Team management training · for new and accidental leaders

Your best doer became a manager.
Nobody taught them how.

The promotion made sense on paper. Now the 1:1s don't happen, feedback gets swapped for “nice job”, and performance conversations are avoided for a quarter at a time. Managing is a different job from doing. It can be trained in weeks.

Book the 20-minute call Read the stories ↓

The offer, so you don't have to scroll: 1:1s, feedback and accountability, trained on your real situations.

20+
years in the field
before the flipchart
£2m
programme budget held
on the buyer's side of the table
£1.5m
largest single deal at BT
biggest in the division's history
1 in 3
close ratio held for a full year
at 100% of target
Every number on this page is verifiable. My sales managers at BT and Croner will take your call.
You already know this story

Friday, 5pm. The managers' sync.

The new manager is drowning in a job nobody described. They still do their old work (they're good at it, it's safe) and manage in the gaps. The team has noticed. The team always notices.

The 1:1s keep getting moved. The underperformer gets vaguer instead of clearer. The best person on the team is quietly reading job ads, because nobody has asked them a real question in three months.

A skip-level conversation reveals the whole thing: the team thinks the manager is aloof. The manager thinks they're being kind. Both are acting in good faith, and neither has ever been shown what a real 1:1 looks like.

The quiet math of an unmanaged team
Quiet undermanagement taxes everything: two unhurried 1:1 hours per person per month against the salary of a team drifting without them. Avoiding one awkward conversation doesn't save the awkwardness; it schedules it for a worse day, usually with HR present.
Team management training
The 1:1 that keeps getting moved to next week. · brand scene

I ran programmes at BT scale and held the £2m budget that paid for them: real teams, real deadlines, real accountability, and managers learning the job in the deep end. The managers who made it all had the same three habits. Habits can be taught.

Management isn't a personality. It's a set of moves. Moves can be trained.

The turn

New managers don't fail on willingness. They fail on never having seen the moves.

How to run a 1:1 that isn't a status update. How to give feedback that lands without a fight. How to hold a line without becoming the villain. Three moves. Two weeks of practice. A completely different team.

Stories from the room

Three scenes you'll recognise.

Twenty years in the field, told honestly. The Receipt stories are mine and verifiable. The Pattern stories are composites: details changed, lessons intact.

The Pattern

The accidental manager

The pattern: the best engineer, promoted because it was the only way to reward them, managing exactly the way they were managed (badly) or not at all. Well-meaning, untrained, quietly drowning. Every organisation has three of them.

“Manager” is a job, not a prize.
The Receipt

The £2m seat

Holding the £2m programme budget at BT meant running real teams against real dates: hiring briefs, performance conversations, all of it. I learned management where it's load-bearing, not in a workshop. That's how I teach it: on your situations, not case studies.

Teach it on live situations, not case studies.
The Pattern

The 9am that fixed it

The pattern I watch for now: the team that turned around when the manager started one 20-minute meeting. Last week's wins, this week's blocker, one honest question. No ceremony, no deck. Within a month the team was telling the truth earlier, which is all management actually is.

Truth arriving early is the whole game.
Who's training your team

Jamie Sonnex, on a first-name basis with every seat at this table.

i.

The practitioner

Twenty years selling before teaching: £1.5m at BT, a 1-in-3 close ratio held for a full year at 100% of target. I only teach the moves I've run myself, at scale, on real money.

ii.

The trainer

At Think Tank I closed 100 owners into $10k-a-year coaching programmes, then trained the owners myself in prospecting, pricing and closing. The ones who drilled it beat the ones who "just had the gift." Every time.

iii.

The buyer

I've held the £2m programme budget and sat through hundreds of pitches and demos as the decider. I know what a room does next, because I was the room.

iv.

The operator

Training that doesn't survive contact with the day job is theatre. I ran programmes at BT scale, so everything I teach ships with the operational kit that keeps it alive after I've gone.

"I only teach what I've done for money. That's not a slogan; it's a syllabus."

The standard

How I train: the whole method in four lines.

Before

Your deals, not case studies

Training built from your pipeline, your recordings, your objections. Nobody practises on someone else's business, because nobody sells in someone else's business.

During

Drill, don't lecture

Nobody learns to close from a slide. Rounds of filmed practice, feedback the same hour, everyone rotates until the move is theirs. Uncomfortable for ten minutes, then unbeatable.

The week after

The manager's kit

One-page scorecards, a 1:1 script and a coaching rhythm, so the training compounds after I've left. Training that needs the trainer forever isn't training.

The result

One team, one playbook

Shared discovery, shared objection handling, a close that's allowed to feel like a conclusion. New starters onboard to a system in weeks, not folklore in months.

The receipts

Anyone can claim. This brand exists to prove.

The numbers above, the deals behind them, and a public ledger of the whole journey: applications, rejections, results, lessons. The highlight reel is boring; the work is the evidence.

The Training Room: proof in public
The offer

The same offer I make on every call.

✓ What the 20 minutes is

You bring the situation: team size, structure, and what isn't happening that should be. I'll map what training would change in 90 days, and whether the first fix is training or structure. If it's structure, I'll say so.

✗ What it isn't

A pitch. There's nothing to buy on the call except a decision, and you'll know inside ten minutes whether I'm the person to train your team.

The Training Deal
Bring me the team. I'll bring the drill.
  • Built on your real deals, objections and prices, not generic roleplay
  • Practice-first: filmed rounds, same-hour feedback, nobody hides at the back
  • Every person leaves with the same one-page playbook
  • Manager's kit included, so it survives the week after I leave
Book the 20-minute call
From the engagements A £2m programme, six projects, every pound answerable.
Projects & operations · Homeopathy UK · the full story on the hub
Last line

Managers are made,
not promoted.

1:1s, feedback and accountability, trained on your team's real situations until they're habits. The three moves that change everything, practised until they stick.

Book the 20-minute call

You'll know inside ten minutes. · Every number on this page is verifiable.