Case study — Dalmuir Financial Group, 2025
How a 26-person finance team rebuilt trust through Leadership Workshops in three months
When Dalmuir Financial Group expanded from a single Edinburgh office to three locations across Scotland, the leadership team discovered that their informal, corridor-based management style simply could not scale. Decisions stalled, middle managers felt bypassed, and engagement scores dropped by nineteen points in a single quarter.
The chief people officer reached out to us after reading a paper we published on distributed decision-making. Her brief was direct: "We need our leaders to lead without needing to be in the same room." That sentence became the design anchor for every workshop session that followed.
Our workshop framework
| Dimension | What we address | Typical duration | Outcome signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diagnostic clarity | Mapping existing decision patterns, identifying bottlenecks and shadow hierarchies within the team | Half day | Shared leadership map agreed by all participants |
| Conversational capacity | Building the ability to stay engaged and productive in difficult, high-stakes conversations | Full day | Reduction in meeting deferrals and escalation requests |
| Distributed authority | Designing clear decision rights so leaders at every level can act without waiting for approval | Full day | Documented authority matrix adopted across functions |
| Feedback architecture | Creating sustainable loops for honest, constructive feedback that replace annual review cycles | Half day | Peer feedback frequency increases measurably within 30 days |
| Resilience under change | Practising adaptive leadership through scenario-based exercises drawn from real organisational crises | Full day | Faster recovery time when plans change unexpectedly |
What happened inside the room
Each workshop session began not with theory but with a live case — a real decision the Dalmuir team was facing that week. We structured every ninety-minute block around a single leadership tension: speed versus thoroughness, autonomy versus alignment, candour versus psychological safety.
Participants worked in rotating trios, ensuring that every combination of seniority and function had to negotiate together. We introduced the concept of "decision journals" — brief written reflections completed within twenty-four hours of each session — which became the primary data source for tracking behavioural change over the twelve-week engagement.
Between sessions, our facilitators held fifteen-minute coaching calls with each participant. These calls were not therapeutic; they were operational. We asked one question: "What decision did you make differently this week because of what you practised in the workshop?" The answers fed directly into the next session design.
The participant journey
Every workshop engagement follows this arc, though the content is always built from your organisation's real challenges, not from a pre-packaged curriculum.
Outcome: what changed at Dalmuir
Twelve weeks after the final session, Dalmuir ran their quarterly engagement survey. The results surprised even the most optimistic stakeholders. Engagement scores had recovered twenty-two points, surpassing the pre-expansion baseline. More importantly, the qualitative comments shifted from complaints about communication to descriptions of shared ownership.
The leadership team reported that cross-office decisions now took an average of two days instead of eleven. Three middle managers who had been considering leaving chose to stay, citing the new feedback culture as their primary reason. The authority matrix created during the workshops became a living document, reviewed and updated monthly.
Riona Macleod, who had been the most sceptical participant at the outset, later wrote to us: "I did not believe a workshop could change how we work. I was wrong. It changed how we think about work, and that turned out to be more powerful."
Start a conversation
Every engagement begins with a thirty-minute discovery call — no cost, no obligation. Tell us what your team is facing and we will tell you honestly whether our approach is the right fit.
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