Lead better. Get more done through others.

Ninety minutes a fortnight for the session, and be honest with yourself about the first two months: the work in between — writing a one-page standard for a role, preparing a conversation properly, sitting on your hands while somebody does the job their way — costs time before it saves any. That is the part nobody sells you. The return arrives when work stops bouncing back for your approval, decisions stop queuing outside your door, and the four questions you answered by half nine this morning get answered by the people paid to answer them. In the illustrative example on this page, that turn comes around month three. If you cannot protect ninety minutes a fortnight, do not start — a rhythm you cancel twice teaches your team that your new standards are provisional, which is worse than never having set them.

Training and coaching fail the same way: they stay general. A course gives you a model for difficult conversations; it does not sit with you while you plan the actual conversation with the actual supervisor who has been coasting for eighteen months, rehearse the opening line out loud, and then ask you a fortnight later whether it happened. That last step is the one that was missing. Here, every session opens with what you committed to last time — done or not done, and what got in the way — and the work is always a named person, a specific decision, the actual words. Nothing stays at the level of principles, because principles are easy to agree with and easy to shelve. If the last attempt gave you a folder of models and no changed Tuesday, the difference you are looking for is the follow-up, not a better folder.

You are flat out because everything routes through you — that is not the obstacle to this work, it is the case for it. Look at the day described at the top of this page: four questions before half nine that somebody else could have answered, a proposal rewritten in silence because fixing it was quicker than the conversation. None of that is a time problem; it is a delegation problem dressed as one. The honest warning is different: half-doing this is worse than not starting. If you announce new standards and then cancel the sessions, overrule decisions you delegated, or let the follow-up slide, your team learns that nothing you set lasts — and the next attempt gets harder. So the real question is not whether you have capacity. It is whether you will hold the line for three months while the team learns you mean it.

Something small usually moves in month one — typically a decision you stop taking, because the first two sessions map every recurring decision in the business and mark where it lands, and most owners find far more arrows pointing at themselves than need to. The visible changes take longer, because they depend on other people building new habits: work going out without your sign-off, a meeting you attend but no longer chair, your hours coming down because the rework stopped. Three to six months is the honest range for those, and the ninety-day review exists to check the trajectory with evidence rather than optimism. Watch for one early signal that costs nothing to spot: whether the number of questions reaching you each week starts falling. If it does, the rest tends to follow. If it does not, that is what the next session is for.

Sometimes true, and if it is, the coaching will surface it quickly rather than protect you from it. But run the test before the verdict. Has anyone in the team ever had a written standard for their role — not a job description from the hire, an actual definition of what good looks like in numbers? Have they ever owned a decision you did not quietly reverse? Has feedback ever arrived inside a week of the event rather than at an annual review? Most owners answer no to all three, which means the team has never been managed, only supervised — and you cannot assess people you have never actually led. Give them three months of clear standards, real authority inside written limits, and feedback close to the event. The ones worth keeping become obvious. So do the others, and by then you can act on evidence rather than frustration.

Say so early, because in leadership work the failure modes are diagnosable. At ninety days we review the measures picked in month one — hours in delivery, decisions escalated to you each week, work going out without your sign-off — against a written record of what you committed to and what you did. That record settles the first question honestly: was the approach wrong, or was the work not done? If you had the conversations, held the limits and the numbers still have not moved, the approach changes or the engagement stops, and we will say stop first if it is true. If the record shows the conversations kept not happening, that is different — and usually more useful, because the block is now visible and it is often personal rather than tactical. Either way the review is a scheduled conversation, not an awkward one you have to start.

That fear keeps more conversations unhad than any other. First, the conversation you are picturing — the one rehearsed in the car for six months — is risky, because by then it arrives too hot and lands as an attack. That version is what we prevent: raised inside a week, behaviour and effect rather than character, rehearsed out loud before you are in the room. Delivered like that, a clear standard with a fair review period reads as seriousness, not hostility, and people mostly respond to being taken seriously. Second, look at what silence is already costing: your best people can see the underperformance too, and they are watching what you tolerate. If someone does leave rather than meet a reasonable written standard, you have learned something you were paying not to know. One caveat: anything formal — disciplinary, grievance, redundancy — needs an employment law adviser, not a coach.

There is no rate card on this page because the honest figure depends on things a page cannot know — which stream you need, how often we should meet, and how much sits alongside the sessions. Publishing a headline number that later differs from your actual quote would be worse than publishing nothing, so we do not do it. What is fixed: the discovery call is free, thirty minutes, and ends with a straight answer about fit — including the answer that you do not need a coach yet, which gets said when it is true. If there is a fit, you get a specific figure on the call and in writing before you commit. Then judge the number the way you would judge any hire: against what the current arrangement is costing you — your hours, the rework you absorb, the decisions that queue while you are busy.