Cluster 2 leadership programme

Understanding development needs, and designing what responds to them

This workbook is for the client L&D team and the design team building the programme. It brings the survey and the design framework together in one place so you can see what the review asks, how it is run, what its results mean, and how findings become learning and support.

What this review is for

The review identifies where managers at the N−3 level have development priorities in their current management responsibilities, and what kind of development would respond to them.

It asks two groups

Participants (N−3) describe their own development priorities. Stakeholders (N−2) describe what they observe across the participants they work with. The two are read side by side, never combined into one number.

It looks at four kinds of capability

Task — Knowing how to carry out management work and having the skill to do it effectively.
Context — Reading the situation, relationships, expectations and constraints well enough to choose an appropriate response.
Will — Taking ownership and sustaining purposeful action, including when the work becomes uncomfortable.
Self — Recognising one's own patterns and impact, using feedback and adjusting one's approach.

It is a needs review, not an assessment

The survey records what respondents identify as priorities. It does not measure ability, rank people, or establish that anyone is performing poorly. A person naming a priority may simply be aiming at a higher standard.

How to use this site

Five sections, in the order you would work.

Try the survey

Both forms, fully working, with every selection limit and branching rule in place. Turn on the administrator view to see the codes behind each question.

Set up and administer

Who receives which survey, how to configure the form, what must stay in the export, and the privacy and language rules to apply before launch.

Read the results

What each question can and cannot tell you, the counting rules, the pattern-reading table and a full worked example using illustrative numbers.

Design the response

Choose a finding and see the activities, job aids, manager contributions and organisational actions that respond to it.

Limits and cautions

What the survey does not establish, and the claims to avoid when writing up the findings.

The whole process in five steps

If you read nothing else, read this. Each step is expanded later in the workbook.

1Use the Core version: copy the participant questions into one form and the stakeholder questions into the other. Apply the administration rules.
2Export the responses and retain the option codes. Prepare separate participant and stakeholder summaries.
3Use questions 1 and 2 to identify prominent development priorities. For each priority, filter by question 2 and read questions 3 and 7 together. Read question 4 separately as wider context.
4Add the professionalism and progression findings from questions 5 and 6. Use the interpretation table whenever the meaning of a result is unclear.
5Summarise the conditional clarity responses. Complete the development-needs profile before choosing activities, then complete the response map.

Words used throughout

Plain definitions for the terms that appear on every page.

N−3: The manager level taking part in this programme: the participants who answer the participant survey.
N−2: The leaders who directly oversee or regularly work with the N−3 participants. They answer the stakeholder survey.
N−1: The level above N−2. Not a respondent in this version, but relevant to manager support and next-role expectations.
Task: Knowing how to carry out management work and having the skill to do it effectively.
Context: Reading the situation, relationships, expectations and constraints well enough to choose an appropriate response.
Will: Taking ownership and sustaining purposeful action, including when the work becomes uncomfortable.
Self: Recognising one's own patterns and impact, using feedback and adjusting one's approach.
Core: The seven primary questions for each group, plus the clarity follow-up when uncertainty is selected.
Extended: The core plus two structured questions (potential gains and enabling conditions) and one optional short example.

Source documents: “Cluster 2 — Development Needs Surveys (Draft)” and “From Development Needs to a Leadership Journey”, Dr. Dehumo Bickersteth, working drafts of 11 September 2026. This site is a working companion to those documents, not a replacement for them.