Mace is one of the clearest examples of why we rarely believe in a single, standard leadership programme. Over more than a decade, MJA worked with Mace to create and evolve a family of development journeys for different leadership populations — most notably Developing Success, Developing Our Future and, later, the Mace Business School Leading Business Masterclass for leaders in Mace’s supply chain.
Developing Success was created for high-potential Assistant Managers and Managers, with some newly promoted Senior Managers, who were building the capability to take on bigger and more complex roles. The original programme ran over 14 months and was organised around six practical leadership domains: My Leadership, My Business, My Team, My Project, My Client and My Career. Each module was contextualised with Mace leaders and Board sponsors, with post-module assignments deliberately taking the learning back into participants’ day-to-day work.
As Developing Success matured, we kept redesigning rather than simply repeating it. The later version placed more emphasis on individual development, 360° feedback, work-based application and learning between formal modules. Participants identified a personal One Big Thing they wanted to change, worked in Learning Pods where colleagues challenged and coached one another on live issues, and used experiments in their everyday work to turn insight into different behaviour. The intention was to create more flow between learning and performance rather than a sequence of disconnected classroom events.
Developing Our Future ran in parallel with Developing Success for several years, but for a different population: high-potential Senior Managers, Associate Directors and Operations Directors preparing for the transition to senior leadership. Its architecture therefore asked different questions. A nine-month journey combined Adaptive Leadership, Influencing Clients & Winning Work, Managing for Sustainable Growth and Pitching Compelling Proposals with a strategic project running through the programme.
The project was not an academic exercise. Mixed-discipline groups were given a real Mace challenge or opportunity where the answer was not already known. They had to engage stakeholders, create clarity from ambiguity, develop and execute a response, reflect on their own leadership and team dynamics, and ultimately pitch their proposals to senior Mace leaders. The project became a developmental spine through which participants could practise the broader judgement, influence, collaboration and enterprise perspective required at the next level.
The third chapter took that philosophy beyond Mace itself. The Mace Business School Leading Business Masterclass adapted much of the logic of Developing Our Future for senior executives and future leaders in important businesses across Mace’s supply chain. The aim was to help leaders move from managing their businesses to leading them through a changing construction environment. The programme combined three residential experiences — Strategy & Adaptive Leadership, People & Organisational Performance, and Personal & Organisational Resilience — with senior Mace dialogue, expert faculty, immersive experiences and reflection.
Again, real work sat at the heart of the learning. Each participant brought a substantive leadership project based on an unmet business need, recurring problem or growth opportunity in their own company. The brief was explicit: the project should make a difference to the business, stretch the individual as a senior leader, involve action rather than recommendation, and be strengthened through peer reflection across the programme. In that sense, the supply-chain programme carried forward the same principle that had shaped the internal Mace pathways: development is most powerful when people are working on something that genuinely matters.
Across all three programmes, the architecture changed because the work and the leadership transition changed. Developing Success strengthened the foundations for emerging leaders. Developing Our Future prepared more senior leaders to operate with broader strategic and organisational responsibility. The Business School extended that thinking into the wider ecosystem on which Mace’s own performance depends.
Across the decade, the architecture kept changing because the populations and leadership transitions changed. What stayed consistent was the development philosophy: start with consequential work, create deliberate stretch, make peers and senior leaders part of the learning system, and build reflection and experimentation into performance. Coherence came from that philosophy, not from forcing everyone through the same curriculum.