Leadership Labs
A Leadership Lab brings your managers and leaders together to work on a real business challenge, and builds the practical habits of leadership while they do it.
In most organisations the strategy is already clear enough. What is harder is getting the behaviour behind it to show up in how people lead, day after day, which is exactly what a Lab is built to do. We work on the how, so the what sticks.
Your managers are not short of commitment.
They are often leading in conditions that ask more of them than their habits, tools and support systems were designed for. People who are brilliant at the job find themselves newer at leading it. The business grows, integrates or changes, and the way leadership worked at the last size stops being enough.
Most development does not change that. People go on a course, enjoy it, and come back to the same inbox and the same pressure they left behind. The knowing was rarely the problem in the first place. It is the doing that breaks down under real conditions, and the doing is exactly where a Leadership Lab works.
A cohort, not a course.
A Leadership Lab is a co-designed programme that builds leadership and management habits over a few months, by having a cohort practise them together on a real business challenge.
Rather than hand you a fixed curriculum, we start from your context, your pressures and the behaviours your leaders actually need, and design the Lab around them. The cohort learns a habit, practises it on live work and in their own teams, then presents what they have built to your senior leaders.
The challenge is real, the habits are practical, and the change is owned by you long after we have stepped back.
What makes a Lab different
- Real work, not case studies. People practise on a problem your business genuinely needs solved.
- Habits, not theory. Each part of the programme turns one idea into something people do, not just know.
- Co-designed, not off the shelf. We build the Lab around your leaders and your situation.
- Built to be handed over. We leave the tools, rhythm and coaching behind, so it lasts without us.
Built around the leaders you already have.
Leadership Labs work across the layers of an organisation, from first-line managers to senior teams. We shape the cohort around the tier that matters most to you right now, and we can run more than one layer at once.
The habits that make everything else easier.
Every Lab is built around the behaviours your leaders actually need. These are the themes that come up most often, and we shape the work around the ones that matter to you.
Designed around your business, in four phases.
Every Leadership Lab follows our 4Cs framework, the same architecture behind our award-winning global programmes. It keeps the work grounded in your real context from the first conversation to the final handover.
We design the Lab through conversations with you, your leaders and your people. We agree the live challenge the cohort will work on, and set a baseline we can measure against later.
A name, a look and a story inside your organisation, so the Lab feels like something to be part of rather than another course to attend. People want in.
The cohort works through a series of sprints, learning one habit in each and practising it in two places: their own team, and a cross-cutting project team working the live challenge. Peer coaching holds the accountability in between.
The cohort presents its work to your senior leaders at an executive showcase. We leave behind the tools, the rhythm and often an internal coaching network, so the habits hold without us.
The building blocks we shape to fit.
No two Labs are identical, so we draw on the elements below and design the mix around your cohort, your challenge and the rhythm of your business.
A live business challenge
A real problem your organisation needs solved, chosen with you, that the cohort works on throughout. This is where the habits get practised.
Sprints built around habits
Short cycles, one leadership habit each, practised on live work and in people's own teams between sessions.
Live cohort sessions
Short, focused sessions, in person or online, spaced around real work so the learning fits the working week rather than competing with it.
Peer coaching
Coaching pairs and peer groups that hold the accountability between sessions, where most of the real practice happens.
Cross-functional project teams
Mixed teams from across the business, where it is safer to try new behaviours and where silos start to break down.
An executive showcase
The cohort presents what it built, learned and recommends to your senior leaders. Real outputs, real visibility.
An internal coaching network
We can train and supervise your own people as coaches, so the capability stays in the business after we step back.
A communications spine
A clear rhythm of internal communication that gives the work an identity and keeps people moving, even when answers are still forming.
A toolkit that stays
Practical tools and a ready-to-run plan that remain in the business, so you can carry the work into the next cohort yourselves.
You commit to one cycle at a time. Many organisations run a founding cohort first, then extend the model into further cohorts once they have seen it work.
Practical for your people, real for the business.
What participants leave with
- Practical habits for delegating, briefing and handling the moments that matter, showing up in their daily work.
- More confidence in leading people, including the honest conversations that have not been happening.
- A peer network across the business, built on real shared work rather than an org chart.
- The sense that the organisation is investing in them, not only in the people they manage.
What the organisation gains
- A real business challenge moved forward, with tangible outputs presented to your senior team.
- Consistent leadership behaviour across teams, sites and regions, handled early and handled well.
- Strategy and change that lands, as the behaviours behind them become things people do rather than words on a page.
- Internal infrastructure you keep, from a coaching network to a tested model ready for the next cohort.
Futures: a leadership pipeline that lasted.
Immediate Media reaches more than 75 million people every month, in an industry being reshaped by AI and shifting audiences. The business needed a new layer of leaders who could act as agents of change rather than wait for direction, so together we created Futures.
What we did
We brought together a cross-functional cohort of 23 emerging leaders from right across the business, deliberately mixing brands and functions so the silos began to break down from the first session. Over several months they moved through workshops, one-to-one coaching and peer consulting, with two Innovation Sprints at the heart of it. Those sprints were real commercial challenges, from launching new products to reaching new audiences, and the cohort used tools such as Three Horizons, Lean Startup and Design Thinking to balance fresh thinking with commercial realism.
How it stuck
Senior leaders, including the CEO, sponsored the work, coached participants and turned up to the final showcase where the cohort presented what it had built. To make sure the change outlasted the programme, sixteen of those leaders trained as internal coaches and became the Immediate Coaching Network, which still supports the business today. As one participant put it, it felt like a cultural shift rather than a training course.
Their depth of experience in organisational culture, change, leadership and team dynamics means they raise the bar every time we work together. A true trusted partner in every way.
Award-winning, research-informed, and built to be handed over.
We design leadership development that works in the real conditions of the business. We work on the how, so the what sticks.
Our Leadership Labs are built on the same 4Cs architecture as our award-winning global programme for the lubricants company Valvoline, which reached more than two thousand people across 28 countries. Behind that work sits our own doctoral research into how leadership behaviour really moves from knowing to doing, while people are handling the daily pressures of the job.
A few ways a Lab can run.
These are illustrations, not a fixed menu. We design the right shape with you in the first conversations, around your people, your challenge and your calendar.
A six-week sprint
A single team or a single habit, worked intensively on one live challenge. A good way to test the approach before committing to more.
A four-month cohort
A cohort of managers or leaders moving through three sprints on a live challenge, with peer coaching and an executive showcase.
A six-month founding cohort
A first cohort spanning sites, regions or newly joined businesses, designed to bring managers together in practice and build a model you can repeat.
Parallel cohorts
Senior leaders and their direct reports run in parallel, so shared language and behaviour build across the layers of the business at the same time.
Every shape can flex. Add a senior team lab, an internal coaching network, board-level briefings or one-to-one coaching, without weakening the core programme.
Got a challenge worth solving, and leaders worth growing?
Tell us what is going on in your organisation, and we will explore what a Leadership Lab could look like for your managers or your leadership tier.
The first conversation is a relaxed one, where we listen to your context, talk through where the pressure is, and share how a Lab might be shaped around it. If it feels right, we move into a proper design conversation, with no pressure and no obligation along the way.
