Management training is still handed out on the basis of a job title. You get it when you acquire direct reports, and you get none of it before. That rule made sense when managing meant supervising, and it has quietly stopped making sense.
Prioritising work, running a conversation that resolves something, deciding without complete information, handling a disagreement, presenting a case, organising a group towards an outcome. Every person in your organisation does several of those every week, and only the people with reports have ever been trained in any of them.
So train everybody, and train them together. Every module below runs as a workshop, with the group working its own live situations, and every one of them works with a mixed room rather than a management cohort.
| The inherited rule | What it costs | The shift that transforms |
|---|---|---|
| Management training follows the job titleAccess to management training is granted at promotion, on the assumption that managing means supervising other people. Everybody below that line does managerial work every week without ever being taught any of it. | A capability gap that appears on day one of a promotionNew managers arrive without practice in prioritising, resolving disagreement or deciding under uncertainty, and learn it on their first team. Meanwhile the specialists around them navigate the same problems unaided. | Open every module to everybodyTraining the whole population in management removes the promotion cliff, gives specialists the vocabulary to work across functions, and produces mixed rooms where a technician and a director work the same case. |
Why management training should not be reserved for managers
Management is a set of capabilities rather than a rank. Restricting training in those capabilities to people who already hold the rank is an inherited assumption from an era when managing meant supervising, and it produces three problems that every organisation recognises and very few connect to their training policy.
The promotion cliff
Somebody is promoted on Friday for being excellent at their craft and arrives on Monday responsible for a set of capabilities nobody has taught them. They then learn prioritisation, difficult conversations and decision-making on a live team, which is an expensive place to practise.
The organisation calls this a development need and books a new manager programme, six months after the damage. Training the same person two years earlier costs the same money and no team pays for the learning curve.
The specialists doing managerial work with no permission to name it
A technician negotiating with a supplier, a designer arbitrating between two stakeholders, a nurse handling a distressed family, an analyst deciding what to escalate. All of that is management, performed daily by people whose job description calls it something else.
They receive no training in it and no vocabulary for it, which means they cannot ask for help with it either. That silence is the reason so much of this work is done badly and privately.
What a mixed room does that a cohort cannot
A room containing a director, a team leader and two specialists works differently from a management cohort. The same case gets examined from four positions in the hierarchy at once, and the gap between how a decision was intended and how it was received becomes visible without anybody having to describe it.
The mixed room also removes the performance. Managers in a cohort of managers protect their competence in front of peers. Managers in a mixed room stop performing, because the audience has changed and there is no longer a ranking to defend.
This connects directly to enableship, my own frame for the leadership of innovation. An organisation that trains only its managers is deciding, without saying so, who is permitted to contribute.
How these sessions are built
Every module runs as a workshop, which means participants spend most of the time working rather than listening. The design assumption is that a manager learns a practice by applying it to something they are currently stuck on, in front of peers who are stuck on something similar.
Why the workshop format rather than the classroom
A conventional session delivers content and hopes for transfer. A workshop makes the transfer the activity, which changes the ratio of talking to doing and changes what people remember a month later. It also removes the prerequisite, since anybody with a live situation has material to work with.
It also surfaces something a lecture cannot. When a group works its own cases, the constraints that sit outside any individual’s control become visible to everybody at once, and that conversation is frequently more useful than the module itself.
Group size matters here. Above sixteen people the format degrades into a presentation with exercises, so cohorts are capped rather than filled.
Formats, duration and delivery
Each module works as a half day or a full day, and several combine into a programme running across a quarter. Groups are deliberately mixed by function and by level, and no module requires participants to have direct reports.
Sessions are delivered in English or in French, in person across Australia or remotely. Rates depend on format, group size and how much customisation the brief calls for, and I quote after a conversation rather than from a price list.
One point of clarity worth stating. These are professional development workshops rather than accredited training, so they carry no formal qualification and no nationally recognised unit of competency.
Modules on change, innovation and creativity
These five modules address the capability to move an organisation and to generate what it moves towards. They suit management populations facing a transformation already underway, or an innovation ambition with no method behind it.
Leading change
Change management training for managers who have to carry a decision they did not make. The session covers the map of allies, the difference between resistance and outright opposition, and what to do with each.
Participants map their own stakeholders during the session, which is usually the moment somebody realises they have been spending their energy on the group least likely to move. The reasoning behind that is set out in my piece on innovation killers.
Managerial innovation
How management practice itself gets updated, working through the six circles from trust to creativity and locating where a team’s own practice gives way.
The session opens with the managerial transformation diagnostic, so the group works from six scores rather than from impressions. Running it at two levels beforehand, executives and their managers separately, doubles what the session can address.
Participative innovation
Designing and running the mechanisms that collect ideas from across an organisation and, more importantly, answer them. The module covers idea schemes, innovation champions and the response obligation that decides whether either survives.
Most participants arrive wanting help collecting more ideas and leave working on their response rate instead.
Creativity and idea generation
The methods behind each of the five levels of creativity, from service safaris and SCAMPER through to storyboarding, applied to a live problem the group brings.
Participants also identify their own creative profile, which changes how a team distributes creative work afterwards. The point is knowing who in the room is a problem finder and who is a problem solver before you assign anything.
Collective intelligence
Facilitation techniques for getting a group to produce something better than its best individual member, including the Braintrust format, structured critique and the rules that stop a session collapsing into consensus.
The module works particularly well immediately after a failed workshop, because the group already knows what went wrong and simply lacks the vocabulary for it. My write-up of the Pixar Braintrust covers the underlying design.
Modules on people, experience and the employer relationship
These four modules address what an organisation offers the people inside it, from the promise made at recruitment through to what those people actually experience once they arrive. They suit HR teams and management populations equally.
Employer brand
Building an employer promise that survives contact with the workplace, which means starting from what the organisation genuinely offers rather than from what recruitment marketing would prefer to say.
The session includes the ikigai exercise, used here at organisational level rather than individual, to locate where what the business does well, what it is paid for and what the market needs actually overlap.
Employee experience
Mapping the experience of work across the whole relationship, from the first contact through to the departure, and identifying the moments that decide whether somebody stays.
Participants map their own organisation during the session. The exercise routinely finds that the moments with the highest impact are the cheapest to fix, which is both encouraging and slightly embarrassing.
Nonviolent communication
Practical training in the observation, feeling, need and request sequence, applied to the conversations managers actually avoid: the underperformance conversation, the workload conversation and the one about somebody’s behaviour towards a colleague.
Participants bring a real conversation they have been postponing, and they rehearse it. That is uncomfortable and it is the entire value of the module.
Diversity and inclusion
Moving from a headcount approach to an inclusion approach, meaning from who is present to whether they have the supervision, tools and permission to contribute.
The module connects diversity to innovation capability rather than treating it as a compliance obligation, since a room that thinks alike produces ideas that look alike.
Modules on hybrid work, time and collaborative leadership
These four address how work is organised now, across distance and across competing demands. They are the modules most often requested by organisations whose arrangements changed faster than their management practice did.
Hybrid management
Managing a team split between home and the workplace, covering the six levels of autonomy, what each level requires from a manager, and how to move a team up one level deliberately rather than by accident.
The module also covers the right to disconnect and what it means in practice for a manager’s own contact habits, which I set out in detail in my article on the right to disconnect.
Remote management
The practical end of distance: running a meeting people stay in, building empathy without a corridor, and noticing that somebody is struggling when you cannot see them.
Grey remote work gets addressed directly, meaning the informal working-from-home arrangements that exist with no policy and therefore with no agreed working hours.
Time management
Prioritisation for managers whose day is consumed by other people’s requests, built around the urgent and important matrix and around the harder question of what to stop doing.
The session ends with each participant removing something from their own week. Somebody always says they cannot, which is the most useful discussion of the day.
Collaborative leadership
Leading through influence rather than authority, which is the situation most managers are actually in for the majority of their work. The module covers shared decisions, the difference between cooperation and collaboration, and what a leader has to give up.
It connects to enableship, my own frame for the leadership of innovation, and to the responsibility of shielding a team from pressure rather than passing it along.
Field note
The module they booked and the module they needed
A client booked time management for a cohort of team leaders who were all working late. The brief was specific and the diagnosis seemed obvious: people needed help prioritising.
Twenty minutes into the first session, every participant had produced the same list of what was consuming their week, and none of it was their own work. They were absorbing decisions that belonged one level up, because their own manager had never made those decisions and had never been asked to. No prioritisation technique addresses that.
We finished the module, because they had paid for it and because the matrix is genuinely useful. Then I told the sponsor the session had answered a question their team leaders did not have, and we rebuilt the programme around collaborative leadership for the layer above them.
Before buying a module, ask the intended participants to describe what actually consumed their last fortnight. The answer frequently points at a different cohort from the one you were planning to train, and training the wrong layer is the most expensive mistake in professional development.
Choosing between a workshop, a programme and a keynote
Three formats cover most management development budgets, and they answer different problems. Choosing by budget rather than by problem is how organisations end up with a well-attended series and an unchanged practice.
Three formats compared
The deciding question is whether your people lack the method or lack the permission to apply it. Method responds to training, and permission responds only to a decision made above them.
| Format | What it changes | Its limit | Choose it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single workshop | One capability, applied to live cases in the room | Fades within a quarter unless something structural changes | A specific method is genuinely missing |
| Programme across a quarter | Several capabilities plus the habit of practising them together | Requires protected time that delivery pressure will contest | The population is large enough to need a shared vocabulary |
| Keynote | How a room frames a subject, for a large group at once | Delivers no method and no practice | You need a starting point before any development work |
Signals that training is the wrong purchase
Four signals suggest the constraint sits outside anything a workshop can reach, whoever is in the room. Each one is visible before the money is committed.
- Participants describe a week consumed by decisions that belong one level above them.
- The same module has been run before and nobody can name what changed.
- People need approval for things their role description already covers.
- The appraisal template rewards precisely the behaviour the training asks people to stop.
Score your practice before you choose a module
Buying the module with budget attached rarely matches the module you need. Take the managerial transformation diagnostic, bring six scores to the conversation, and choose from evidence instead of preference.
Booking a session
Every booking starts with a conversation rather than a proposal, because the module named in the enquiry and the module the situation calls for are different about half the time.
Tell me who is in the room, the situation they are in, and what you want to be different afterwards. Mixed groups are welcome and generally preferred. I will tell you which module fits, whether a workshop is the right instrument at all, and what it costs, through the contact page.
Terms of engagement, cancellation and rescheduling are set out in the terms and conditions.
Frequently asked questions about management training
Is this accredited training?
No. These are professional development workshops rather than accredited training, so they carry no formal qualification and no nationally recognised unit of competency. What they deliver is applied practice on the participants’ own live situations.
Why train people who do not manage anybody?
Because prioritising, resolving disagreement, deciding under uncertainty and organising a group are done daily by people without direct reports. Training only managers creates a promotion cliff and leaves specialists doing managerial work with no vocabulary for it. Sixteen is the practical group ceiling, mixed by level.
Can sessions be delivered online?
Most modules work online with the session shortened and the group work moved into breakouts. Nonviolent communication and collective intelligence lose the most in translation, since both depend on reading a room, so they are worth keeping in person where possible.
How do I choose the right module and the right room?
Ask the intended participants to describe what consumed their last fortnight. The answer identifies the module, and it usually widens the room, because the people describing the same problem rarely all sit at the same level.
