Programmes

Leadership development

A cohort programme that fails almost always fails on return, not in the room. So the participant’s manager is in the first session and the last one.

Five modules over nine months
Shape
Cohorts of 12 to 18
Who is in the room
From £2,900 per participant
Indicative fee

Leadership programmes are well liked and rarely change anything, and the reason is structural: the participant learns in a room with peers and returns to a manager who was not there, has not changed, and asks how the course was. Behaviour reverts inside a fortnight.

So we contract with the manager at the start. They attend the opening session, agree two specific things they will do differently to support the participant, and attend the closing session to review both. It is the single change that most improves what happens afterwards, and it is the part clients most often ask to cut.

The content is drawn from behavioural science that has held up: deliberate practice, feedback specificity, psychological safety as measured rather than asserted. We do not use MBTI. When asked, we explain that its test–retest reliability is poor enough that we cannot justify basing a development conversation on it, and we offer an alternative instrument instead.

Each module is a full day, with a fortnightly practice pair between modules. Attendance below 80% and we will have a conversation about whether the participant should defer to the next cohort.

What you get

What is actually delivered

  • A written development contract between participant and manager
  • Two behavioural commitments per module, observed by a practice pair
  • A 360 at module one and module five, on the same instrument
  • Manager attendance at the first and last session, contracted up front
Next step

Start with the diagnostic, not the programme

Six weeks of interviews and a baseline measure, and a written finding — including the finding that the problem is structural and a development programme will not touch it. We have delivered that one twice.