Not the total. The distribution. Which roles, which levels, which names.
In nearly twenty years of running leadership programs, I’ve seen the same pattern in almost every organisation I’ve worked with — construction, government, health, professional services. It barely varies. The budget goes to the people who are already senior. Already identified. Already, by most measures, doing fine.
They get the two-day program. The 360. The external coach on a Thursday.
And they’re often the people who need it least.
Where leadership actually breaks
Think about where things have gone wrong in your organisation this year. Not strategy failures — people failures.
A grievance that could have been a conversation. A resignation that surprised everyone except the person’s team. A capable person managed out because their manager didn’t know how to give feedback and let it run until it was terminal.
Almost none of that happens at executive level. It happens with the team leader promoted six weeks ago who now manages people she used to have coffee with. The supervisor who has been avoiding a performance conversation for a month because nobody ever showed him how to start one.
Those people are making leadership decisions every day, with more direct impact on culture and retention than anyone on your executive, and they are figuring it out alone.
I know that because I was one of them
Long before I ran leadership programs, I was the person promoted into managing people with no idea how to do it.
I remember sitting in a meeting room I’d booked so nobody would hear, trying to work out how to tell someone their work wasn’t good enough — and getting it badly wrong, because I had no framework, no coach, and no one I felt safe asking. Admitting I didn’t know how to lead felt like admitting I shouldn’t have the job.
Nobody offered me a two-day program. There was no external coach on a Thursday. I wasn’t senior enough to be on anyone’s list, and the people who were on the list were doing fine.
That isn’t a talent problem. It’s an access problem — and it’s one of budget arithmetic, not intent. Traditional coaching costs what it costs. You cannot buy it for four hundred frontline leaders.
The other problem: timing
Even when development reaches people, it arrives at the wrong moment.
Leadership doesn’t happen in the workshop. It happens at 2pm on a Tuesday when someone’s crying in your office and you have no idea what to say. It happens in the ninety seconds before a meeting where a supervisor has to disagree with a client.
The workbook is in a drawer. The coaching happened in March. The moment is now.
This is the gap I’ve been trying to close my whole career, and it isn’t closeable with more programs. Programs are constrained by cost and calendar. The need isn’t.
Why I built something different
I’ve spent nearly two decades building leadership programs I’m genuinely proud of. They work. People leave those rooms changed.
But I could only ever get into so many rooms.
Every year I’d watch the same arithmetic play out — the deep work reaching a hundred people, maybe two hundred, while thousands in the same organisations went without anything at all. Not because their leaders didn’t care. Because a facilitator can only be in one place at a time, and coaching has a price per hour that doesn’t bend.
I got tired of the answer being “that’s just how it is.”
Worksparks is coaching that shows up in the moment, not next quarter — built on the neuroscience and behavioural research underpinning everything we deliver at LeadershipHQ, and available to your people the day they need it.
Someone describes a real situation in plain language. They get coaching that’s practical and specific. Before the conversation they’re dreading, after the day that went badly, when they’re not sure whether to speak up.
It’s built and in use today. It isn’t a replacement for the programs we run — the deep work still needs a room and a facilitator. It’s what happens in the eleven months between them.
The question your people will ask
“Can my manager see what I write?”
No — and we’d rather be precise than reassuring, because this is the question that determines whether a tool like this gets used honestly or not at all.
On a team account the administrator sees who holds a seat, whether each person is active, and how much the group is using Worksparks. They never see content. Not the text, not a summary, not an excerpt. Group usage figures are suppressed entirely below five active people, because below that an average stops being an average and starts being a person.
If your people can’t be candid in it, it doesn’t work. So we built the boundary first.
Why it’s priced the way it is
I started LeadershipHQ in 2008 after roughly forty job rejections, as a sole parent, with no plan B.
I mention it for one reason: I know exactly what it’s like to need help you can’t afford, and to be told the good version is for people further up. Every pricing decision I’ve made since has been shaped by that.
So Worksparks is priced to be given to everyone, not rationed to a shortlist. I built the thing I needed and couldn’t have paid for.
If you’ve been looking for a way to give development to the ninety per cent of your organisation that has never had any, this is the moment it costs the least.
And if you’d rather talk it through for your organisation first, just reply to this. I’d rather have the conversation than the click.
Thank you so much…. Sonia, CEO & founder