Most organisations run two separate improvement efforts that never quite meet.
One track develops leaders – communication, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, culture. The other improves operations – Lean, Six Sigma, process redesign, service improvement. Both are run with good intentions. Both are usually run by different teams, on different timelines, reporting into different parts of the business.
And both, on their own, tend to disappoint.
Why these two things keep failing separately
Operational Excellence programmes deliver strong results in the pilot phase – and then drift. Within months of a Lean deployment ending, many organisations see performance slide back toward where it started. The tools were sound. What was missing was a leadership layer underneath them: people who had actually changed how they led, not just attended a workshop on it.
Leadership development has the mirror problem. Programmes build self-awareness, communication skills and better habits – genuinely useful outcomes – but rarely connect to a measurable organisational result. Executive sponsors are left asking a fair question: what did this actually deliver?
The cost of getting either of these wrong is not abstract. Gallup estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy around $10 trillion a year in lost productivity – roughly 9% of global GDP. In the UK, CIPD benchmarks put the cost of replacing a single employee at six to nine months of their salary once recruitment, cover and ramp-up are accounted for. Disengaged people leave. Leaving is expensive. And neither a leadership programme nor a process improvement programme fixes that on its own.
What we’re building instead
We’re developing a programme that puts leadership development and Operational Excellence on the same track, instead of two separate ones.
It’s built around a deliberately simple behavioural framework:
Self – Purpose – Habits – Entrusted – Influence – Culture – Performance
Each stage moves a participant from understanding themselves, through aligning with organisational purpose, to building habits that hold under pressure, to creating – and being part of – a culture where people are entrusted with responsibility and accountable for delivering on it.
That’s the leadership half. Here’s the part that makes it different.
Every cohort runs a Workplace Impact Project – a real organisational challenge, owned by the participant, worked through during the programme using the same continuous improvement thinking that underpins Lean and Six Sigma. Outcomes are measured. Recommendations are presented to senior leaders before the programme ends.
In other words: the leadership development isn’t a separate track that we hope eventually shows up in performance. It’s the engine that drives a real, measured improvement – while the leader is still being developed.
Why this matters for Operational Excellence specifically
If you’ve run a Lean or continuous improvement deployment before, you’ll recognise the failure mode: the tools work, the pilot succeeds, and then it doesn’t scale – because the behavioural and cultural foundation underneath it was never built. People revert because nothing in how they were led, or how they lead others, actually changed.
This programme is designed to be the layer that’s usually missing – built to sit underneath an Operational Excellence deployment, not bolted on after it, so the improvement has somewhere to land and stay.
Where this is right now
This is genuinely still in development. We’re not launching it broadly yet – we’re shaping it with a small number of organisations who want early input into how it’s structured, and who want to be first in line when it’s ready.
If that’s you, here’s what joining the waiting list gets you:
- Early access ahead of public launch
- A direct say in how the programme and the Workplace Impact Project are shaped for your sector
- Priority placement on the founding cohort
Illustrative figures referenced above are drawn from published benchmarks: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026; CIPD, UK Turnover and Retention Benchmarks. They’re included to illustrate scale, not as a guarantee of programme outcomes for any specific organisation.
