How do I help a newly promoted manager lead their old peers?
This is one of the hardest transitions in any career. Yesterday they were one of the team; today they are leading it. Within small teams, this difficulty is magnified and requires a specific approach and mindset to move up the leadership pipeline effectively.
We help new managers exchange expectations and reflect on them through an honest, authentic conversation. It means ‘marking the pitch’: detailing the boundaries and limits, defining what you expect of others, and outlining your own philosophy of leadership and internal rules, which are often not shared with others. This is the first step, with subsequent steps reinforcing success.
Why do my best technical people make poor managers?
The technical skills that made them successful will not guarantee their future success. Leading a team of technical experts requires creating an environment that enables them to solve problems and thrive. This can feel time-consuming as you spend time coaching and developing others and behaving against preference and our innate ‘Present Bias’.
We are working with many technical leaders and salespeople, helping them make that mindset shift:
‘Where are you really best placed to add greatest value to the endeavour?’
This approach proved very successful when we worked with a highly engineering-centric defence organisation. Their managers valued the technical over the human, and this leaked into the way they led their people. We helped to change their mindset to value leading people as much as leading spreadsheets.
How do I get managers to have difficult conversations?
Most people do not like conflict; in fact, most of us actively avoid it. At the organisational level, this propensity to avoid difficult conversations, and the supporting performance management strategy that helps address it, leads to expensive settlement agreements or, worse, poor morale among those exposed to it.
Knowledge and practice dispel fear, and by developing the hard things we help people overcome their reluctance to address poor behaviour when it needs to be addressed. Through our communication practice, we create an environment and introduce simple, memorable models that can be applied in any situation. With the development of COACH, people can rehearse and refine the conversations they are currently avoiding.
How do I build accountability without a blame culture?
Many leaders think they must choose between a safe culture and an accountable one. You do not have to choose. We help teams write their own code of conduct: eight to ten observable behaviours that the team agrees on, checks every month, and holds to with kindness.
Given the team wrote the standard, holding each other to it feels fair rather than personal.
How do I get leaders to act on strategy, not just agree with it?
Agreement in the room is not action on the ground. We worked with a UK professional services partnership where growth had stalled. The partners agreed on objectives but paid them lip service rather than owning them. We helped them build a clear shared vision, a small number of decisive priorities and a five-year plan they could actually execute. The change came from collective ownership, not from a better slide deck.
Why does nothing change after our away days?
Turning an away day into something more meaningful requires just as much thought as a detailed, multifaceted development programme. For senior leadership teams, the need to reconnect as one team, pulling on the national shirt rather than wearing the club or functional strips to board meetings, is key to building a shared understanding and context, as is diarising follow-ups and rooting it in detailed design so that a walk up a Welsh mountain turns into a seminal moment in the life of a team.
When confronted with the realities of the eventual return to work, the experience, no matter how powerful, needs to be supported by a plan that follows it. Failure to agree on this plan will inevitably lead to inaction, in which good intentions are sacrificed on the altar of urgent and important tasks that could have been removed if the team had worked more efficiently to solve them proactively in the first instance.
How do I build a leadership pipeline for succession?
People and their collective capabilities and motivations will ultimately drive the success of your business. Place barriers in their way, and the talent pipeline becomes blocked. Blockages like this can be expensive, as good people leave and managers get promoted only in title. Planning how to identify, develop, and harness your future leaders is key, and it starts with line managers owning their succession plans.
For a global insurance group, we ran a senior programme for high-potential managers about two years from executive appointment. Around 150 senior leaders took part between 2011 and 2017. It combined demanding, business-relevant simulations with clear behavioural expectations, and it built lasting networks across countries and business units. That is the kind of pipeline we build with clients, from early career to the executive floor.
How do I fix a dysfunctional senior leadership team?
Hard work, design that seeks to understand the legacies and the personalities, the learnt behaviours and the standards, the relationships, the cliques, the leadership, the priorities, the pressures, the norms and the culture that envelopes the team.
We use four building blocks: clarity about values and behaviours, faster honesty, tools that strengthen accountability and collaboration, and the enablers that make the rest stick.
We support this method with bespoke diagnostics and our high-performance team model entitled: Clarity - Culture - Interdependence.
Read more in our series: Fixing the roof while the sun is shiningHow do I get leaders aligned after a merger or restructure?
Mergers more often fail on culture than on numbers. Two groups of leaders arrive with different habits, loyalties, and ideas of what good looks like.
For a global banking group in Asia-Pacific, we ran executive programmes in Asia and the UK after an acquisition and a reorganisation. The aim was simple: to merge two cultures into one leadership practice. We start by finding where the cultures clash, and then build one shared set of leadership behaviours.
How do I prepare my leaders to lead through AI and change?
We like to use the word augmentation. The technology serves humans first and never replaces them in the behaviours and characteristics that AI and technology can never touch.
As machines take on more routine thinking, the advantage moves to deeply human capabilities: judgement, curiosity, creativity, adaptability, communication, collaboration, ethical decision-making and working well with ambiguity.
We develop those capabilities through experience and practice, not theory. Our communications practice excels in developing the skills that AI and tech can never touch.
My sales team is underperforming
Before you change the people, find out where the sales system is holding them back. Our Sales Capability Gap Indicator measures nineteen capabilities, from pipeline quality to trust, rapport and negotiation, and shows where value is leaking. We have worked with high-performing sales teams around the world for 15 years. Much of what we teach comes from the theatre: how to listen, read the room and bring real energy to a conversation. Selling is a performance, and like any performance it can be rehearsed and improved.
I need my sales leads to generate more business
Sales leaders win business through their teams, not just through their own deals. That means building a team that shares leads, shares knowledge and sells together. For a global HR services firm we ran sales force seminars across the UK and EMEA. The problem they wanted solved was how to get the sales teams to work more collaboratively, and the result was a consistent approach to building teams across the organisation. We then coach sales leads to grow their pipeline through relationships first.
I have a leader with specific communication challenges
Many people reach leadership without ever being taught to communicate well, and for many it is genuinely hard. That is not a flaw. It is a skill that can be developed. Our communication team is made up of performers, many of them actors. They help leaders work on the things that shape their authentic presence and the way others experience them: voice, body language, presence and story. We work one to one, in private, on the real situations the leader faces.
I have a senior leader, new in role, who lacks presence
Presence is not about volume or confidence for show. It is clarity, calm and conviction, especially under pressure. New senior leaders often lose it because they are still working out what the role asks of them. We coach them to understand their own style and how it lands with others. For one UK building society we coached the executive board on how their personal leadership and communication styles affected engagement and performance.
Our team cannot articulate our value
This is common in technical businesses. The product is clever, but the people selling it explain how it works instead of why it matters. Technology and process only get you to the start line. To win, you need people who can influence and inspire, and who can make complex value simple. We help teams find the few words that matter to each customer, and practise saying them until they sound natural.
My team need to improve their relationship building as they are not working effectively together
Teams rarely fail on purpose. They fail on connection. When people do not understand each other, small frictions grow into silos. For a UK energy brokerage we ran a relationship-building and communication programme for the whole organisation. People left with more confidence and skill in communicating with colleagues and customers alike. We give teams a shared language for how they work, so differences become a strength rather than a source of conflict.
I need to prepare senior leaders for an important strategic message
A strategic message succeeds when people believe the person giving it. We help leaders keep the message simple, tailor it to each audience and speak with authenticity. For a national energy organisation in Nigeria, we developed middle and senior leaders to build followership through clear, credible communication, and to lead change as individuals and as teams. We rehearse the message, the hard questions and the conversations that follow, so the message lands the same way in every room.
I need help with our culture
Culture is what people do, again and again, especially under pressure. It is not the values on the wall. For a UK insurance group we helped change a complacent culture into one that was hungry to perform. New values and behaviours supported a successful rebrand, inside the business and out. We start by measuring the culture you have, agree the few behaviours that will make the biggest difference, and then build them into daily work.
I have a group who need presentation training
Good presentation training is practical and personal. People learn by standing up, trying, getting feedback and trying again. For a global manufacturer we trained a sales team across the UK and EMEA, mixing remote learning, live virtual sessions and face-to-face practice. The result was better engagement and stronger delivery of the sales message in every setting, whether in the room or on screen.
