Introduction to Management

Why teams run this

The first sign is usually in the work, not the person. A strong specialist gets promoted, and three months later they are still writing the reports themselves, checking everything twice, and catching up on their own tasks after the team has gone home. Their people are underused, their own output has dropped, and nobody has said anything out loud because the promotion was meant to be good news.

New managers rarely struggle because they lack commitment. They struggle because nobody told them the job had changed. Setting an expectation, holding someone to it, and saying something uncomfortable in a way that gets heard are different skills from the ones that earned the promotion. This workshop teaches those skills directly, using the situations participants are already avoiding.

What happens in the room

Participants bring live cases. Before the session, Louisa asks each person to name one member of their team and one conversation they have been putting off. Those become the material for the day. Each topic opens with a short input block, usually ten minutes, and the rest of the time goes on practising against the real situations in the room. Nothing is hypothetical unless a group runs out of its own material, which does not happen often.

Practice runs in threes: one person manages, one plays the team member using details the manager supplies, and the third observes against a specific brief. Rounds are short, four or five minutes, and repeated. After each round the observer names one behaviour, the manager tries again, and the difference is usually audible to everyone. Louisa interrupts rounds, stops people mid-sentence, and asks them to say it another way. The first hour is uncomfortable. After that it stops being uncomfortable and starts being useful.

• A DISC profile completed before the day, used to look at how your default style lands on people who work differently
• Practice rounds on expectations: turning a vague request into an agreement with a standard, an owner and a date
• Feedback rounds on a situation each participant is currently avoiding, run until the wording holds up
• A one-to-one redesign: what the agenda covers, who speaks first, and what does not belong in the meeting
• A session on authority: what you decide alone, what you escalate, and what to do when a former peer ignores a deadline
• Drafting the first thirty days back at work, with dates against each conversation

What people leave with

What everyone leaves with is short enough to act on: a plan, not a record of the day. It is deliberately small, because a new manager who commits to two conversations in the next month will actually have them, and one who commits to twelve will have none.

• A thirty-day plan naming two specific conversations and the dates they happen
• A one-to-one agenda they have already tested in the room
• Their DISC profile, annotated with where their style helps and where it costs them
• A short set of team expectations, drafted ready to take to their team

Making it stick

A single day changes what someone knows. What changes behaviour is what happens in weeks three to eight, when the first real test arrives and the temptation is to do the work yourself instead. Pursue Your Potential builds that in: optional one-to-one coaching with Louisa, the same person who ran the practice rounds, for participants who want a call before or after a difficult conversation; a 60-day check-in session where the group brings back what worked and what did not; and a briefing for the participants’ own line managers so they know what to reinforce rather than quietly undo. The sequencing is deliberate. Coaching covers the conversation that is about to happen, the check-in covers the ones that already did, and the line manager is told enough to recognise both when they see them.