Leadership Training & Workshops

The training and workshop work is the group-format arm of the practice. It runs alongside the one-to-one coaching and consultancy work and is designed for organisations that want to develop their leadership capability across a cohort of people, not just one individual at a time.

Nothing here is off the shelf. Every programme starts with a conversation about what the specific group needs. That conversation shapes the content, the format, the pacing, and the facilitation style. An off-site workshop for a partner group that has been together fifteen years needs to work quite differently from a development programme for twelve people who have just been promoted into their first significant leadership roles.

Workshop formats

Half-day facilitated workshop

The most common format for existing leadership teams. Three to four hours, usually built around a single focused question the team needs to work through together — how decisions are being made and who is excluded from them; what the team's priorities actually are once the noise is stripped away; how to handle a particular recurring tension. The facilitation creates conditions for an honest conversation; the output is a set of specific commitments the team leaves the room with.

This format works well as a standalone session or as part of an existing leadership conference, off-site day, or strategy event. Groups of six to sixteen people.

Full-day leadership development workshop

Six to seven hours of facilitated content, structured around a defined development theme. The design includes input from Sally (typically 20-30% of the day), structured exercises and paired or small-group work, whole-group discussion, and action-planning time at the end. The aim is for participants to leave with both new thinking and specific actions they can apply in the following fortnight.

Common themes for full-day workshops include: leading through change; having difficult conversations; building psychological safety in teams; the move from functional expert to strategic leader; and managing performance in a way that is honest without being brutal.

Multi-session cohort programme

For groups of emerging or mid-level leaders, a structured programme of five to eight sessions over three to six months. Each session builds on the previous one, and participants are expected to apply the learning between sessions and bring what they notice back to the group. This is the format that produces the most lasting change, because the learning is embedded in the actual work rather than extracted from it in a single day.

Cohort programmes can run in person, by video, or as a hybrid. Groups of eight to fourteen participants work best. The content is specific to the cohort's context — if the organisation can share what its leaders are actually struggling with, the programme design reflects that.

Topics and content areas

The following are the content areas the practice works in most regularly. These are starting points for a conversation, not a fixed menu:

• Strategic leadership. Moving from operational thinking to systemic thinking; the habits that keep capable leaders stuck at the wrong altitude; how to build a team that does not need you in every room.
• Influence and authority. Leading across a matrix; building credibility in new environments; the difference between formal authority and actual influence and how to develop both.
• Feedback and difficult conversations. What makes feedback genuinely useful; the specific conversations leaders avoid and why; practical tools for handling high-stakes conversations without destroying the relationship.
• Decision-making under uncertainty. How leaders make decisions when the information is incomplete; the cognitive patterns that distort good decision-making under pressure; building a team decision-making culture that does not default to whatever the most senior person in the room thinks.
• Resilience and sustainability. Not the motivational-poster version of resilience, but the practical habits and structural conditions that allow leaders to perform consistently over years rather than sprinting until something gives.
• Leading teams through change. The leadership behaviours that help teams through transitions; what leaders get wrong when communicating change; how to maintain performance when the ground is shifting.

What the practice does not do

It is worth being direct about this. The practice does not deliver generic leadership training programmes that can be delivered to any group in any organisation. If you are looking for a training supplier who can run the same "Leadership Essentials" course for your graduate intake every year, there are other providers better suited to that. The work here is more specific, more tailored, and involves more upfront conversation to design. If that sounds like a reasonable trade for content that actually fits your people's situation, it is probably worth talking.

Combining training with coaching or consultancy

Some of the most effective work the practice does combines training with one-to-one coaching. A cohort programme gives people a shared language and shared experience; individual coaching sessions during the programme give people a private space to work on the specific challenges their role is surfacing. The two formats reinforce each other.

If you are thinking about a programme that combines group and individual work, the consultancy page explains how the diagnostic work can inform both the group design and the individual coaching priorities.

Start the conversation

Email [email protected] with a brief description of your group, the challenge or development goal you have in mind, and a rough sense of timeframe. Sally will come back with some initial thinking and a suggested call to take it further.

You may also want to read about how we can help with the specific challenges your leaders are facing, or look at what previous clients have said about working with the practice.