Which Leadership and Management Course Is Right for You? Explore Our New Management Courses

Most people get promoted because they were good at their old job, not because anyone taught them how to do the new one.

Claire and I have been saying that for years, in rooms all over the country, and it is still the truest thing we know about management. The best engineer becomes the engineering manager. The best salesperson gets the team. And on Monday morning they are expected to delegate, give feedback, handle the awkward conversation and keep six people pointed in the same direction, with nothing but the memory of the best boss they ever had and a determination not to be the worst.

So we have brought our leadership and management offer together around eight practical courses. Each one starts with a real problem managers bring us, and each one is designed to be used back at work rather than admired in a workbook. This post is here to help you work out which course is right for you, or for the people you are responsible for.

How do you choose the right management course?

Start with what is actually happening in your team, not with the course title.

When someone rings us and says "I need some management training", the first thing we ask is what is going wrong. Nine times out of ten the answer is specific. The new team leader is doing everyone's job for them. Two people in the office have stopped speaking. The senior manager freezes in front of the board. Nobody has told the graduate that turning up at ten is a problem.

Every one of those has a course below. That is not an accident. We designed them that way.

Claire and I always ask people at the start of a course what they want to get out of it. Interestingly, what they write down can sometimes change within the first couple of hours. Once people start exploring the real issue, they often realise the problem they arrived with was not quite the problem they thought they had.

That, for me, is one of the most useful parts of good management training. It should help people understand what is really happening, not just confirm what they thought before they walked into the room.

Then ask yourself one more question. Is this one person, or is it a whole layer of managers? For an individual, an open course in London may be the simplest answer. For a whole team or management layer, in-house delivery lets us tailor the day to what is actually happening in your organisation. And if the need is broader than one skill, it may be a programme rather than a single course. More on that at the end.

Eight leadership and management courses

The range includes open courses in central London as well as options designed for in-house delivery. Some are one-day focused courses, The Coaching Manager runs over two days, and Managing Generations is designed specifically for teams in the workplace. The point is not to force every management problem into the same format.

For the manager who has to present

Speak with Impact: Presentation Skills Training is for people who have something worth saying and want the room to remember the message rather than the nerves. You present, you get straight feedback, and you present again. That cycle of practice, feedback and improvement is what builds confidence. By the end of the day, you should be far more capable of holding a room and getting your message across.

For the manager whose day belongs to everyone else

Own Your Day: Time Management Training starts from a simple truth: most managers do not have a time problem, they have an everyone-else's-priorities problem. You map your own time thieves, test every task against three questions, and leave with next week already planned. Your real diary, not a made-up example.

For the manager who reads the numbers better than the people

Read the Room: Emotional Intelligence Training is Claire's course, and it is not about being nice, it is about being accurate. Understanding your own triggers, reading other people properly, and staying composed when someone across the desk has lost their composure. If you have ever been the last to know something had gone wrong in your team, this is the one.

For the manager caught in the middle when people fall out

The Mediator's Mindset: Conflict Resolution Training is delivered by Chris Breedon, who is ex Royal Air Force like the rest of us and a professional mediator who runs his own mediation company. Chris teaches managers the approach he uses on real workplace disputes: spot it early, get underneath it, stay neutral and bring people back to working together. Most workplace conflict does not start with a row. It starts with something small that nobody dealt with.

For the new manager, or the one nobody ever trained

The Manager's Toolkit: Essential Management Skills is where I would send almost every first-line manager, and a fair few experienced ones who learned by surviving it. Setting expectations, giving feedback that changes something, delegating to develop, running one-to-ones that are worth having and dealing with the difficult conversation while it is still a conversation. Promotion gives you the job title. It does not automatically give you the skills.

For the manager carrying everyone else's monkeys

Throwing the Monkey: Delegation Training is the course I have been teaching for years and eventually wrote the book about. Every task someone brings you and leaves with you is a monkey, and by Friday many managers are carrying far too many of them. You learn to spot the monkey changing hands, hand it back properly, and use our four stages of delegation: decide, brief, check in and review. Delegation is not abdication and it is not simply giving work away. It is giving someone responsibility while remaining accountable for the result.

For managers who would rather grow answers than hand them out

The Coaching Manager: Coaching Skills for Managers (ILM) is the one two-day course in the set, and the only one that is ILM accredited. Claire holds an MSc in Executive Coaching from Ashridge and is an EMCC accredited Coaching Supervisor, and over two days she teaches managers to listen to understand, ask questions that make people think, and hold the answer back long enough for someone to find their own. Delegates coach, are coached, and are assessed on day two. It runs as an open course and in-house.

For the team that spans four generations

Managing Generations: Leading a Multi-Generational Team is delivered in-house by Claire and me, and it grew out of our book Decoding Gen Z: Bridging the Mindset Gap. The generation gap has not gone away, it has moved into the office. This is a day on understanding the generations you actually lead, what motivates each of them, and how to flex your leadership without losing yourself. Every delegate takes the book home.

What if you need more than one course?

Sometimes the honest answer is that a single day will not do it. If you have a layer of supervisors and first-line managers who all need the same foundation, or senior people who need to develop how they lead, that is what our Management Development Programme is for. It runs in three tiers, Core, Leader and Executive, is ILM recognised, and is built around your organisation rather than delivered as an off-the-shelf package.

We saw the value of that recently during our work with Spicerhaart Estate Agents. Afterwards, one of their directors described the training as “practical and relevant” and said their Partners left “equipped with clear, actionable strategies they can implement immediately”. That is exactly what a management development programme should do: not just motivate people for a day, but give them something they can use when they go back to work.

Still not sure which one?

Then tell us what is actually happening in your team and we will point you at the right one. That is not a sales line, it is what we do on the phone every week, and quite often the answer is a different course from the one you rang about.

You will find all eight, with dates and further information, on our Leadership and Management courses page. Start with the problem you are trying to solve, then choose the course that fits it. And when you turn up, expect to take part. You will not spend the day being talked at.