At a glance
Industry, metallurgy and materials · Managers of a production site · Modular programme, ongoing
The challenge: An international industrial group is transforming its model: diversification, climate, safety. Nothing will move without frontline managers.
Our approach: A modular leadership programme over several years, one module at a time.
Objective: A shared vocabulary and tools for leading change. The debriefs are already bringing concrete issues to management: safety, procedures, recognition.
A strategy can be decided at head office. It plays out in the teams.
The group is coming out of long years of success and profitability. That is precisely what makes change hard: why move when the results are good? Yet its historical markets are changing, the climate roadmap demands new ways of producing, and the leadership wants to build a more diversified company while it still has the means to do so.
What is at stake: building a culture of high performance and accountability, carried by managers who can bring their teams along, not just pass decisions on.
What we see on the ground:
- A weak sense of urgency: “we’re breaking records, why change?”
- Managers who are technically strong, but poorly equipped to deal with people’s reactions to change.
- Feedback that is still rare, and difficult conversations often avoided.
- A very strong safety requirement, which also needs to become psychological safety: being able to say what is wrong.
- A leadership programme designed at group level, in English, to be brought to life locally in another language and another culture.
The challenge: turn a corporate programme into an experience lived by frontline managers, module after module, year after year.
“Transforming through people”: a long-term programme, one module at a time
The group designed a multi-module leadership toolbox in support of its transformation. Lead is its facilitation partner on site: translating and adapting the materials, facilitating in French, reworking facilitation guides for the classroom, debriefings and summary sheets. Groups are deliberately mixed to encourage peer learning, and each module opens with the same check-in ritual that builds trust.
Modules 1 to 4: laying the foundations
- Navigating and leading change: Kotter’s eight steps, the transition curve, and an action plan applied to each participant’s real change project.
- Giving and receiving feedback: the Johari window, psychological safety, quarterly team review.
- Holding difficult conversations: active listening, analysing the causes of underperformance, corrective dialogue.
- Coaching and mentoring for performance: coaching posture, questioning, listening, quarterly follow-up of the performance dialogue.
Modules 5 and 6: widening the scope
- Collaborating across the boundaries between departments and trades.
- Leading sustainably: what is expected of a leader in terms of safety, environment and performance culture. Participants produce a concrete assessment: what to continue, what to develop, areas to watch.
Modules 7 and 8: anchoring accountability
- Building accountability through self-leadership: learning zone, accountability ladder, real dilemmas, role play in threes and individual commitments.
- Creating a healthy environment through constructive relationships: constructive conflict, psychological safety, role play on a frank conversation each manager genuinely needs to have.
The Lead method: adapt without betraying
For each module, Lead reworks the head office guide into a timed facilitation plan, designed for the room and for a group that already knows the previous modules. Redundant sequences are trimmed, and four moments are protected: the safety ritual, the check-in, the practice and the check-out.
The principle is owned openly: acknowledge from the outset that the training was not chosen, relay the group’s message honestly, then speak in your own voice. That in itself is teaching psychological safety.
Tools for managers, not binders
- The materials for each module translated and adapted into French.
- Timed facilitation plans, with a fallback plan and instructions ready to deliver.
- Editorial summary sheets handed to participants (for example: framing accountability, leading with accountability, building a team that owns its results).
- A change action plan worked on a real project of each manager’s.
- Reusable tools: quarterly team review, feedback dialogue, performance dialogue template.
- A structured debriefing per module, reporting to leadership what managers think should be continued, developed and watched.
A management line that speaks the same language of change
The programme aims to make managers the first drivers of the group’s transformation. The module debriefings already outline its expected effects:
- a shared vocabulary and shared tools for leading change, giving feedback and holding difficult conversations;
- a space where managers can speak about sensitive topics, in an atmosphere they describe as positive and interactive;
- concrete feedback from the ground to leadership on safety, the environment, simplifying procedures and recognition;
- a more explicit link between industrial safety and psychological safety;
- clearly identified areas for improvement: linking the modules more closely to day-to-day work and organising follow-up on commitments.
A partner who brings strategy to life in the room
- The ability to carry a corporate programme into another language and another culture, without losing its intent.
- Facilitation grounded in reality: ongoing change projects, real situations, conversations to have on Monday morning.
- Continuity over time, module after module, which builds the group’s trust.
- An honest perspective, which also reports back what is not working and what needs improving in the programme.
Does your transformation depend on managers who still need to believe in it?
If your strategy is clear but struggles to reach your teams, we can design or bring to life a leadership programme that makes it concrete for your managers. Let’s talk.
