How executive coach David Holt kept 11 of 14 managers through a 10-week leadership programme

David Holt runs leadership development cohorts for mid-level managers at manufacturing and logistics companies across Greater Manchester. He replaced quarterly feedback reports and monthly group calls with weekly structured check-ins inside Bitir — and completion more than doubled.

Where he started

David trained as a coach in 2019 after fourteen years in operations management at a logistics company in Salford. His niche is specific: mid-level managers — team leaders, department heads, line managers — at manufacturing and logistics companies in Greater Manchester who have been promoted but have not yet received any structured leadership development.

Gallup's research on employee engagement consistently finds that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement scores — which means the organisations David works with are spending significant money on culture initiatives while the most powerful lever, manager behaviour, is largely uncoached.

His programme is 10 weeks. Fourteen managers per cohort, drawn from the same company but different departments. The structure: a 360-degree feedback report at week one, a monthly 90-minute group video call, and a shared email thread for between-session communication.

It was, by his own assessment, "structurally sound and practically ignored". Managers read the feedback report, agreed it was accurate, and then returned to their day jobs with no mechanism for changing anything before the next call.

What was the problem with quarterly contact?

The monthly group call was the backbone of the programme — but one call every four weeks is too infrequent to build accountability. A manager who had a difficult week in week two had forgotten the specifics by week six. The conversation stayed abstract.

The email thread compounded this. Between calls, David would send a prompt question to the group. He averaged 3 replies out of 14. The rest of the cohort was, effectively, invisible to him between sessions. He did not know who was applying the coaching, who was stuck, or who had quietly decided to disengage.

"I had been working with these managers for six weeks and I genuinely could not tell you what half of them were trying to change. Their goals were on a PDF somewhere. Nothing was alive."

By his third cohort, he was completing roughly six of fourteen managers. The other eight dropped engagement progressively — fewer call appearances, fewer email replies — and eventually stopped engaging entirely. They never formally left; they just faded. He describes this as "the most demoralising pattern in group coaching — a silent attrition that you cannot intervene in because you cannot see it happening."

Why David chose Bitir

He was not looking for a general collaboration tool. He had tried Slack for one cohort — "absolutely not, for leadership coaching; it felt like work, not development" — and a project management tool for another, which lasted three weeks before the managers stopped logging in.

What he needed was a space that was private, purpose-built for goal tracking and accountability, and simple enough that a manager with no interest in yet another app would still open it. A former coachee, now running her own coaching practice, mentioned Bitir. He set up a trial group in an afternoon.

The feature that changed his mind was not the check-in poll or the goal widget. It was private member posts — the ability for a manager to post a reflection that only David could see, with David deciding whether to share it with the group. "In a leadership cohort, no one is going to post their real struggles in a group their colleagues can read. But they will tell me privately. I just needed a structured way to receive that and act on it."

How David set up his cohort in Bitir

His setup before week one takes approximately 75 minutes and has not changed across four cohorts:

1. Group goal. One sentence pinned at the top: what a successful manager looks like at the end of 10 weeks, in concrete terms. He writes this with the sponsoring HR director before cohort starts.
2. Individual goals. Each manager is sent a Bitir invite and a three-question prompt in the first week: what feedback do you keep receiving? What do you want to be different by week 10? How will you know? Their answers become their pinned individual goal.
3. Weekly check-in poll. Five questions, sent every Monday at 8am, open until Wednesday. Questions rotate but always include a 1–10 leadership confidence rating and one open text field.
4. Weekly assignment. One specific action per week, posted by David on Friday, due the following Thursday. Not an essay — a single sentence describing what the manager will try. The response is a sentence confirming whether they did it and what happened.
5. Private reflections. David posts a prompt question each Wednesday. Responses are private by default. He reads them, responds to each privately, and selects one or two to share with the group — always with the manager's explicit consent, via a quick reply in the thread.

What the managers said

The initial reaction from the cohort was sceptical. Three managers messaged him in week one to say they already had too many apps and too many notifications. He told them to turn off all Bitir notifications except the Monday check-in. Two of those three ended up with the highest assignment completion rates in the cohort.

By week four, two managers had independently told him that the weekly 1–10 confidence rating was the most useful single piece of self-reflection they had done during the programme. Not the 360 report. Not the group calls. A single number, once a week, that they could track themselves.

Results after the first full cohort

The completion figure matters most to him. Eleven of fourteen managers completing all ten weeks means eleven sets of behavioural data, eleven written goal reviews, and eleven managers who have now had a structured conversation about their development — rather than six who completed and eight who quietly disappeared.

The lesson he took from the first Bitir cohort is one he applies directly to how he now talks about coaching to prospective clients: structured between-session contact is not a supplement to the coaching. It is the coaching. Monthly calls are too far apart to build accountability; the work happens in the weeks between them, and without a structure for those weeks, there is no work.

What David does in Bitir

• Group goal — pinned at the top of the group, agreed with the HR sponsor before cohort starts
• Individual goals — each manager's three-sentence goal, written in their own words in week one
• Weekly check-in poll — five questions, Monday morning, closed Wednesday; David reviews responses before the Thursday assignment drop
• Weekly assignments — one specific action per week, due Thursday; responses logged and visible to David only until he chooses to celebrate them
• Private member posts — Wednesday reflection prompt; David reads all, publishes selected ones with consent
• Celebration cards — posted for managers who complete four assignments in a row; visible to the whole cohort

Related reading: four weekly check-in templates that get 90%+ response rates, and the three-layer goal model that keeps coaching groups on track.