Front Line Sales Manager program
A blended learning program to develop high performance sales teams
The challenge:
Front-line managers sit at one of the most demanding points in an organisation. They need to translate strategy into day-to-day performance while simultaneously coaching individuals, making decisions, managing pressure and creating the conditions for their teams to succeed.
The challenge was to create a practical leadership experience that reflected those realities — not another programme built around abstract management theory.
The solution:
I helped design a blended leadership programme combining digital learning with an intensive two-day facilitated workshop.
The experience was built around realistic leadership situations, giving participants opportunities to recognise their own default responses, explore alternative approaches and practise making different choices.
Digital learning introduced and reinforced key ideas, while the face-to-face experience created space for discussion, experimentation, peer learning and practice.
Rather than treating leadership capabilities as separate topics, the programme brought them together through situations that front-line managers regularly encounter: competing priorities, struggling performers, customer pressure, team conflict, unclear ownership, difficult conversations and the tension between delivering results and developing people.
Designing for real leadership behavior:
A central principle of the programme was that leadership often becomes most visible under pressure.
Participants explored some of the automatic responses leaders can fall back on — such as becoming the Fixer, Controller, Rescuer or Avoider — and examined what those responses can create in the people and systems around them.
Scenario-based activities then allowed them to pause, assess what was happening and practise a more deliberate leadership response.
The learning explored tensions such as:
results vs. people
control vs. empowerment
speed vs. quality
support vs. accountability
Participants worked with realistic situations, reflected on their own leadership patterns, learned from peers and identified small, observable changes they could test back in the workplace.
