Practice 03
Leadership Development
For CEOs whose managers were promoted for being good at the work, not for being ready to lead it — and whose teams are paying the difference. We work with the people already in the seats, on the decisions they face now, to avoid paying for training that changes nothing.
Typical first step
Leadership workshops
A first conversation on the decision your leadership team is facing.
In the UK, 82% of people who become managers have had no formal management and leadership training.
Source: Chartered Management Institute (CMI) with YouGov, Taking Responsibility – Why UK PLC Needs Better Managers · Oct 2023
What CEOs bring us
My best specialists stopped growing the day they were given a team.
Executive trainings: built on the decisions your leaders are facing, not on a generic curriculum.
We sent people on training and nothing changed.
Leadership workshops: worked on your own situations, with the group that has to live with the outcome.
My leadership team agrees in the room and then pulls in different directions.
Leadership workshops: the disagreement surfaces in the room, not afterwards.
The gaps we close
Other advisors answer part of the question. We answer the part that reaches your P&L.
| What you usually get | What you get from us |
|---|---|
| A course catalog, chosen by title. | Workshops or trainings built on the decisions your leaders face this year. |
| A satisfaction score at the end of the day. | What each leader commits to change, written down and owned by name. |
| Training bought separately from everything you already know about your people. | The budget goes to the managers whose own units read worst, not to whoever is available. |
Services in this practice
Start with one. Each stands on its own and connects to the others if you continue.
- Standalone
Executive trainings
You have committed the company to a plan that depends on your managers. Trainings built on that plan show whether the layer can deliver it, and close the gaps before the quarter the plan misses.
- Standalone
Leadership workshops
Working sessions with your leadership team, managers or team leads on a decision they face now, so the disagreement is settled before the decision rather than paid for six months after it.
Surface the disagreement
Where your leaders disagree about the same decision, said now rather than after it is taken.
Name what blocks it
What is stopping a decision everyone says they support.
Take the decision
A decision, taken by the people who have to live with it.
Record who owns it
A record of what was agreed and who owns each part of it.
What you receive
A brief that reads your team from trust to results.
- Five levels, from trust at the base to results at the top, drawn on one page.
- For each level, what it means, the signs a team shows, and one finding from a leadership team described without names.
- The levels are a lens, not a score. The findings are what we observed in this team.
- It ends on the result, and on what to work on next.
What makes a group of leaders a team
A small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.
Leadership team
Arrow keys move between levels, Enter opens a level, Escape or Backspace goes back.
Team brief: five levels, from trust to results.
| Level | What it represents | What a team shows | Our finding |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Lack of trust, Invulnerability | Whether leaders will be vulnerable with each other: trust built through shared work, and easily lost. | Mistakes explained, not owned; Help asked for late; Trust easily damaged | Leaders raise their real concerns with the CEO after the meeting, not in it. |
| 2. Fear of conflict, Artificial harmony | Whether the team can disagree openly about ideas. | Polite meetings, little debate; Hard issues talked around; Unclear who thinks what | Disagreements are settled in private, so the meeting records an agreement that does not exist. |
| 3. Lack of commitment, Ambiguity | Whether everyone leaves a decision knowing what it is and backing it. | Direction shifts between meetings; The same decision reopened; Agreement without follow-through | Leaders leave a decision each believing that a different version was agreed. |
| 4. Avoidance of accountability, Low standards | Whether peers hold each other to what was agreed. | Agreed milestones slip; Standards differ by person; Resentment builds quietly | Nobody asks a peer about a missed milestone; the CEO does it alone. |
| 5. Inattention to results, Status and ego | Whether leaders see the leadership team as their first team, ahead of the function each one runs. | Functions compete for budget; Progress hard to see; Strong people leave | Each function reports on its own targets, and nobody reports the company's number. |
Start with one step.
You leave with the one decision we would work on first, and who should be in the room.