“Sustainable performance comes from what I call a Value Creation State, when a leader is connected to themselves, their energy, their purpose and their inner resources,” she says. The evidence she points to is not a feeling. It is a behavior: change fluency. Leaders operating from that state, she argues, spend less energy defending old assumptions and identities, and more capacity actually moving between contexts under pressure without becoming reactive. “It is not about escaping the material world,” she adds. “It is about becoming more present and whole within it.”
Why Transformation Programs Trigger an Immune Response
Her explanation for why so many culture transformation programs collapse follows the same logic. Having worked across 40 countries, she has watched the same failure repeat itself in different languages. “Most transformation programmes are designed at the visible level, structures, processes, behaviours and communications, but they do not address this deeper layer,” she says. That deeper layer includes the unconscious patterns, collective fears, and defense mechanisms that determine what a system actually rewards and punishes, regardless of what the new values poster says. Left unaddressed, the organization treats the transformation like an infection. “The result is often an immune response,” she explains, and the change is gradually rejected.
Her counter to that immune response is an integral approach, combining Spiral Dynamics with psychological and systemic tools to diagnose what is really happening inside a company before deciding what to build, and in what order, and at what pace. It is the same instinct that shaped her very first 90 days in every greenfield HR function she has ever created. She starts with the board, not the org chart, mapping their meanings, purpose, strategy and how the business actually creates value. She explores the system’s unconscious values and evolutionary stage in depth through the tools of Integral Spiral Dynamics, examining which unconscious games govern the system, what those games protect and what they punish. She studies the real employee experience and cultural patterns already in motion. “I see HR as an architect translating business strategy into people strategy,” she says. What she deliberately avoids is importing a fashionable framework before she has done that diagnosis. Every organization, she insists, has its own context, and the function it needs has to be built for that context specifically, not copied from the last one.
That same diagnostic patience shows up in her volunteer work, which she describes with far less fanfare than her corporate résumé but treats with equal seriousness. For years she coached women rebuilding their lives after domestic abuse, several of whom went on to launch their own businesses. Today that work continues through a community of women leaders she supports on a voluntary basis, offering coaching and reflection practices. In her paid work, one leadership example stands out: a talented CEO whose intense emotional reactions were costing him his senior team. Working on self-awareness and behavioral patterns under pressure, Zhanna Zhuravleva helped him communicate differently, and his relationships with his leaders strengthened into something sustainable. Different rooms, same method: locate the pattern underneath the visible problem, then work there first.
Zhanna Zhuravleva, Chartered FCIPD, is Chief Spirit Officer at Awake Conscious Play, based in Cornwall, United Kingdom. She works with executives and HR leaders across 40 countries, helping them diagnose the unconscious patterns behind culture, incentives, and decision-making, and rebuild organizations from that deeper layer outward. To connect with Zhanna, visit her LinkedIn profile.
