What Happens When You Actually Use What You Learn
Most leadership development looks good on paper, but the real test of it comes on a Monday morning.
We've been working with a Head of Operations at a manufacturing business - someone who oversees ten departments and has absorbed a colleague's responsibilities on top of his own. He's not short of things to deal with so when he started our How-To SkillBuild programme, he wasn't looking for theory. He wanted things he could actually use.
This is what happened next.
The thing he noticed first was himself
He started paying attention to how he showed up, especially when things got pressured, and without any navel-gazing about it. He'd been doing some thinking about his Shadow of Influence, about what he was modelling for the people around him without necessarily meaning to.
He started reacting more calmly - and people noticed. He hadn’t announced it or made a thing of it, they just noticed. Team members became more open with him, more honest, and one colleague even commented on it directly.
From there, small things started to shift. His team asked for more time together, not less; they wanted more huddles and more connection. When he brought them into the planning process and actually showed them the bigger picture and got them involved, they understood where they were headed. And they got on board in a way they hadn't before.
He'd also carried out a feedback exercise, which sounds simple enough, but the act of sitting down and being deliberate about what to keep doing, what to let go of, and what to start doing, well that's harder than it sounds when you're in the middle of running a busy operation.
Then he turned his attention to time
With so many departments to oversee, time had always felt like something that happened to him rather than something he managed. That started to change. He moved to a 12-week planning cycle, broke the annual plan into quarterly objectives and began linking his own priorities to the work in front of him rather than letting the urgent crowd out the important.
He also started letting go – of the operational things that others could manage just as well, probably better, because they were closer to them. The idea was straightforward: if he was going to think strategically, he had to stop filling his days with things that didn’t need him specifically. So he delegated more and trusted people to get on with it.
Change was where it really came together
His business was going through a period of significant change - shift hours being restructured, new processes coming in, people at different stages of getting their heads around it all, to name a few. He'd been thinking about the change curve, and particularly the 20-60-20 model: the idea that in any change, roughly 20% will get on board quickly, 60% are moveable and 20% will resist regardless. The insight that stayed with him was about that middle 60% - that they often come on board not because of a compelling argument, but because they can see the top 20% being dealt with fairly and they feel safe enough to follow.
So instead of trying to bring everyone along at once, he focused his energy differently. He even used what he'd learned about attitudes and readiness to make a practical decision about who should represent the business on an important trip abroad.
The framework he'd picked up didn't stay in a notebook. It spread. His SHEQ (Safety, Health, Environment, and Quality) colleague uses it daily - not only for change management but in meeting structures and cascades. It became the business's template, adapted and built on, and eventually folded into their ISO processes and risk management approach too. He'd wanted to show her a finished project rather than a work in progress, but the fact that it's been taken up and made their own says something in itself.
He'd also been working on difficult conversations, both having them himself and helping others have them too. A colleague who would previously have avoided those moments now has performance management plans in place. Improvement plans and the effect on the team has been tangible: people can see that things are being dealt with. It's created a steadier environment, and it shows, he said, that change is actually possible.
Then there’s the £3.5m capital project
He’s currently managing a £3.5 million capital project – and he’s clear that much of what he’s applied comes directly from the QuoLux™ framework: cross-department collaboration, meeting structure, planning, effective delegation. But the moment that stands out sits right at the heart of Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA).
The project was planned and managed in a standard PDCA format. But during the planning phase, the team did something different.
The installation would take the business offline for 16 weeks, wiping out around 70% of manufacturing capacity in the process. The conventional options were to run at reduced output for the duration or buy parts from a third party to cover the gap. Neither was ideal, so instead they committed to overproducing the parts before the project even started – building up enough stock to keep the Assembly department fully supplied throughout the installation with no impact on customer orders.
It required an external warehouse rental, exceptional planning, logistical complexity, machine availability at levels the business hadn’t seen before and absolute buy-in from every department. There was risk involved. But Phase 1 – the overproduction phase – was completed two weeks ahead of deadline. And when they called those parts off during Phase 2 to keep production running, the saving compared to buying from a third party came to more than £500,000.
That’s what “do something different” looks like when a leader has the frameworks, the team and the confidence to act on them.
The results are hard to argue with
World-class performance in his industry sits at 95%. They're now at 80-85%, which is a significant move up. They hit their targets for many consecutive days for the first time ever and individual records are being broken within the business.
All of that matters. But so does something he said almost in passing - that he wants to do more management by walking around. And say thank you more.
Sometimes the most practical thing a leader can do is also the most straightforward.
QuoLux's How-To SkillBuild modules are short, practical sessions designed for busy leaders who want to put learning into practice straight away. When leaders and their teams thrive, so do organisations. An organisation with a high performing mindset prioritises skill development and continuously makes the necessary investments to ensure people have time to dedicate to learning to improve their work. Find out more about How-To SKillBuild here.
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