Manufacturing
Copperline Engineering
Building the management layer
A 240-person engineering firm was promoting its best engineers into managers with no help. We designed the role, trained eleven people, and changed how promotions work.
The result
11
new managers, all promoted from inside
−34%
leavers among team leads
6 wks
faster onboarding
The brief
Copperline’s founders were engineers, and they promoted engineers. Three of its best team leads had left within a year, each saying the same thing: nobody had told them what the job was.
What we did
We wrote a two-page description of the manager’s job, ran a nine-month programme for eleven people, and moved promotion decisions to a panel that reads that description.
What changed
Managers now hold a weekly conversation with each person in their team. It takes thirty minutes and is written down on one page.
Where it stands
Leavers among team leads fell by a third, and the firm now promotes at a steady pace instead of in a panic.
“
We stopped losing good engineers to bad management, which was the whole point.
Sam Achterberg, Operations Director
