How We Developed Two Team Leaders With Completely Different Plans

The instinct when two team leaders have a performance problem is to design one solution: put them both through the same programme, run the sessions together, keep it efficient and consistent.

That instinct is wrong. Acting on it would have failed both of them.

This is a case study from a UK pharmaceutical logistics operation. Two team leaders, both flagged by the same weekly KPI scorecard, both underperforming in different ways. One needed high-direction coaching with structured challenge and deliberate behavioural correction. The other needed low-direction support with technical knowledge transfer and a safety net while confidence built.

Same role, same expectations. Completely different development plans, both of which worked. Here's how we got there.

The Starting Point: Using the Scorecard as a Diagnostic, Not a Verdict

In the absence of a centralised learning and development framework, identifying development needs in this operation fell to the warehouse manager (accountable for reviewing performance data, interpreting what it showed, and translating that interpretation into action).

The primary tool was a weekly KPI scorecard covering productivity, accuracy, attendance, shift consistency, and people process compliance. The scorecard measured outcomes. The job was to use it as a diagnostic: not just to confirm whether targets were being hit, but to identify why they weren't, and what kind of intervention the data was actually pointing to.

This distinction matters. A scorecard used only to confirm pass or fail is a compliance instrument. A scorecard used to ask questions becomes a development tool. The data tells you where the gap is. It does not tell you what to do about it. That comes from the conversation, the observation, and the understanding of the person behind the metric.

What the Q4 scorecard showed for the two leaders in question:

The temptation at this point is to skip ahead to the solution. Resist it. Understanding the gap is half the work. Understanding the person behind the gap is the other half, and it's what determines whether the intervention you design will actually land.

Reading the Person, Not Just the Metric

Before drafting either plan, I spent time in observation and structured one-to-one conversation. Not performance management conversations, but diagnostic ones. What are the motivational drivers at play? What conditions make this person more receptive, and what conditions make them defensive or disengaged?

For the experienced leader, the pattern that emerged was one of strong status identification with the technical role. Recognition as a subject-matter expert mattered significantly. But challenges to decisions (even legitimate ones) were frequently interpreted as threats to that status, resulting in defensive responses rather than open dialogue. Autonomy was a strong driver, but when unconstrained it was showing up as excessive control and limited delegation. The gap was not knowledge. It was self-awareness and behavioural habit.

For the new leader, the picture was simpler but required its own care. High autonomy drive, natural empathy, strong team relationships: all working well. The single stressor was the technical complexity of a specific operational area she hadn't been exposed to before. The risk in developing her was not finding the gap; it was inadvertently undermining what was already working by over-managing someone who didn't need it.

Two Completely Different Interventions

The Experienced Leader: Directive Coaching

Given the status-sensitivity identified in the observation phase, development conversations were framed deliberately. Rather than positioning them as corrective (which would have triggered defensiveness and closed the conversation down), they were framed around leadership effectiveness and credibility at the senior level. The goal was to reduce the perceived threat and increase openness to feedback.

Coaching used the GROW framework as a structure: establishing a clear goal around communication tone and people process consistency, reviewing live interactions and their perceived impact, exploring alternative approaches to delegation and feedback, and agreeing specific actions for implementation. The emphasis was on reflection rather than instruction, encouraging the leader to arrive at the insights themselves rather than being told what to change. This distinction is not cosmetic. It is what determines whether the change sticks.

Feedback was structured using the Situation-Behaviour-Impact (SBI) model throughout. When a specific communication or action needed to be addressed, the feedback was always anchored to a specific situation, a specific observable behaviour, and its measurable impact on others. Never on character, intent, or personality. This approach reduced emotional response and increased receptiveness to discussion. It also made the feedback harder to dismiss: specific, evidenced, and tied to observable outcomes rather than impressions.

Mentoring was delivered through proximity during live operational activity. This was the most impactful element. Rather than discussing issues in a structured 1-2-1 three days after they occurred, behaviours were addressed in context: immediately after a shift briefing, on the warehouse floor, in the moment the gap appeared. Issues caught in context cannot be argued about in the abstract. They happened, they were witnessed, and they can be discussed clearly.

Governance ran on a bi-weekly "gateway review" structure: the scorecard was reviewed together, and progression to the next development module was gated on specific metric improvement. If people process compliance or pick error trends had not moved, the conversation repeated before moving forward. This prevented the programme from becoming a series of sessions disconnected from operational reality.

The New Leader: Supportive Mentoring

The contrast with the experienced leader could not have been sharper. There was nothing to correct here. The communication style, the team relationships, the instinct for how to manage people: all of it was already at the level you'd want from a much more experienced leader. The only gap was technical confidence in one specific, genuinely complex area of the operation that she hadn't encountered before joining.

The intervention was designed around that constraint. Protect what's working. Transfer what's missing.

Planning review sessions were established before each shift in the relevant area. Rather than telling her how to run it, coaching questions were used: "Looking at tomorrow's volume, where do you see the pressure points?" "How does this roster match the peak demand window?" The goal was to build her own analytical framework for the problem, not to give her answers that would make her dependent on the conversation continuing.

Her autonomy was deliberately protected. Her communication style and approach to team management were not touched, not because they didn't matter, but because they were already excellent. Micromanaging what works is one of the most reliable ways to break it.

A safety net was maintained: the shift plan was reviewed together before execution, giving her confidence to run it alone. As competence grew over the following weeks, the review moved from a pre-shift check to a brief post-shift debrief. Then it stopped being necessary. The cadence matched her development, not a fixed schedule.

What Changed

For the experienced leader: progress was gradual, which reinforced the need for sustained coaching rather than a one-off intervention. Early indicators were improved communication clarity in briefings: operatives reported clearer understanding of what was expected, and the pick error rate in the team's area began to stabilise. As instructions became more precise, the error rate dropped below tolerance, recovering approximately 15 hours per week that had previously been spent on rework and reprocessing. People process compliance was restored to 100% and maintained. The defensiveness under challenge reduced (not eliminated, but measurably more manageable).

A critical moment in the process: addressing issues in the moment through proximity coaching broke the leader's initial limited self-awareness. When a behaviour is pointed out immediately after it happens (in context, with specific evidence), it cannot be reframed or argued away. That immediacy was what moved the needle when structured coaching sessions alone had not been sufficient.

For the new leader: the trajectory was faster. Within one quarter, she was planning and executing complex shifts independently, without the pre-shift review. The team people scores for her shift were consistently the highest in the operation, a reflection of a communication style that had been protected rather than managed. She moved from new starter to high-potential leader in a period where many new leaders would still be finding their feet.

The Lesson: Fairness Is Not the Same as Uniformity

This experience reinforced something worth stating plainly, because it runs against a common management instinct.

Fairness in development does not mean treating everyone the same. It means giving everyone what they actually need.

The experienced leader needed directive leadership (high direction, high challenge) because the behavioural gap represented a real risk to team performance and was not going to change through positive encouragement alone. Applying supportive mentoring to this situation would have produced no change: the habit was too ingrained, the self-awareness too limited, for a low-challenge intervention to create movement.

The new leader needed supportive leadership (low direction, high support) because the gap was one of technical confidence in a new environment, not attitude, behaviour, or character. Applying directive coaching to this situation would have undermined her natural strengths and created the very anxiety it was trying to resolve.

Running the same programme for both, at the same time, in the same sessions, would have been efficient for the manager. It would have been ineffective for both leaders, and the operational consequences of two leaders not developing would have been significantly more expensive than the additional planning time required to design two different approaches.

There is also a secondary lesson here about the dynamic nature of motivation and development need. The experienced leader's SCARF drivers (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness) were not fixed. As his communication improved and his team responded differently, his relatedness driver strengthened. As his compliance metrics recovered, his status concern reduced. The development plan that was right at the start of the programme was not identical to what was needed at month three. This is not a problem. It is how development is supposed to work. Treat it as a dynamic, not a static, diagnosis.

What Helped and What Didn't

Being honest about what was genuinely useful in this process:

What did not help: a one-size approach at the start. Before the diagnostic work was done, the initial instinct was to enrol both leaders in a shared module on "people management and communication." That would have been the wrong intervention for one leader and an unnecessary one for the other. The diagnostic phase (slower, less efficient, more conversational) was not optional overhead. It was the work.

Three Things to Do This Week

1. Review your team leader performance data for signals, not just verdicts

   Look at your scorecard with one question: what does this data not explain? A leader hitting productivity KPIs while missing people process compliance is telling you something specific about prioritisation. A leader with high team engagement but inconsistent operational outcomes is telling you something different. The metric is the question. You still need to find the answer.
2. Before you design any development plan, diagnose the gap correctly

   Ask yourself: is this a capability gap, a behavioural gap, or a confidence gap? Capability responds to training. Behaviour responds to coaching, specifically to structured reflection and evidence-based feedback, not to instruction. Confidence responds to a safety net and increasing autonomy as competence builds. Applying the wrong approach to the wrong gap wastes time and can make things worse.
3. If you are running two separate development plans, do not conflate them

   The efficiency of a joint session is smaller than it appears. Two leaders sitting through material that is calibrated for one of them, and not for the other, will each get a fraction of the value. The time investment in two well-designed separate plans is not double the work, and the return is significantly higher. Resist the instinct to conflate for ease of delivery.

On Bespoke Development in an Operation With No L&D Framework

This case study comes from an operation without a formal learning and development infrastructure: no centralised training team, no off-the-shelf leadership programme, no dedicated budget for external coaching. The development described here was designed and delivered within normal operational management activity, using public-domain frameworks and a structured coaching approach that any manager can learn and apply.

The constraint is not resources. It's the discipline to do the diagnostic work before jumping to a solution, and the willingness to accept that two people with similar job titles and similar gap descriptions might need entirely different things.

The experienced leader needed direction and challenge. The new leader needed support and space. Recognising that difference and acting on it precisely is what made both interventions work.

That is a management skill, not a training budget.