From Red to Green: Leadership in Practice

How we invested in our managers (and how you can too!) with our CIPD-nominated leadership development programme: “Leadership in Practice“.

Two years ago, our staff survey came back Red. Quality of advice was slipping. A £190k deficit put the organisation’s future in question. Today, every one of those measures is Green — and we’ve just been shortlisted for a national CIPD People Management Award for the second year running.

We’re proud of that. But we’re prouder of what sits behind it.

The turning point wasn’t a restructure

When things are difficult, the instinct is often to reorganise, cut, or bring in outside help. We did none of those things. Instead, we asked our staff and volunteers one question: what’s getting in the way?

The answer, again and again, was managers — not as a criticism of the people in those roles, but as a recognition that we’d promoted brilliant advisers into complex management jobs and given them almost nothing to succeed with. That’s not a people problem. That’s an investment problem.

So we built our own leadership programme, in-house, from our own data — informed by a piece of academic research (an MA dissertation, awarded Distinction) into the hidden cost of poor management and unresolved conflict. The board backed a serious investment in the middle of a financial crisis, on the strength of predicted returns.

What the evidence shows

We don’t ask people to take our word for it. Every cohort is measured three ways — self-rated learning gains, session satisfaction, and independent 360° feedback from colleagues — and all three have to agree before we trust the result.

Across two cohorts and eleven sessions, the numbers have been consistent: statistically significant capability gains in every single session, and 92% of colleagues independently observing real change in how these managers behave day to day. Off the training room floor, sickness absence nearly halved, resignations hit a four-year low, and our quality of advice moved from Red to Green under external audit. In the year following investment, conflict costs fell by over a quarter of a million pounds — for every £1 spent, £5.83 was saved.

One finding shaped how we now build every cohort: self-awareness at the very first session predicts almost all of the capability gains that follow (r = 0.93). It’s why “knowing yourself” now comes before anything else — leading people well starts with understanding how you lead.

Hear it from the people who lived it

“Leadership isn’t a personality trait… it’s a capability, and capabilities can be built.”

The numbers only tell half the story. In our latest podcast episode, our CEO Vicky Gutteridge is joined by two of our managers to talk honestly about what changed on the ground — including the uncomfortable feedback, the conversations they used to avoid, and what it actually feels like to lead a team through a turnaround.