Make decisions with greater clarity
Notice how you establish what matters, what counts as evidence and when you are ready to act.
Leadership development for smaller businesses
Grow the thinking behind your business.
Understand how you and your team think, make decisions and approach challenges. Then use that insight to work on the issues that keep coming back.
With Dr Darren Stevens · Profiling, feedback and practical team development
For owners & managersBuilt around your businessStarts with a team of fourWorks towards practical action
Start with what is happening
A familiar problem.
A different way to see it.
Bring a situation that matters to your business. We explore how the people involved understand it, and what that makes possible—or difficult.
- Too many decisions still come back to you.
- Capable people keep talking past one another.
- You want initiative, but your team waits for direction.
- The business is growing, and familiar ways of working are under pressure.
Your route through the work
Four stages.
One real business challenge.
The SME Pathway connects individual understanding with team development. Each stage gives us something concrete to bring into the next.
Identity Compass
Understand how you construct your thinking
Each person completes a profile exploring 50 Cognitive Intentions: the patterns through which they direct attention, make sense of situations and approach decisions. We use the resulting Thinking Style to explore how they think in their business context.
The starting point: an individual profile to inform the development work.
Individual feedback
Connect the profile to your experience
In an individual conversation, we examine the profile alongside examples from that person’s work. We explore strengths, blind spots and the choices currently available, then identify practical areas for development.
The focus: what the person can begin to notice and work on.
Team feedback
See where thinking connects, clashes or goes missing
We bring the team picture into view. How do different ways of constructing the same situation affect decisions, communication and responsibility? We explore these patterns alongside the roles and working conditions that shape them.
The connection: a shared understanding of what happens between you.
Half-day session
Apply the insight to your real challenges
We work together on a live business issue and agree practical intervention steps: what you will try, who will take responsibility, and what you will look for as evidence of progress.
The next move: agreed actions to take into the business.
Your pathway at a glance
A route from individual insight to team action. Keep the original overview to share with your team.
Download the diagramThe thinking beneath the problem
Insight becomes useful when it changes what happens next.
My work draws on adult developmental psychology and Constructed Development Theory. Together, we explore how you construct your understanding of a situation, how that shapes your response, and where another choice may become available.
Your profile provides a foundation for the conversation. The development happens as you recognise these patterns in your work and practise responding more deliberately.
Work with different perspectives
Explore how colleagues can understand the same problem differently, and use that difference in the conversation.
Put responsibility into practice
Agree how ownership, delegation and follow-through will work in a situation that matters to the team.
For example
When an owner says, “My managers won’t take responsibility,” we can explore what responsibility means to each person, how decisions actually get made, and what happens when someone takes a different approach.
The complete SME Pathway
A practical beginning
for a team of four.
A connected programme of assessment, feedback and team development, grounded in your business.
- Identity Compass profiling for four people
- Individual feedback with each person
- Team feedback on your combined thinking patterns
- A half-day session applying the insights to real challenges
- Agreed practical steps for development
For your team of four
Standard priceThe complete pathway
£1,500Chamber members£300 per person for a team of four
£1,200Have a different team size? Get in touch to discuss the scope and price.
Start a conversation
What keeps coming back in your business?
Tell me what your team is facing. We can explore whether the SME Pathway is a useful place to begin.