Blog: Leading with Insight

The title of this blog isn't something we wrote. It's a direct quote from a LEAD™ graduate, and it's one we hear, in different forms, from almost every cohort: the delegates join largely expecting business development but they leave with something bigger. "I Wasn't Alone. Other Business Owners Felt Exactly Like I Did." This is the one that comes up first, almost always during the Overnight Experiential. The moment when a room full of accomplished, successful business leaders …

People ask us this all the time. They've read the statistics. They've seen the testimonials. They know the programme runs for ten months. But what they actually want to know is: what happens in the room? It's a fair question, and surprisingly hard to answer because LEAD™ isn't a course with a fixed syllabus. It's a leadership and business development programme for senior leaders and it adapts to the people in it. No two cohorts are the same.…

Most leadership development looks good on paper, but the real test of it comes on a Monday morning. We've been working with a Head of Operations at a manufacturing business - someone who oversees ten departments and has absorbed a colleague's responsibilities on top of his own. He's not short of things to deal with so when he started our How-To SkillBuild programme, he wasn't looking for theory. He wanted things he could actually use. This is what happened next.…

From modest beginnings two men have forged one of the county's most successful family business partnerships. Now they're preparing to pass it on to the next generation. Don Robins, pictured tells a story about arriving at a client’s offices wearing a suit, doing the deal to dispose of their wastepaper, then returning to his van to get into his overalls to go back into the business as the removal man. That was going back years. Brothers Don and Geof Robins were in the early days of establishing their business and did everything themselves. …

Every World Book Day, we're reminded that the right book at the right time can truly change the way you see the world. This year, we want to share one that we think every business leader should read. Realising Good Growth: A Practical Guide for Business Leaders by Professor Steve Kempster and Dr Stewart Barnes opens not with a business framework or a growth strategy, but with a question that stops you in your tracks. Our children - and certainly our children's children - may one day ask: why did you let this happen?…

Fact One: The business world is now very familiar with the benefits of an holistic approach to Employee Engagement thanks mainly to the MacLeod Report released a decade or so a go. Fact Two: The benefits of this holistic approach to employee engagement are now accepted to be transformational, if properly applied. Fact Three: UK adoption has been been very poor across all sectors of the working population whether public or private, big or small.…

Ninety-one percent. That's the proportion of business leaders who tell us they have suffered from imposter syndrome before starting LEAD™. These aren't junior managers finding their feet, they're CEOs, Managing Directors, Managing Partners and owner-managers who built their companies from nothing. People who, by any reasonable measure, have already proved they can do the job, and yet privately, they sometimes feel like they're waiting to be found out.…

It’s 2026, and if you ask most leaders how they’re doing, the answer is almost always the same. Busy. Not the productive kind of busy. Not the satisfying kind either. Just full calendars, constant decisions and very little space to think. Leadership today comes with a strange contradiction. The more responsibility you carry, the less time you feel you have to step back and improve how you lead. …