Leadership development
A Leadership Development Programme That Goes Past the Workshop
Most leadership workshops produce informed participants.
Tryitowl's programme is designed to produce changed ones — by combining an honest assessment of where the leader currently is with simulation-based practice and peer learning that actually shifts behaviour.
Tryitowl's leadership development programme is a modular, assessment-led experience that combines competency diagnostics, business simulation, facilitated peer learning, and ongoing development — rather than a single-event workshop. It is designed for managers at the stage where real leadership demands begin: the transition from individual contributor to team leader, from manager to senior leader, and from operational responsibility to strategic influence. It runs as an in-person, virtual, or blended cohort programme.
The Design of the Programme
Leadership development that produces durable change requires more than a good facilitator and a coherent curriculum. It requires an accurate baseline — knowing specifically where the participant's capability gaps are before designing the experience to address them. It requires practice under conditions realistic enough to activate the behaviours you're trying to change. And it requires a structure that extends beyond the programme itself, because a three-day event followed by nothing is how most of the learning is lost.
Tryitowl's leadership development programme is built around four integrated components.
Assessment-led entry
Every cohort begins with Tryitowl's leadership competency assessment — a diagnostic tool that measures capability across eight core competencies, from strategic thinking and stakeholder management to communication and adaptability. The assessment results shape the programme design: modules are weighted toward the capability gaps most common in the cohort, and individual development plans are built from each participant's personal profile. Take the assessment →
Simulation-based learning
The core of the programme runs as a facilitated series of business simulations — experiences that put participants in the kinds of decisions they face as leaders: resource allocation under competing priorities, stakeholder navigation without formal authority, communicating under pressure, managing team performance when the feedback is difficult to give. The simulations are selected from Tryitowl's portfolio based on the specific capability gaps identified in the assessment phase.
Facilitated cohort experience
The cohort format is deliberate. Leadership is developed through practice with other people, and a cohort of peers at a similar stage creates the conditions for the kind of honest feedback and shared learning that individual coaching alone cannot produce. Rupert Picardo facilitates core sessions in the programme, bringing a perspective built from designing and running leadership experiences since 2003, across organisations from early-stage companies to global enterprises.
Ongoing development via Guild
The programme doesn't end when the facilitated sessions do. Participants access the Guild platform for post-programme reflection, peer challenge questions, and follow-up competency assessment at three and six months. The data from those reassessments feeds back to the L&D team and gives the programme a measurement arc that extends well beyond the delivery dates.
The Problem with One-Day Leadership Workshops
There is a consistent pattern in the research on leadership training transfer: the longer the gap between the learning experience and the application opportunity, the less the learning transfers. A one-day workshop delivers information and insight. Without a follow-up structure — without a reason to apply the learning quickly, and without accountability when it isn't applied — the insight fades at exactly the pace that Ebbinghaus predicted.
The other failure mode is the absence of diagnosis. Most leadership programmes start with a curriculum — a set of topics someone has decided that leaders need — and deliver it to everyone in the cohort regardless of where they are. A high-potential individual contributor who has just been promoted to manager has different development needs from a mid-level manager who has been leading a team for five years and is preparing to move into a senior leadership role. Treating them the same way produces results that are fine for no one.
Tryitowl's programme is designed to avoid both of these failure modes: it starts with an individual assessment, delivers practice-based learning that is specific to the gaps identified, and has a follow-up structure that keeps the development arc alive after the programme ends.
Who the Programme Is Designed For
First-time managers
The transition from individual contributor to manager is one of the most demanding identity shifts in a professional career. The skills that made someone successful as an individual — deep expertise, personal productivity, precise execution — are only partially transferable to management. Managing former peers, delegating work they could do faster themselves, building credibility with a team that remembers them as a colleague — these are specific challenges that the programme addresses directly. First Time Manager programme →
Mid-level managers stepping up
Managers who have been leading teams for several years and are moving into senior leadership face a different set of challenges: moving from operational to strategic thinking, influencing across the organisation rather than within a function, and developing the kind of executive presence that makes others want to follow their direction. The programme is designed to address this transition explicitly.
High-potential talent tracks
For organisations running a structured high-potential programme, Tryitowl's leadership development programme integrates as the experiential component — providing the simulation-based practice and peer learning that rounds out a development track that might also include mentoring, stretch assignments, and formal education.
How It's Delivered
Modular structure
The programme runs in modules rather than as a single extended event. A typical design is four to six modules delivered over three to six months — each module building on the previous one, with application assignments between sessions that require participants to take what they learned and use it in their actual work before the next session.
In-person, virtual, and blended
The programme is available in all three formats. In-person delivery produces the richest facilitated experience, particularly for the simulation components. Virtual delivery is effective for cohorts that are geographically distributed. Blended programmes — with some modules in-person and others virtual — are the most common format for organisations running multi-location cohorts. Format decisions are made during the design conversation and are driven by what will produce the best learning transfer for the specific cohort, not by what is most convenient.
What Organisations Report After
The feedback pattern that signals the programme has worked is not enthusiasm at the session close. It's the specific story three months later: a participant who handled a difficult performance conversation differently, or who built a stakeholder coalition that previously would have stalled, or who delegated something significant and watched it succeed. That specificity — the connection between the programme experience and a real change in a real situation — is the transfer signal.
Thomson Reuters and Virtusa, which runs programmes for over 50,000 employees across 50 countries, are among the organisations that have run leadership development programmes with Tryitowl. The design approach in both cases was the same: start with an honest assessment, build the programme around what the assessment reveals, and create the follow-up structure that keeps the learning alive.
Rupert's Take
The question I ask every L&D leader before we design anything is: what would you see happening differently if this programme worked?
Not “what outcomes do you want” — that's too abstract. I mean: what specific behaviour, in what specific type of situation, with what specific type of person, would tell you that something changed? If the answer is clear, we can design toward it. If it isn't — if the answer is something like “more confidence” or “better leadership skills” — then the first thing the programme needs to do is get clearer on the question.
Leadership development that produces informed managers who haven't changed is still very common. It's comfortable to design and easy to evaluate — everyone enjoyed the session, the content was relevant, the facilitator was excellent. None of that tells you whether anyone is leading differently. The design decisions that make the difference — the assessment upfront, the simulation-based practice, the follow-through structure — are also the decisions that make a programme harder to run and more expensive to deliver. They're also the only ones that reliably produce the outcomes organisations are actually trying to create.
FAQs
How is this different from a one-day leadership workshop?▼
Tryitowl's leadership development programme is a multi-module experience delivered over three to six months, not a single event. The primary differences are: it starts with an individual competency assessment that shapes the design; it uses simulation-based practice rather than instruction as its primary learning method; it runs as a cohort experience with structured peer learning; and it includes a post-programme follow-up structure — including reassessment at three and six months — that extends the development arc beyond the delivery dates. One-day workshops can produce useful insight. They reliably do not produce durable behaviour change without a follow-up structure.
What does the programme include and how long does it run?▼
A typical programme includes: a pre-programme leadership competency assessment for all participants; four to six facilitated modules over three to six months, combining simulation, facilitated discussion, and peer learning; application assignments between modules; access to the Guild platform for post-programme development and reassessment; and individual development plans built from the assessment results. Specific module design, duration, and format are determined by the cohort's profile and the development goals agreed at the start of the engagement.
Is this suitable for first-time managers?▼
Yes — and specifically so. Tryitowl has a standalone first-time manager programme that addresses the transition from individual contributor to manager directly. View it here → The leadership development programme is designed for cohorts at various stages and can be designed specifically for first-time manager groups. The assessment at the start identifies exactly where the gaps are for each participant, so the programme addresses actual development needs rather than assumed ones.
Can we customise the programme for our organisation's leadership framework?▼
Yes. Tryitowl's competency assessment can be aligned to an organisation's existing leadership framework, and module design can be adapted to use scenarios relevant to the organisation's specific context, sector, and the decisions its leaders actually face. This adaptation is part of the design conversation at the start of the engagement and is not an additional layer on top of a standard programme — it's how the programme is built.
How do you measure the impact of the programme?▼
Measurement is agreed before the programme starts. The standard approach uses the leadership competency assessment as a baseline and reassesses participants at three and six months post-programme. The delta between the two assessments provides a quantified measure of development against the specific competencies the programme targeted. Additionally, manager observation data and participant self-report are collected. What Tryitowl will not do is provide ROI figures that cannot be substantiated — the measurement approach is honest about what can be reliably tracked and what cannot.
What is the role of the Tryitowl assessment in the programme?▼
The assessment serves two functions: it provides an individual baseline for each participant, informing their personal development plan and making the programme relevant to where they actually are; and it provides an aggregate profile of the cohort, allowing the programme design to weight toward the capability gaps most common across the group. Without the assessment, the programme is generic. With it, the programme is specific — and specific is what produces transfer.