I was working in HR and kept noticing the same gap. Companies would invest in leadership development, bring in trainers, run programmes — and six months later, the same dynamics were still there. The same tensions, the same communication breakdowns, the same disengagement. And when you looked at the high-performing teams, the ones that consistently delivered, the difference was almost always the manager. Not the tools, not the strategy, not the market. The manager.

So the question became: what are those managers doing that the others are not? Not what do they believe, or what values do they hold — but what specific, observable behaviours do they demonstrate, day after day? Can we identify them? Can we describe them precisely enough to coach them?

In two phases. The first phase was individual interviews with 33 managers — people who were known in their organisations for achieving both high performance and high retention in their teams. I wanted to understand what they considered most important, and what they actually did in practice. Not their theory of management — their daily habits.

The second phase was group interviews and a survey with 44 of their direct reports. This was critical. It is one thing to ask a manager what they do. It is something entirely different to ask the people who work for them what they actually experience. The gap between those two perspectives is often where the most important development opportunities are.

The research was conducted across Randstad N.V.'s global sales operations — nine countries, across multiple management levels and cultural contexts. What surprised me was how consistent the patterns were. The habits that characterised high-performing managers showed up repeatedly, regardless of nationality or industry background.

The central finding is that high-performing managers share 23 specific, observable, coachable habits — and that these habits are consistent across geography, culture, and management level. Leadership effectiveness is not a personality trait. It is a practice. It can be identified, taught, and developed.

The research also confirmed something that ArrowHead already knew from experience: most managers with these habits apply them intuitively, without fully understanding which specific behaviours are driving the results. Making those habits explicit — naming them, describing them in observable terms, coaching them deliberately — is where the real development happens.

One of the most striking findings was around psychological safety. Trust was mentioned 67 times across the interviews as the foundational condition for everything else. Teams where people feel safe to speak up, admit mistakes, and ask for help consistently outperform teams where they do not. And psychological safety is entirely a function of manager behaviour — it is built or eroded, habit by habit, every day.

The 23 habits give you the map. Management Drives gives you the starting point — it tells you who you are, what drives you, where your blind spots are. But the habits tell you what to do with that information. They translate profile insight into daily behaviour.

And the outdoor environment — the mountain, the cold, the unfamiliar terrain — is where the habits become visible and where they can be practised under real conditions. You can tell someone that they need to work on stepping into tough conversations. Or you can put them in a situation where avoiding that conversation has real consequences for the group, and let them experience what avoidance costs. The field does in two days what coaching alone takes months to achieve.

That frontline managers are the most important variable in organisational performance. Not strategy, not technology, not culture initiatives from the top. The manager who runs a team of ten people has more direct impact on those ten people's performance, wellbeing, and retention than any other factor. And that manager's behaviour is a set of learnable habits — not a fixed personality trait.

One area manager in the research put it this way: even if technology becomes more and more important, the frontline manager guiding the teams through the jungle is the hero and the key element on which the machine turns. Invest in that person. Develop those habits. The rest follows.