SCALE Session - Manchester

Most founders build a team that thinks like them. The ones who scale build a team that doesn't.

Every founder has a default hiring pattern: people who think fast the way you do, decide the way you do, work the way you do. It feels efficient. It feels safe. It is also the quiet reason so many scaleups hit a leadership ceiling exactly when they need more range in the room, not less.

In this session, Barry McNeill and Mark Green (Co-founders, Work Progressive) will take founders and senior operators through a live, physical experience of diversity of thought in action. To bring it to life, they will explore the dynamics of personal style and emotional intelligence to explore how different people in teams naturally think, decide and lead. Using world-class tools they have used with multiple scaleup organisations, you'll see in real time what your current team's thinking style actually looks like, and what's missing from it.

This isn't a lecture on diversity of thought. It's a practical, occasionally uncomfortable look at your own hiring pattern, and a clear next step for building a leadership team or board that challenges you rather than agrees with you.

You'll leave with a simple model for talking about difference in your team, and one deliberate action to shift how you hire, delegate or listen over the next 90 days.

Who this is for: Founders and senior operators of scaleup businesses (roughly 10 to 100 people) who are building out their leadership team or board and want it to be stronger than a mirror of themselves. Particularly useful if you've ever caught yourself hiring the person who "just gets me" a little too quickly.

What you'll take away:

• A working model (the four Lumina colour energies and your quick Lumina splash in the Lumina app) for spotting where your team's thinking is concentrated, and where it's missing.
• A live demonstration of the gap between the team you have and the team your growth actually needs.
• One specific, 90-day action plan to deliberately widen the range of thinking around your table.
   

About Work Progressive

Work Progressive is an embedded People & Culture partner supporting ambitious, founder-led and scaling businesses to power up their scaleup. As organisations grow, the leadership, culture and ways of working that once drove success often start to break down. We support the transition from Founder to Leader, build leadership capability, culture and operating rhythms needed to scale sustainably.