DURATION12 Weeks
Creative Executive &
Strategic Leadership
For founders, directors and senior leaders of creative and digital businesses who need to lead at the level their organisation has grown to not the level it started at. A 12-week programme combining expert workshops, 1:1 executive coaching and peer learning.
FORMATHybrid:
In-person + Online
COMMITMENT0.25 days / week
LEVELLevel 6 (Chartered Manager)
COHORT SIZE10 Participants
START DATESeptember 2026
LEVEL 6
Fully funded
Waiting list
— WHO IT’S FOR
For founders and senior leaders whose organisation has outgrown their current way of leading.
In creative businesses, senior leaders are almost always promoted on the basis of creative or technical excellence. They're brilliant at what they do and that's exactly how they ended up running the business. But running a business is a different skill set. And without formal development, most creative leaders find themselves operating as the primary contributor, the decision bottleneck and the cultural thermostat, all at once.
This programme develops Chartered Manager-level strategic leadership capability, practical, applied and specific to the creative sector.
Creative Founder / CEO
Ready to step back from delivery and lead strategically
Managing Director
Translating business ambition into team-level performance
Studio Director
Building the culture and capacity for sustainable growth
Creative Director (senior)
Moving from creative authority to organisational leadership
— THE CHALLENGE
You built something good. Now the way you've always led it is starting to hold it back.
Most creative founders and senior leaders reach a point where the instincts that got them here stop working as well as they used to. The business has grown. The team is bigger. The decisions are more consequential. But the leadership approach, built on personality, proximity and sheer force of will, hasn't grown with it.
The organisation needs a different kind of leadership now. More deliberate. More distributed. More strategic. And that's genuinely hard to build without support.
1 You're still the decision bottleneck, not because you want to be, but because it's faster, and because letting go feels like losing control.
2 Your culture is something that happens around you rather than something you're deliberately building. You're not sure what your team would say about it if you weren't in the room.
3 The strategic work, the thinking, the planning, the longer view keeps getting crowded out by the operationally urgent.
4 You don't have many peers who are dealing with the same things at the same level. Most leadership advice you encounter wasn't built for creative businesses.
— PROGRAMME THEMES
Four integrated themes. One leadership transformation.
The programme begins with a GCI 360 executive leadership diagnostic, combining your self-assessment with feedback from colleagues, to establish a clear, evidence-based foundation for your development.
#01 Presence — Executive Self-Management and Behavioural Discipline
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Develops executive self-management as a structured management skill. You'll study your GCI 360 diagnostic results and use evidence-based frameworks to identify and change the leadership patterns that most impact your team and culture.
→ Analyse 360 feedback using the Radical Candour framework to identify default leadership patterns
→ Develop self-regulation under pressure using the Window of Tolerance model
→ Strengthen trust and accountability behaviours using the BRAVING framework
YOU'LL LEAVE WITH - A personal leadership roadmap, a clear, one-page guide to how you want to lead and what you're committing to develop.
#02 Culture — Creating the Conditions for Creative and Commercial Success
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Helps you move from unintentional culture creation to deliberate culture design, translating your values and intent into observable, replicable behaviours that allow creative teams to be both excellent and commercially disciplined.
→ Recognise the unintended cultural signals your leadership behaviour creates
→ Use values-to-behaviours mapping to translate intent into real organisational norms
→ Address cultural risks without damaging creative confidence or team trust
YOU'LL LEAVE WITH - A Culture Gap Analysis + a Values-to-Behaviour Action Plan translating your organisational values into leadership behaviours.
#03 Performance — Leadership Leverage and Organisational Capacity
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About strategic delegation: shifting from founder-dependency to enabling high-quality delivery through others. The performance constraints in most creative organisations aren't about talent, they're about leaders who are still too involved in delivery.
→ Analyse where your leadership time, decisions and authority are currently concentrated
→ Apply structured risk assessment to executive decision-making
→ Use the "Right People, Right Seats" framework to redistribute leadership responsibility
YOU'LL LEAVE WITH - A Leadership Capacity Audit + a Delegation Plan clarifying responsibilities, strengthening team ownership and reducing founder dependency.
#04 Growth — Strategic Leadership and Sustainable Organisational Development
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Brings everything together. You'll develop the strategic leadership capability to take a longer view, strengthening your ability to set priorities, build leadership depth and ensure your business can sustain its performance, culture and direction as it evolves
→ Define clear organisational priorities that support sustainable creative and commercial growth
→ Build leadership capability in your senior team to reduce dependency on individual leaders
→ Develop succession and sustainability planning to ensure continuity as the organisation grows
YOU'LL LEAVE WITH - An Executive Leadership Action Plan, bringing together your programme insights to define clear leadership priorities, development actions and measurable steps forward.
— HOW IT'S DELIVERED
Structured for senior leaders. Applied from day one.
Three contexts, designed to work together: expert workshops for frameworks and peer exchange, 1:1 coaching for personal application, and structured peer learning to build your advisory circle.
🏛️
Expert Leadership Workshops
3 × full-day in-person workshops delivered by senior practitioners. Practical frameworks, peer exchange and applied exercises grounded in creative sector scenarios.
24 GUIDED LEARNING HOURS
🎯
1:1 Executive Coaching
3 × 1-hour individual coaching sessions with your dedicated executive coach. Apply learning to live organisational challenges and embed behavioural change.
3 GUIDED LEARNING HOURS
🌐
Peer Learning & Network
Structured peer learning sessions with senior leaders across the creative sector. Share challenges, test thinking and build a peer advisory circle that outlasts the programme.
8 HOURS INDEPENDENT LEARNING
Starts with a GCI 360 Executive Leadership Diagnostic
Every participant begins with a comprehensive 360-degree leadership review, combining your self-assessment with structured feedback from colleagues. A 1:1 interpretation session with your executive coach ensures you begin the programme with clear, evidence-based priorities. Everything that follows is grounded in your diagnostic.— YOUR COACHES
Experts who have walked the path you’re on
Our coaches have the scars and stories of lived experience to help you achieve your version of success as we know each journey and destination is different.
Amanda McKenna
EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP SPECIALIST
Former co-founder and board director of the UK's largest independent creative agency, leading it to successful acquisition. Deep experience of executive leadership, strategic growth and senior stakeholder influence within creative and digital organisations.
Freia Muehlenbein
GROWTH ADVISOR & STRATEGIST
16+ years supporting founders and senior leaders to scale creative and digital agencies. Specialises in translating strategy into practical, embedded change across operations, people and commercial performance.
Kate Rosser
SENIOR LEADERSHIP COACH
Senior leader and executive coach with 17 years' experience across strategy, business performance and people development. Works with senior leaders to develop the capability, confidence and clarity to lead at the highest level.
— WHAT CHANGES
By the end of the programme, AI will be part of how you work.
Not in theory. Not in a controlled demo environment. In your actual role, on real tasks, with real outputs to show for it. The measure of this programme isn't what you know about AI it’s in the change in the quality, speed and cost you’re able to create.
🎯
For you
You'll have a clearer picture of how you show up as a leader: where you add value, where you get in the way, and what you need to change. That picture comes from evidence made of of your GCI 360 results, your cohort, your own honest reflection, not from gut instinct alone.
👥
For your team:
Most creative businesses have a founder dependency problem. The founder is the brand, the relationships, the final call on everything that matters. This programme helps you start redistributing that weight by building leadership capacity in the people around you so the organisation doesn't live and die by your presence.
🛠️
For your organisation:
Culture drifts when no-one is designing it deliberately. By the end of the programme, you'll have mapped the gap between the culture you intend and the one that's actually operating. And you'll have a plan for closing it.
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What you'll leave with:
A GCI 360 diagnostic that gives you an evidence-based picture of how you lead. A Leadership Impact and Adjustment Plan grounded in that data. A Culture Gap Analysis and a values-to-behaviours action plan. A Delegation and Capacity Audit that maps where your time and authority are concentrated. And an Executive Leadership Action Plan that brings all of it together into a clear set of commitments for the next stage of your leadership.
CREATIVE EXECUTIVE & STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP · LIVERPOOL CITY REGION
Secure your place on the next cohort.
Starting September 2026. Cohort of 10 — limited places. Includes GCI 360 diagnostic and 3 × 1:1 executive coaching sessions. Available through LCR Skills Bootcamps — may be fully funded.
DURATION12 Weeks
FORMATWorkshops + coaching + peer learning
COMMITMENT0.25 days / week
LEVELLevel 6
✓ This programme is available through the LCR Skills Bootcamps initiative. Check your employer's eligibility — places may be fully funded for businesses in the creative industries.
COHORT SIZE10 Participants
START DATESeptember 2026
COSTFully funded for eligible employers