World Class Leadership Development

When it comes to leadership development, you've got a tough job to do.

“Only 20% of HR leaders say they have leaders ready to fill their most critical roles.”

— DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025
“Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement.”

— Gallup
“54% of UK employers report current skills shortages — and fewer than half have a plan to address them.”

— The Open University, Business Barometer 2025
“63% of employers identify skills gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation.”

— World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025
“Left unaddressed, labour and skills shortages could cost the UK more than £30 billion in lost potential every year.”

— Neil Carberry, Recruitment & Employment Confederation
“82% of managers who enter management positions have not had any proper management and leadership training – they are ‘accidental managers’.”

— Chartered Management Institute
“A wake-up call for a low-growth, low-productivity, and badly managed Britain.”

— Ann Francke, CEO, Chartered Management Institute
“Commitment to stay runs at 94% under a great manager — and collapses to 19% under a poor one.”

— Culture Amp
“Sickness absence has reached 9.4 days per employee — the highest since records began in 2010.”

— CIPD, Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025
“A one-standard-deviation improvement in management quality is associated with around 10% higher productivity.”

— World Management Survey, National Bureau of Economic Research
“93% of employers say their managers perform better after taking an ILM qualification.”

— Institute of Leadership & Management

UK productivity has been flat since the 2008 financial crisis.

Most managers enter the role with no formal management (let alone leadership) training. They were promoted because they were good at their job, handed a team and left to work it out for themselves, or close to it. Nobody showed them how to give feedback, have a difficult conversation, or get the best out of the people around them.

There is a real cost. Only around a quarter of workers say their manager is highly effective. One in three has left a job because of a bad manager or a poor culture. UK employee engagement sits at just 10%, among the lowest in Europe. The CMI puts the cost of poor management to the economy at £84 billion a year in lost productivity.

It takes a toll on people's health, too. Untrained managers pile on pressure they were never shown how to relieve, and the stress and burnout that follow have pushed sickness absence to its highest level on record.

None of it is inevitable. People don't have to be born leaders, they can be manufactured. We've spent 40 years building a production line, we know how to do it efficiently and effectively. The skills that separate a good manager from a poor one are simple, learnable, and can be put to work the same week. Get them right and everything downstream changes: people stay, teams perform, and the latent productivity already sitting in your business finally gets used. All your KPIs go up.

We've worked with thousands of managers across hundreds of businesses, in dozens of industries, doing exactly this. We change behaviour, we make it stick, and we help you show the difference it made.

It's often said that people are a business's greatest asset, but they can also be its biggest frustration. If you'd like to find out more, then let's talk.