For organisations
We coach the wrong people, at the wrong time
Much of the development money is ring-fenced for the most senior people, and it is often spent at the point of promotion, which is the point at which a person is least willing to change.
The language changes too, from training to coaching. What does not change is the target. A newly promoted leader is visible in a way they have never been, to their people, to HR, to the board, and their management want them to look the part. So the coaching is tactical. Present better. Communicate better. Look more confident. Every one of those is about how they are seen.
It rarely gets argued the other way. Weight the investment towards your senior middle managers, and you are building a pipeline of executives with the culture and the mindset the organisation will actually need in ten years.
Why target that layer, specifically
Senior middle managers are where people stop managing and start leading. Strategic enough to matter, still close enough to the work to see it. They lead the first-line managers and they report to the executives, so they are the only layer touching both the people who do the work and the people who decide. Yet it is the layer we often neglect.
Gallup puts seventy per cent of the variance in team engagement down to the manager. Change the leaders of leaders, and you change the daily experience of the largest population of employees you have.
Executives are not indifferent to culture. They are just further from it than they think. PwC's Global Culture Survey found that seventy-seven per cent of senior managers feel personally connected to their company's purpose, against fifty-four per cent of everyone below them. What is decided at the top has to survive the journey down, and every route down runs through your senior middle managers.
It changes by who become the executives.
Those executives come from your senior middle managers. If enough capable people reach executive level already grounded, low on ego, and coached to serve the people they lead, the gap closes. Not because anyone announced a value, but because the people who rise are not the same people.
One leader raised differently changes the managers beneath them, and those managers change everyone else.
What the programme is
The programme is grounded in applied behavioural science, drawn from military and intelligence practice rather than the lecture theatre, and it works underneath the presenting problem rather than on the symptom.
These are tools built to read a person who did not want to be read. Turned inward, they teach a leader to read themselves accurately, and a leader who reads themselves reads the people working for them. That is where durable change starts.
What changes is observable: composure that is real rather than performed, cleaner judgement when they are triggered, less energy spent managing how they are seen, and leaders who listen and are more empathetic. That is authority that does not have to be asserted.
What the programme is not
The programme is not a workshop, and it is not a competency framework. It is not therapy, and it is not diagnosis. Most importantly, it is not for everyone. This work cannot be forced on a person. It has to be their choice. It is likely the first time they will have come face to face with their truth, and some people find that too difficult.
The honest constraint. I work with a small number of people at a time, because the work is close and it does not scale by dilution. That shapes what I can take on, and it is worth saying before we talk rather than after.
One thing before you write to me
This only works if the person wants it. If they are being sent and they are reluctant, it will fail, and I would rather tell you that than take the work. If they want it, write to me and tell me who they are and what you have already tried.
If you would rather I spoke to them first, explained what the programme involves and gave you my view on whether they are suitable, I am open to that.