About Leadership Treehouse

Leadership Treehouse is a Wellington-based leadership development company founded by Tamara Buckland. We design immersive, story-based experiences for leadership teams across New Zealand and Australia — using fictional scenarios, facilitated storytelling, and experiential learning to help leaders practise the hard stuff: difficult conversations, high-stakes decisions, conflict, and the kind of trust that only comes from genuinely going through something together.

We work with teams in-person and online, from one-hour culture sessions to multi-month programmes.

The real cost of underdeveloped leadership isn't visible on a spreadsheet. It shows up in the decisions that don't get made, the conversations that don't happen, and the talent that quietly walks out the door. Most training gives leaders new ideas. We give them actual practice — in a space where getting it wrong doesn't cost anything, and getting it right changes everything.

If you want a team that leads with more courage, clarity, and cohesion when it counts, this is where that work happens.

Meet the Team

Smiling woman with black hair, glasses, tattoos on arms, wearing a black shirt and a necklace with a large stone pendant outdoors.

tamara Buckland
Founder & leadership facilitator

Tamara has spent over a decade working with leaders across New Zealand and Australia — in-house, as a fractional Chief People Officer, and as a facilitator. Previously Head of People Experience at Sharesies, and with experience at Weta Digital and SilverStripe, they have worked at the intersection of people, culture, and organisational change across tech, creative, and growth-stage environments.

They founded Leadership Treehouse because they kept seeing the same problem: leaders who knew what good leadership looked like, but had never had a safe space to actually practise it. So they built one.

Leadership Treehouse uses immersive storytelling, fictional scenarios, and facilitated reflection to give leaders the kind of experiential learning that traditional training rarely delivers. It's research-backed, genuinely effective, and — unusual for leadership development — something people actually want to come back to.

A man walking on a trail in a lush green park, smiling, wearing glasses, a blue patterned shirt, a gray coat, and jeans.

william bennett
game designer & lead storyteller

William is a master Game Facilitator with many years of experience guiding people through rich, unpredictable role-playing adventures. With a sharp eye for story and a gift for reading the room, he creates worlds that feel alive - and then invites you to shape them.

As co-designer and lead storyteller of A Quest Within, William brings depth, humour, and just the right amount of danger to every session.

His favourite part? Being surprised. He thrives on the unexpected choices people make and loves adapting the story on the fly to mirror their leadership challenges and spark fresh insight.

He sees every session as a collaborative story — not one he tells to you, but one he helps you discover.

greig roulston
concept artist & illustrator

Greig is a Concept Artist, Illustrator and Designer based in Wellington, New Zealand.

Greig has been drawing characters and creatures since childhood, and has a lifelong passion for gaming (both table top and video game varieties), with over 15-years experience working on design and imaging projects.

Before moving to freelance work, Greig worked as the lead artist on a digital interactive comic book project where he developed both the art pipeline and the interactive viewer that brought the comic book to life.

Greig has a unique style, and a strong understanding of design and process. This has been influenced by many years working among New Zealand's documentary taonga at The National Library of New Zealand, while also tinkering in his garage building arcade machines, racing drones, guitar effect pedals, war gaming terrain, and stormtrooper armour.|

You can see more of his work on instagram or his Artstation page.

our
values

  • People don't change by being told things. They change by experiencing things.
    Every programme we design puts leaders inside a scenario before it asks them to reflect on one - because insight that comes from lived experience lands differently than insight from a slide deck.

  • Leadership is a skill, not a thing you’re born with. That means we can learn to do it better through repetition, feedback, and the chance to try again.

    We build programmes where leaders get genuine practice at the hard stuff: difficult conversations, high-stakes decisions, conflict, trust.

  • We're not interested in the professional version of you. The version that already has the right answers and never gets it wrong.

    We design for the real one - the one who's still figuring it out, who sometimes says the wrong thing, and who leads better when they stop performing and start engaging.

  • Better questions beat fast answers in leadership. Every time.
    We build reflection into everything we do - not as an add-on, but as the mechanism through which insight actually transfers to behaviour. The goal isn't to leave with a checklist. It's to leave asking better questions.

  • A good session is not enough. We design for what happens after the workshop - the patterns that shift, the conversations that finally happen, the decisions that get made differently. Everything we build is oriented toward lasting change, not just a good day out.