Pete Fullard is Founder of Upskill People, whose Managing People programme is Institute Approved, and a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership. He is the author of Better Managers = Better Business and has spent more than 30 years helping organisations develop confident, capable managers through practical, measurable learning.
After the Applause
What happened when Leadership Award winners took part in an Institute Approved development programme
Pete Fullard, founder of Upskill People and Fellow of the Institute of Leadership, reflects on how recognising great leadership can create opportunities for development – and what one Institute Approved programme has revealed about building better leaders.
Awards matter. They give people and organisations a moment to pause, reflect and recognise work that might otherwise disappear into the noise of busy working life.
For winners, it can be a brilliant boost. For others, it can be a reminder that good leadership is something people do, often quietly and under pressure.
The best awards open doors. They start conversations. They connect people who might not otherwise have met.
For The Institute of Leadership, The Leadership Awards reflect something at the heart of The Institute’s work: that leadership is practical, human and visible in behaviour. That was certainly our experience as a sponsor and attendee last year.
The IoL’s Leadership Awards have quickly become a serious platform for recognising leadership in different contexts. Each year, they bring together around 250 attendees, attracting hundreds of entries from more than 20 countries, spanning a wide range of sectors such as healthcare, finance, public services, education, policing, charities, construction, rail and aviation.
Through our partnership with the Institute, several award winners from last year’s event were given access to Managing People, Upskill People’s Institute Approved management development programme. That created an opportunity to explore an interesting question. What happens after recognition? Could structured development help successful leaders become even more effective managers?
Many of the participants in question specifically worked in healthcare, allowing us to examine the impacts of the programme in one particularly demanding sector.
Leadership looks different, but the challenge is the same
Good leadership is not owned by one sector. The setting changes, the language changes, the pressure points change, but the central question is familiar. How do we help managers be more effective when it really counts?
In healthcare, that question becomes especially sharp. Clinical and non-clinical managers lead complex teams, handle difficult conversations, support wellbeing, set expectations and keep people moving in the right direction.
Process-led training may signal that someone has been told what to do. It does not necessarily show they can use judgement, listen well, act early or handle the awkward human moments that make the difference.
That is where The Leadership Awards became more than recognition. They became the starting point for practical development, allowing us to measure how managers applied new skills in real workplace situations.
Measuring the impact
Across recent NHS and healthcare pilots using Upskill’s Managing People programme, 75 managers and soon-to-be managers completed 579 learning modules across the programme.
Learner feedback demonstrated that the programme was useful, with 98% of course feedback responses indicating they had gained knowledge and skills they could apply.
We also examined whether capability had shifted. Across 2,100 before-and-after assessment data points, we measured an average 14% uplift in competency.
That takes the story beyond enjoyment, completion and polite feedback. It shows whether managers were better equipped to do something differently afterwards. This is the key lesson for L&D teams, HR leaders and senior managers.
Management development should start with the behaviours you want to improve, and it should be measured against those behaviours. That may sound obvious. A lot of useful things do.
The challenge is that obvious ideas are crowded out when everyone is busy, budgets are tight, and someone has just remembered they need management development by next month.
Start with behaviour, not training
Good programmes take time, resources, and skill. It took us more than three years to build Managing People into what it is today, and we are still making progressive improvements all the time. That is the work. Listen, test, improve, repeat. Tiny spanner-work, not fireworks.
Management development often starts with the thing being delivered. A workshop. A course. A model. A platform. An away day with tired coffee and a flipchart that has seen things. Or an online programme that is well-intentioned, while still not quite feeling like real life.
In Better Managers = Better Business, I wrote about Florence, a new manager sent on a training away day where the scenarios do not feel realistic, and attendance is mistaken for learning.
The point is not face-to-face training versus online learning. One is not automatically better than the other. Development works best when it connects with real work, real behaviours and real measurement.
A better starting question is simple. What do our managers need to do differently?
Perhaps they need to:
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Listen before jumping to solutions
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Handle difficult conversations earlier
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Set clearer expectations
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Adapt their communication style
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Give balanced, constructive feedback
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Support wellbeing without avoiding accountability
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Base decisions on evidence rather than assumptions
These are often referred to as “soft skills”. But there is nothing soft about telling someone their performance is not good enough while preserving the working relationship. There is nothing fluffy about negotiating when two people have dug trenches and started throwing emails at each other.
These are practical, commercial and human skills.
Why measurement matters
Completion tells you someone turned up and clicked through the learning. Satisfaction tells you whether they found it valuable. Both are useful signals, and only part of the picture.
The more interesting question is whether the manager is now more likely to listen well, handle conflict early, set expectations clearly or follow up properly.
To measure that, assessment needs to be linked to specific behaviours. In Managing People, learners work through realistic, story-led scenarios and make decisions as a manager would in real life. The follow-up Mastery Checks are built around practical situations, not memory tests. The point is to understand how someone is likely to apply judgement.
Five lessons for organisations developing managers
For L&D and senior leaders, there are five practical lessons from our healthcare pilot.
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Define the behaviours before choosing the solution
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Use realistic scenarios, because people management is messy
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Measure before and after, so movement is visible
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Look for patterns across groups, so support can be focused
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Make development part of a cycle of defining, assessing, developing, measuring, learning and improving.
Beyond healthcare
Although these insights come from healthcare, the same principles apply in any organisation that takes management capability seriously.
The NHS Leadership and Management Framework provides an important reference point for NHS organisations, helping embed leadership into development, appraisal, recruitment and talent processes. Development helps people practise what good leadership looks like, while measurement helps organisations understand whether capability has genuinely improved.
The same principle applies across every sector. People are often promoted because they're excellent at their job, then expected to lead others without the support needed to develop those management skills.
If you're responsible for developing managers, start by asking what behaviour needs to change. Then ask how you'll know whether it has changed. If the only answer is, "We'll ask whether they enjoyed the training," keep looking.
Better managers don't appear by accident. They're developed deliberately. And if we're serious about leadership, we should be just as serious about demonstrating what changed.
To find out more about Upskill People’s programme Managing People visit the Upskill website.
About Pete Fullard
