Meet The Founder
Tanya Perry-Iranzadi
Leadership System Designer, Author and Founder of Women at Work By Design
Tanya Perry-Iranzadi enables organisations to understand and redesign the systems shaping women’s retention, leadership progression and career longevity.
Leadership Development
Burnout Prevention
Organisation Design
Corporate Restreats
How Tanya’s Work Supports Organisations
Drawing on more than 35 years of experience across people and culture, employee relations, organisational transformation, leadership development and workplace change, Tanya combines organisational strategy with a deep understanding of women’s lived experience.
Tanya partners with organisations to:
- Retain experienced women and reduce avoidable talent loss
- Enable women’s self awareness, burnout prevention and career longevity
- Strengthen women’s leadership pipelines
- Redesign leadership systems for sustainable performance
- Equip leaders to support women more effectively
Experience Across Leadership, Work and Organisational Change
Tanya brings nearly 4 decades of experience across:
- Human resources and employee relations
- Organisational transformation
- Leadership development
- Organisational design
- Restructuring and workplace change
- Culture and behavioural-change programs
- Executive and management consulting
She has worked inside the systems that determine how organisations structure work, manage risk, reward performance, exercise authority and lead people through change in international organisations.
This experience allows Tanya to approach women’s retention, career progression and career longevity not as isolated wellbeing or personal-development issues, but as outcomes shaped by organisational systems, leadership expectations and women’s lived realities.
Work With TanyaQualifications and Professional Foundations
Tanya holds:
- A Master of Labour Law and Relations from the University of Sydney
- A Diploma in Training and Development
- A Diploma in Human Resource Management
- Postgraduate study at master’s level in Organisational Design
- Postgraduate study at master’s level in Strategic Human Resource Management
Her work brings together strategic, organisational and human insight.
Why This Work Exists
Tanya’s work began with a pattern she could no longer ignore.
Across decades working inside corporate organisations, holding executive HR/ People & Culture roles in multinational organisations and advising leaders as a management consultant through complex transformation and change, she repeatedly saw capable women becoming depleted, stepping back, burning out or leaving.
These women were not stepping back because they lacked ambition, resilience or competence. They were trying to succeed inside systems that had not been designed around the realities of women’s lives, bodies, responsibilities, leadership capability or career longevity.
Women were adapting to environments not designed for them.
They were over-functioning, over-preparing, absorbing pressure, carrying invisible work, proving competence and continuing to perform long after their capacity had been exceeded.
At the same time, organisations were investing in women’s leadership, resilience, wellbeing and inclusion while still losing experienced female talent through burnout, stalled progression, career withdrawal and early retirement.
The issue was not women alone. It was not policy alone and it was not usually a lack of intent from leaders or organisations. It was what happened where traditional organisational systems and women’s lived experience met.
That became the foundation of Women at Work By Design.
Start a ConversationFrom Organisational Systems to Leadership Architecture
Tanya has worked inside the systems that shape how organisations make decisions, manage risk, structure work, reward performance and lead people through change.
That experience led her to a deeper question:
What if the issue is not simply whether individual women are capable, but whether the leadership architecture around them is producing the outcomes organisations are trying to change?
This question now sits at the centre of Tanya’s work.
Through the Leadership Architecture Blueprint™, Tanya helps organisations make visible the structures, assumptions and practices that shape leadership, work and sustainable performance.
Through the Integrated Feminine Leadership Model™, she helps organisations rethink the human capacities required for the future of work integrating direction, structure and delivery with awareness, connection, adaptability, regulation and longevity.
Her book, Beyond Extractive Leadership, expands this work by guiding readers through the shift from inherited leadership systems built on endurance, control and output, toward a more integrated leadership architecture that strengthens performance, supports women’s career longevity and expands the leadership range and capacity of all leaders.
Her work is not traditional leadership development. It is leadership architecture.
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The Catalyst: Tanya’s Story
Tanya’s work is also shaped by her own lived experience of burnout.
After decades in senior People & Culture roles, management consulting, employee relations and corporate leadership roles, she reached a point where her body was no longer coping.
“I got to the point in an international executive role where I couldn’t work another day.”
She took time off, rested, went on holiday and then stepped back into project work.
Later, she accepted a lower-level permanent role, believing that reducing the level of responsibility would solve the problem. Within four months, she burnt out again.
At the same time, many women in her immediate circle were confiding in her that they were experiencing similar dynamics.
They were successful on the outside and privately depleted. Some were stepping back, retiring early or questioning whether they could continue leading in the same way.
Rest helped for a time, but it did not answer the deeper question:
Why were so many capable women reaching the same point of depletion?
That experience became a turning point.
It led Tanya to examine the organisational systems, personal conditioning, nervous-system responses, beliefs and patterns of responsibility that shape how women work, lead and sustain themselves.
Her work is focused not on helping women endure more, but on helping women understand themselves more deeply and helping organisations redesign the conditions that require endurance in the first place.
This became the foundation of the The 9 Layers of Women’s Burnout™, later developed through her book The War Women Fight…Within and the launch of her women’s retreat supporting women to recover from burnout Journey Back To You.
Beliefs, Values and the Work Beneath Behaviour
Tanya’s work with culture, values and behavioural change programs also shaped her thinking.
Across her career, she saw that organisations do not change simply because values are written down, policies are introduced or leaders are trained in new behaviours. This is well intentioned, surface level and temporary.
Lasting change requires attention to the beliefs beneath values and behaviour.
This insight also became personal. Through her own personal history and burnout and recovery, Tanya began examining the beliefs she had inherited about responsibility, worth, achievement, approval, visibility, strength and self-sacrifice. This has been a life long process.
She came to see that beliefs rarely operate in isolation. They form clusters interconnected patterns that shape how women work, lead, respond to pressure, set boundaries and measure value.
This became the foundation of the Cluster Belief Reframe Process™, later developed through her book Recoding Eve.
The process helps women identify the belief clusters shaping their behaviour, understand how those beliefs connect to safety and the nervous system, and consciously develop more sustainable beliefs that support confidence, agency, boundaries and leadership longevity.
Work With TanyaA Connected Body of Work
Women at Work By Design is grounded in a connected body of original models, programs and books.
Leadership Architecture Blueprint™
The Leadership Architecture Blueprint™ makes visible the systems that shape leadership, work and sustainable performance.
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Leadership Development Programs
Develops women leaders at the defining stages of their careers, from their first transition into leadership through to the complexity and responsibility of executive leadership.
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The Hidden Architecture of Women’s Careers™
The Hidden Architecture of Women’s Burnout™ and the 9 Layers of Women’s Burnout™ help women and organisations understand the deeper architecture of depletion.
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Recoding the Beliefs That Shape Women at Work™
For organisations seeking to address the beliefs and patterns affecting women’s voice, visibility, boundaries and confidence.
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Corporate Retreats & Conferences
Co-designed experiences focused on women’s leadership, career longevity, burnout prevention and your Leadership EVP for Women.
More InformationPartnering with organisations to understand women’s retention, leadership, and career longevity
Together, this work helps organisations move beyond fixing women, running isolated programs or changing policy alone.
It creates a more complete way to understand women’s retention, leadership, burnout and career sustainability.
Start a ConversationTanya’s Point of View
Tanya believes women’s career longevity is one of the most important leadership issues facing organisations. Not because women need special treatment, the truth is that workplaces were not originally designed around the realities of women’s lives.
For much of modern corporate history, work was structured around assumptions of continuous availability, limited caregiving responsibility, linear careers, visible confidence, constant output and endurance.
Women entered those systems and built careers en masse, while carrying the burden of adapting to workplace structures and social conditioning thousands of years in the making.
That adaptation has come at a cost to women’s health, confidence, leadership longevity and career sustainability, and to organisations that lose experienced women at the very point their judgment, maturity and contribution are most valuable.
Tanya’s view is simple:
Women’s progress will not be created by asking women to adapt harder to work environments that were not designed to truly recognise and support them.
And equality will not be created by assuming the workplace was neutral to begin with.
It must be designed.
Work With Tanya
Work With Tanya
Tanya works with organisations through:
Leadership Architecture Consulting
Examine and redesign the systems shaping leadership, work and sustainable performance.
Women’s Career Longevity & Burnout Prevention
Help women recognise burnout risk earlier and equip leaders to create more sustainable conditions.
Career-Longevity Programs
Support women to remain, rise and thrive across changing life stages and leadership demands.
Women’s Leadership and Agency Programs
Explore the beliefs shaping women’s visibility, boundaries, confidence and authority.
Executive and Leadership Workshops
Build leadership awareness of the organisational conditions influencing women’s careers.
Keynote Speaking
Introduce original thinking on women’s burnout, leadership architecture and the future of women at work.
Corporate Retreats and Conferences
Create substantive leadership experiences aligned with your organisation’s Leadership EVP for Women.
Tailored Organisational Engagements
Connect leadership, retention, psychosocial risk and women’s lived experience through a program designed around your organisation.
Tanya’s work is grounded in one central belief:
The future of women at work will not be changed by fixing women or by changing policy alone. It will be shaped by redesigning what happens where organisational systems and women’s lived experience meet.
Work With Tanya
The Future of Women at Work Must Be Designed
When You Get in Touch, You Can Expect:
A focused conversation about your organisation’s priorities
Clear options for workshops, keynotes, programs or consulting