For Middle Management
You sit in the hardest seat on the project.
Directors above you want certainty, delivery teams below you want answers, and the programme waits for neither. This is a structured path out of constant reaction and into deliberate, repeatable performance: the habits and practical leadership skills you can use on your projects from week one.
The difference between the manager who reacts and the one who gets promoted is a set of trainable habits.
You’ve got the technical delivery. What’s in the way is never the engineering. It’s the problem building behind today’s urgent request while you firefight. The boss you can’t influence. The team that brings you problems instead of options. The promotion conversation that keeps happening around you instead of about you.
Most managers under delivery pressure try to fix the output. This coaching works on the engine that produces it, so you come out steadier, sharper, and harder to knock off balance.
Not sure where your ceiling is? That’s what the diagnostic finds →
Why this works when the training day didn’t
You already know what to do. That’s not the problem. If knowing were enough, the promotion conversation would already be about you. What’s missing isn’t information, it’s the structure that turns knowing into behaviour: one habit at a time, in a tested sequence, practised inside your live project with a coach you answer to every week. Take away any one of those and you’re back to good intentions surviving until the first difficult Tuesday.
There are two ways in, and where you start usually depends on where you’ve been.
If you’ve never been coached before, the right first programme is coach-led: the 6 Pillars of High Performance. Twelve weekly sessions, about four months, one pillar at a time, built into your actual week: your project, your team, your diary. It’s where the habits that carry the next role get built.
If you’ve been coached before, you may not need another curriculum. You may need a coach in your corner on the live issues. Focus Sessions run to a simple discipline: twenty-four hours before each session you send two lines, what’s actually in the way this week, and then with the issue reframed as a question. That’s what we work on, start to finish, with a clear commitment out the door.
And the two routes feed each other: many clients start issue-led and step into the Pathway once the immediate fire is out.
Either way, the first step is the same. The diagnostic finds where the work actually sits for you, not the symptom list, the thing underneath it, so whatever you decide next is built on evidence rather than guesswork.
Start with 6 Pillars of High Performance
$6,000 · Twelve weekly sessions, to be completed within four months
You already know what to do. That is not the problem. Six things decide whether you can do it consistently under load: how you think, how you manage your energy and health, how you get the right work done, how you carry a room and move people, why you are doing any of it, and how present you are while you do it. Most development works on the output. This works on the engine that produces it.
Paying for yourself: more influence in the rooms that decide things, more impact from the same hours, and more opportunities coming toward you rather than being applied for. The work you are already doing starts being seen by the people whose opinion moves your career.
Sponsored by your organisation: a leader who shapes priorities instead of absorbing them, who develops the people below rather than covering for them, and who can carry a bigger mandate without needing a bigger title first.
It works the same whether you sit with the contractor, the consultant or the client. The pressures differ. The six pillars do not.
There is further work available to those who want it. The end of these twelve weeks is the right place to decide about that, not the beginning.
Prefer to work issue-led before committing to the pathway? Weekly one-to-one Focus Sessions start from $6,000 for 3 months.
Why the coaching sessions follow the course
The course gives you the method, and a method on its own stays general. The sessions that follow are where it meets your actual week: the handover that keeps slipping, the decision that keeps coming back to you, the conversation with your manager you keep rescheduling.
That is the part that changes what happens on Monday.
You’ll recognise yourself, or someone you manage
- The manager squeezed from both directions: delivering the numbers but permanently reactive, absorbing pressure from the leadership above and the delivery team below.
- The technically excellent engineer whose delivery is strong but whose influence, paperwork discipline, or team leadership keeps getting named in reviews.
- The newly promoted manager leading former peers for the first time, learning the hard way that the skills that earned the promotion aren’t the ones the job now needs.
- The passed-over candidate: capable, loyal, and privately wondering why people with half the capability are two moves ahead.
- The quiet carrier: the one holding a first overrun or a difficult client relationship as a private story about not belonging at this level.
Pricing, published
The Focus Sessions Pathway addressing your issues
3 months
$6,000
12 weekly sessions
Single payment, pre-commencement.
6 months
$9,600
24 weekly sessions
Instalments: 2 × $5,333 = $10,666. Pre-commencement, then before month four.
9 months
$12,960
36 weekly sessions
Instalments: 3 × $4,800 = $14,400. Pre-commencement, then before months four and seven.
Pay in full before we begin and it is the published figure above, a saving of ten percent.
All prices in USD. Corporate-sponsored fees are net of any withholding or similar taxes, which are borne by the sponsoring organisation. Simplified Advisory Services FZ LLE is not currently VAT-registered; no VAT is charged.
Corporate-sponsored engagements are invoiced at the published figure. Corporate sponsors: published multi-candidate rates from 3 candidates; see For Organisations.
Diagnostic fees credit in full toward any programme, where you commit within 30 days of the diagnostic. For self-funded engagements, commitment is payment. For corporate-sponsored engagements, commitment is a signed proposal or an issued purchase order, whatever your procurement timeline then requires. Diagnostic pricing is on the Start With a Diagnostic page.
Why here rather than anywhere else
The course content is certified, and you could take it from more than one place. What you would not get elsewhere is someone who has run the projects you are running: 43 years in this industry, in this region, on jobs the size of yours, from both sides of the table.
The method is the same. The chair is not.
Straight answers
How much time does this take each week?
One session per week (about an hour) plus the work itself, which is done inside your job, not on top of it. The assignments are your live project, your team, your actual meetings. If a practice can’t survive a delivery week, it isn’t taught here.
Do I have to commit to all four stages?
No. You commit one stage at a time. Most clients decide about the next stage in the final weeks of the current one. The sequence is fixed; the commitment is stage by stage.
Can I skip straight to the leadership stage?
No, and not as a sales device. The licensing behind the curriculum requires the sequence, and the sequence is the point: Stage 4 lands because Stages 1–3 built the base it stands on.
What’s the difference between the Pathway and Focus Sessions?
The Pathway is a structured build over ~16 months. Focus Sessions are issue-led: the problem in front of you this month, worked until it’s resolved. Many clients start with Focus Sessions and move to the Pathway once the immediate fire is out.
Is this online or in person?
Sessions run over Zoom as standard, scheduled around GCC working patterns. In-person options exist in Dubai for intensives and diagnostics.
My company is paying. Do they see what I say in sessions?
No. Sponsors get progress against the agreed development goals, never session content. Where a written diagnostic output goes to a sponsor, you see it before they do. No surprises, ever.
What if coaching isn’t the right tool for me?
Then you’ll be told exactly that, in the diagnostic, before you’ve spent programme money. Sometimes the honest answer is training, a mentor, or a structural change, and you deserve to hear it.
The guarantee: every structured coaching programme carries a 100% money-back guarantee. Cancel your agreement at any time up to midnight on the fifth calendar day after the date of your first one-on-one session (excluding UAE and KSA public holidays), and every programme fee you have paid is refunded in full.
Why is the pricing published?
Because you shouldn’t have to sit through a pitch to find out what something costs. The prices are standard, not negotiated; what’s variable is which route fits, and that’s what the diagnostic is for.