After 15 years of walking into workplaces with our Stretching the City team, we’d started to notice a pattern that wouldn’t go away.
The yoga class was full. The mental health workshop landed beautifully. The mindfulness programme delivered exactly what HR had asked for. And yet, in the conversations that happened around the sessions — over coffee, in the corridors, in the chats teams started forwarding to us afterwards — the same kinds of issues kept surfacing.
A manager who’d been promoted because they were excellent at their craft, but had never been taught how to actually manage people, and was quietly drowning. A team that had been through three reorgs in eighteen months and didn’t know how to trust each other any more. An ambitious new starter who couldn’t get a straight answer about what “good” looked like in their role, let alone what progression might involve.
These weren’t wellbeing problems exactly. Wellbeing programmes, however well delivered, couldn’t make them go away. They sat one layer upstream — in leadership, in communication, in capability. They were, in plain terms, leadership and team development gaps.
That’s why we’ve launched People & Performance — a new arm of Stretching the City focused on leadership and team development for modern workplaces.
What we kept seeing — and why it matters now
Three patterns turned up again and again across our client work.
Leaders being promoted without the skills or confidence to manage people. The “best individual contributor gets the management job” model has been creaking for years, and post-pandemic ways of working have made the cracks worse. New managers are now expected to coach hybrid teams, hold difficult conversations across screens, run performance cycles they were never trained on, and manage colleagues who used to be their peers — often within weeks of the promotion landing.
Teams struggling with trust, communication and accountability. Teams that were forged in the office have re-formed in fragments. New joiners don’t always know who they can ask for help. Senior people don’t always know who’s drifting. The casual fabric of team life — the hallway pickups, the quick check-ins, the things you overheard — has thinned, and many teams haven’t yet built deliberate practices to replace it.
Employees navigating change and progression without enough support. Restructures, technology shifts and AI-driven role changes are landing on people who haven’t had a meaningful career conversation in years. They want to grow; they’re not always sure how, where, or with whose help.
These are the kinds of issues that make engagement scores wobble, retention figures slip, and brilliant people quietly start to look elsewhere. They cost companies a great deal — even when nobody is calling them a “problem.”
Wellbeing matters. It just isn’t always enough.
Let’s be clear: wellbeing absolutely still matters. The case for protecting people’s mental and physical health at work has never been stronger, and the work we do through Stretching the City — yoga, nutrition, resilience, mental health awareness, leadership wellbeing — is more in demand than ever.
But if a manager doesn’t know how to give feedback, no resilience workshop is going to make their team feel safer.
If a leadership team can’t agree on priorities, no mindfulness programme is going to fix the burnout cascading down through the org.
If a high-potential employee can’t see a future at the company, no benefits package is going to keep them in their seat.
Wellbeing sits downstream of capability. Both matter — but solving one without the other only ever solves half the equation.
That’s the gap People & Performance is designed to close.
Introducing People & Performance: Leadership and team development built for impact
People & Performance is a new arm of Stretching the City, focused on leadership and team development — structured programmes that build the capabilities modern workplaces actually need.
Our promise is simple: We build real capability, not just awareness. Every programme is designed to translate into changed behaviour back in the room — the conversations managers actually have, the way teams actually decide things, the way senior people actually lead through change.
Our work covers four areas:
Leadership and manager development
Team performance and development
Team Development with DiSC, and High Performing Teams programmes that help groups move from a collection of individuals into a team that genuinely delivers together.
Career and talent development
Career Development & Growth coaching, and Career Transition & Redeployment support during organisational change.
Workplace culture and communication
Psychological Safety & High-Trust Teams, and Presenting & Communicating with Confidence.
Everything is delivered as a structured programme rather than a one-off session, because behaviour change needs more than ninety minutes in a room.
Who’s behind People & Performance
People & Performance has been built by Sally Lovett and Katy Chambers, founders of Stretching the City, alongside Jenny Allen-Smith, who leads on programme design and delivery.
Over the past 15+ years, Sally and Katy have worked with organisations including Amazon, Sky and the public sector, supporting workplace wellbeing at scale. As that work has evolved, so has the need for deeper capability building — particularly around leadership, communication and team performance.
Jenny brings exactly that depth, with extensive experience in leadership development and behaviour change. She designs and delivers practical, engaging programmes that translate into real-world impact, supported by a carefully selected team of expert coaches and facilitators — so we can scale delivery while holding the same high standards across every programme.
Together, we combine strategic insight, operational experience and delivery expertise to create programmes that genuinely change how people lead and work.
What this means for Stretching the City
Stretching the City continues exactly as it always has — delivering expert-led workplace wellbeing programmes to organisations across the UK and globally. Nothing about that work changes.
People & Performance is a natural extension of it. It allows us to go deeper into leadership, team and capability development for the organisations who want both — and to bring our usual practical, no-nonsense, results-focused approach to a slightly different part of the people agenda.
If you’re already thinking about how to strengthen leadership or team performance in your organisation this year, we’d love to hear from you.
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