Why did we design a leadership course for middlies?!

A conversation between Reframe’s creators and facilitators Rochelle Robertson and Clare Jones

TLDR (Too long; didn’t read): - We built the programme around the problem not existing frameworks.

Rochelle: Most leadership programmes start with a framework. We decided to start with a question: why do you think so many people become bad leaders?

Clare: I think that's a bit harsh on people, actually. Most people are never taught how to lead. They just get really good at something, and then they get promoted into a job where they're responsible for other people doing that thing.

Rochelle: And in the meantime, they get imposter syndrome, because there's a huge gap between what they used to be brilliant at and this whole new skill set that involves humans and being responsible for them.

Clare: Exactly.

Rochelle: So there's a desire to progress, and the more money attached to that desire when the opportunity comes. But no training, and an imposter syndrome and vulnerability that doesn't let you ask the questions you don't know the answers to.

(We built Reframe to close that gap. Not by starting with a framework and hoping it fits, but by starting with the problem. We've spent years in workplaces, as team members, as senior team members, as consultants and advisors, understanding what that gap actually looks like day to day. Reframe is what we built to meet it.)

“You build community first. Work culture comes after that.”

TLDR: - Establishing belonging in the community builds company culture. Staff teams ARE communities of people.

Rochelle: The first foundation for me is community. In the people and culture space, I think we moved from HR as a department to "culture" as a buzzword, and somewhere in that shift, we skipped past community entirely. You build community first. Culture comes after that. And once you have culture, trust and psychological safety follow, because they're all built on the same community principles.

Work communities should have structure, accountability and responsibility, without tipping into anything that resembles family, because "we're a family" is usually where the toxic stuff hides.

Clare: I've worked in enough dysfunctional organisations to see that clearly. There's a strange pride some places take in a toxic environment that trauma-bonds people together. We should be building resilience in our personal lives, not having to build resilience just to survive going to work.

When I think about community at work, I think about a genuinely democratic process of supporting each other, contributing to the community so the community looks after you in return. If you're leading that community, you're responsible for the people in it. That goes beyond duty of care, which is an easy phrase to say and a very difficult one to practise every day.

Rochelle: What does it mean to go beyond duty of care?

Clare: It's about more than making sure people don't fall through the gaps. It's building environments where people are actually growing, developing the ability to provide for themselves and their families. People come to work trusting that what they give will be met with a decent exchange in return. Once that trust is given, we have a responsibility to care for the people in our teams the way we'd care for family members who are contributing to our own wellbeing.

“I love stories where flawed people overcome real problems in unsual ways”

TLDR: -Reframe leadership course uses stories in popular culture to be accessible, relatable and relevant.

Rochelle: One of the things I love about the content you've built into Reframe is how much pop culture runs through it. TV shows, modern activists people follow on Instagram, even the odd TikTok. People see themselves in it. How did you land on using culture as the way in?

Clare: Leadership is genuinely hard to characterise. Ask someone who the great leader in their career was, who taught them the most, and most people struggle to answer. And when you look at the leaders society tends to hold up as examples, they're overwhelmingly white men over fifty. So the same as with everything else, we have to look a bit deeper for role models and behavioural examples.

I love stories where flawed people overcome real problems in unusual ways, and most of the time those stories map onto genuine leadership strategies. It doesn't matter how neurodivergent someone in the room is, how far into their own development they are, or how new they are to managing people. You can point to a character on a TV show and talk objectively about whether they took the right approach or the wrong one.

Rochelle: There's something about the caricature of a character that makes it easier to talk about than a real leader you've actually worked for.

Clare: Exactly, it depersonalises the conversation. It's not healthy to pick over the details of a bad relationship with a manager from five years ago in a room of strangers. But it's easy, and low-risk, to point at a character in Slow Horses and talk through how he put his team in danger and what he did to pull them back. We're using genuine organisational psychology and strategy, but through illustrations that are vivid and shared, rather than entirely abstract.

Rochelle: I think that's what makes people able to actually reflect. If you can point at something external and say "that was a problem," the next question becomes "how has that shown up in my own life?" without anyone feeling like a defendant.

“There’s something in trusting that whatever mess you find yourself in, you have the skills to repair it”

TLDR: Leaders don’t come in one size. Reframe helps you find your version of leadership.

Rochelle: Leadership looks different for everyone. Some people are thinkers, some are quiet achievers, some are action-first. Reframe isn't about turning you into a carbon copy of the loud, decisive, room-commanding archetype most leadership training defaults to. It's about building on whatever already makes you, you.

But what about the people who'd never describe themselves as a natural leader in the first place?

Clare: What even is a natural leader? Is it charisma, intuition, warmth, competence? Sometimes we become leaders because we get so good at something. Sometimes because we care so much that our ability to hold people and hold space is what makes us a leader. There's no single definition. Speaking as someone who has spent most of her career being the opposite of a polished professional, more of a messy, spirited, occasionally risky operator, I don't believe there's a way of conforming to something in order to be a leader. My leadership has come from being curious enough that I have to step forward and find out. And people follow that. They come along because I'm willing to ask the questions.

Rochelle: I'd call myself a reluctant leader. Genuinely. I'll just do it myself, that's my default. But I have the same curiosity, the same drive to find answers, and I think that's shaped how I make decisions and how clearly I can see a way through. There's also something in trusting that whatever mess you find yourself in, you have the skills to repair it. That's leadership too.

I've never had an exceptional leader in my own career, which meant I had to lead myself, and lead others, in ways that people eventually noticed and named for me. I also think being neurodivergent, being Black, and being from Birmingham all shape how deliberate I have to be about the way I communicate. People attach assumptions to an accent before you've said anything of substance, so I've had to be intentional, and that intentionality is what's won trust over the years. Using what makes you non-traditional as the source of your leadership, rather than something to smooth over, is its own kind of strength.

“You have to approach learning from every angle, so everybody actually benefits”

TLDR: We built this course for every type of person.

Rochelle: What I love about this programme is that inclusion isn't bolted on. We've built it into the foundation, so it works for neurodivergent minds, different creative backgrounds, different ages, from the ground up. How did you approach the content with that in mind?

Clare: You and I have completely different brains, and we work brilliantly as a combination of the two. It's part of letting go of old systems thinking, the expectation that everyone has to conform to one industrialised way of succeeding. Creativity is about expanding how we think and use different minds around the same ideas. To get people into a learning headspace, you have to approach learning from every angle, so everybody actually benefits. Why would we make it harder for anyone, when we have the ability to be flexible?

I also want people to have the learning experience they didn't get as a child: asking questions, expressing themselves how they want, having things presented in a way that's easy for them to process. So much untapped potential gets curtailed by people spending their whole lives forcing themselves into a neurotypical standard that was never built with them in mind.

Rochelle: It reminds me of how left-handedness used to be treated, the effort that went into forcing children to use their right hand instead, and everything that got assumed about intelligence as a result. Neurodivergence is really just the next chapter of that same story.

Clare: And we're at a point where one in two creative people are neurodivergent. I'm really mindful of how people want to identify, what they want to share, and trying to anticipate any small barrier to understanding before someone has to ask for it. I hate the word "adjustments." It should just be a bespoke way of doing things, for everyone, by default.

Reframe doesn't overwrite your style. It helps you find your highest point of contribution to your team and your organisation, so you can work from there with integrity, decisively, and moving things forward. The goal was never to make you a different kind of leader. It's to help you become a more deliberate version of the one you already are.