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 1:1 executive coaching, expert workshops and peer learning.
FORMATIn-person + Online
COMMITMENT0.25 days / week
DURATION12 Weeks
COHORT SIZE10 leaders
COURSE DATES28th September - 9th November 2026
COST£5950 £595
90% funding available for most businesses with LCR Skills Bootcamps paying £5,355 of your programme costs.
LEVEL 6
Now enrolling
— 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 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
The business has grown. Your leadership needs to grow with it.
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 always 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. Meanwhile, most leadership advice you encounter wasn't built for creative businesses.
— PROGRAMME MODULES
Four integrated themes. A clearer way to lead.
This programme begins with the leader, not the theory. We look at how you lead now, what your team and organisation need from you next, and how to turn that insight into practical change.
#01 Presence — The leader you are, and the leader you want to be
Every senior leader has a version of themselves they’re trying to become — and a version other people experience every day. This theme helps you understand the gap between the two. Using your 360 feedback, reflection and peer challenge, you’ll look honestly at how you show up, what others rely on you for, where your leadership creates confidence, and where it may need to shift.
→ See how your leadership is experienced by the people around you
→ Understand the gap between your intention and your impact
→ Define the leadership shifts that matter most now
YOU'LL LEAVE WITH - A clear personal leadership roadmap, grounded in your 360 feedback, your own ambitions and the shifts you’re committing to make.
#02 Culture — Creating the Conditions for Creative and Commercial Success
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 - giving you a practical way to make your values visible in everyday leadership.
#03 Performance — Creating capacity beyond you
Most senior leaders do not become bottlenecks because they want control. It happens because you care about the work, hold too much context and are used to being the person things come back to. Explore where your involvement is still essential, where it is slowing things down, and how to build the trust, structure and decision-making capacity for others to lead more.
→ Map where your time, authority and decisions are currently concentrated
→ Decide what only you should hold, and what needs to move to others
→ Create the conditions for better ownership across the team
YOU'LL LEAVE WITH - A Leadership Capacity Audit + a Delegation Plan clarifying responsibilities, strengthening team ownership and reducing founder dependency.
#04 Growth — Leading the next stage
Brings everything together. You’ll focus on the decisions, priorities and leadership shifts that will make the organisation more resilient, less dependent on individual people and better able to grow with purpose.
→ Identify the leadership priorities for the next stage of creative and commercial growth
→ Set clearer priorities for the business, the team and your own role
→ Turn insight from the programme into practical commitments you can act on
YOU'LL LEAVE WITH - A focused plan for leading the organisation’s next stage, with clearer priorities, practical commitments and a stronger sense of what it will take to get there.
— HOW YOU’LL LEARN
Structured for senior leaders. Grounded in your real leadership context.
Built around the demands of senior leadership, this programme helps you understand how you lead now, test new approaches in your organisation and build the leadership required for what’s next.
🗓️ Session dates
Aside from the individuals 1:1 sessions, you’ll need to be able to commit to 3x in-person and 3x online sessions over 12 weeks:
In-person dates: 28 Sep / 12 Oct / 26 Oct / 9 Nov
Online dates: 5 Oct / 19 Oct / 2 Nov
🔎 360 Leadership Diagnostic
Start with a GCI 360 diagnostic that combines your self-assessment with structured feedback from colleagues, giving you a clearer sense of where you are now, where you want to get to, and what it will take to lead differently.
🎯 1:1 Executive Coaching
Three dedicated coaching sessions give you space to work through the leadership challenges that matter most to you. Use them to make sense of your 360 feedback, and turn course insight into real behavioural change.
🏛️ Practical Workshops
The 3 × full-day in-person workshops will be delivered by leaders who’ve walked your path. Practical frameworks, peer exchange and applied exercises grounded in your day-to-day reality.
🌐 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.
📚 Live Leadership Application
Between sessions, you’ll apply the work directly to live organisational challenges — the decisions, conversations and changes already on your desk. Each task helps you turn insight into visible leadership practice.
— YOUR COACHES
Experts who have walked the path you're on
Our coaches have led through the kinds of decisions, tensions and transitions you’re facing now. They bring practical experience, honest challenge and support tailored to your version of success.
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.
Kate Rosser
SENIOR LEADERSHIP
COACH
Senior leader and executive coach with 17 years' experience across strategy, business performance and people development with BBC and Sky. Works with creative senior leaders to develop the capability, confidence and clarity to lead at the highest level.
— WHAT CHANGES
By the end of the programme, you’ll know what needs to change — in you, your team and your organisation.
We’ll help you step back from the day-to-day and look honestly at what your leadership is enabling, what it may be limiting, and where your attention will make the biggest difference.
🎯 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 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.
➡️ For the future
A clearer view of how you lead, what your organisation needs next and where change needs to happen. You’ll leave with practical tools, a focused action plan and a trusted peer network to support you as you put it into practice.
Ready to build the leadership your business needs next?
Starting September 2026. Small senior cohort. Skills Bootcamps funding available.