Our commercial team spends most of its week talking to HR directors and chief executives about what’s happening inside their organisations. Most of those conversations are about leadership itself. But lately another kind keeps coming up. It’s less about what people need to learn and more about how to organise it all once a programme gets big.
These are the questions we hear most often on that, and how we tend to answer them.
1. We have several providers working on one programme. Why does it feel like nobody owns it?
Because usually nobody does. Each supplier owns their part, and the gaps between those parts fall back on your own team.
Large leadership or culture programmes often need more than one kind of expertise. Coaching might come from one place and digital learning from another, with a specialist brought in for a particular module. Each of them might be excellent. But someone still has to keep the experience consistent for participants and make sure the whole thing is still pointed at what the organisation actually needs. In most cases that falls to an HR or L&D team who already had a full job before the programme started.
Good providers don’t automatically add up to a good programme.
When organisations ask us about this, we often end up acting as lead partner. We deliver the leadership and organisational development work ourselves and take on the coordination of everything else, so there’s one place to go when something needs sorting.
2. Should we just cut down to one supplier?
Probably not. It’s easier to manage, but you can lose the expertise you brought people in for in the first place.
Consolidating suppliers is a common reaction, and we understand why. But it often swaps quality for convenience. In our experience the problem is rarely how many providers are involved. It’s that nobody is responsible for how their work fits together.
Clients are sometimes surprised that we’re happy to work alongside suppliers they already use. Starting again with someone new is expensive and disruptive, and it’s rarely necessary. Where there’s a genuine gap, we can bring in specialists we know and trust.
3. How do we keep standards consistent when several organisations are involved?
Decide who is accountable for the whole programme, not just each piece of it.
Larger organisations tend to have firm requirements around quality, data and compliance. Checking every supplier separately is a lot of work, and problems usually show up at the joins between them. Evaluation has the same issue. If each provider measures its own contribution, nobody can tell you whether the programme as a whole made a difference.
This is a part of our work that doesn’t get talked about much. We hold ISO 27001 certification for information security, which means the way we handle participant data and the technology behind our programmes is independently audited. We’re also certified to ISO 14001 for environmental management, which increasingly matters to clients with their own sustainability commitments across their supply chain. When we lead a programme, those standards apply across all of it, including the work of any partners we bring in. For a lot of clients, that’s what gives them the confidence to run something at scale.
4. Our priorities have changed halfway through. Do we have to start again?
Not if the programme was set up expecting things to change.
Multi-year programmes almost never finish looking the way they were designed. A new chief executive arrives, the organisation restructures, or the budget moves. If every element was contracted separately, adapting can mean renegotiating with several suppliers or even going back to market.
Where one partner is already coordinating delivery, bringing in new expertise or scaling part of the programme up becomes a conversation rather than a procurement exercise.
None of this is the glamorous side of leadership development. But a lot of what makes a programme succeed happens in the coordination that participants never see. If we had to sum up this part of our work, it’s helping organisations turn a complicated set of moving parts into coordinated action that actually lasts.
So beyond this entry: who is joining the dots on your biggest programme right now?
If you’d like to talk any of this through, our commercial team would welcome the conversation. That’s where most of these diary entries start.
