Programs · Flagship cohort
The Sustainable Leader Program takes up to twelve of your people-leaders through the full build: workload design, priority discipline, early-signal reading, recovery norms — ending with each leader presenting their sustainable-team operating plan directly to senior leadership. You don't get a report about the change. You watch it.
Length
12 weeks
Cohort
Up to 12 people-leaders, one company
Format
Virtual-first · on-site options
Includes
Peer pods · two 1:1 coaching sessions per leader
Investment
$48,000 flat per cohort
The arc
Before any leader sits down, your sponsor and Brightwork agree on what success measurably looks like and which teams carry the most risk. Then each leader gets a 1:1 intake — their team's real load, their own, and what they most need the twelve weeks to change.
The working spine of the program — each session below, every one ending in commitments applied to the leader's actual team before the next.
Pods of three to four leaders meet for a structured hour between sessions. This is where commitments survive contact with a real sprint: pods keep score, trade tactics, and make it harder to quietly drop the hard thing.
Two private sessions per leader, timed for the hard middle of the program — where an individual leader's stuck point (a workload they can't say no to, a delegation they keep avoiding) gets direct attention.
Each leader presents their sustainable-team operating plan — workload redesign, kill-list, recovery norms — to your senior leadership, live. Then a close-out debrief with your sponsor: what changed, what the retention-risk picture looks like now, and what to protect going forward.
The six sessions
Real capacity versus performed capacity. Ending heroic overload as an unspoken management strategy — starting with the leader's own calendar.
Making priorities unmistakable, and killing low-value work publicly — because a priority list that never subtracts is just a wish list.
The observable signs that show up months before a resignation, and the conversations that follow them — the highest-leverage retention skill a manager can hold.
Recovery that depends on individual willpower loses to workload every time. Building it into how the team runs: norms, coverage, and real off-switches.
Spreading load without dropping quality, and recognition people don't have to burn out to earn.
Assembling everything into the sustainable-team operating plan — and preparing to lead it, and defend it, after the program ends.
The ask
Six half-days, a pod hour each cycle, two coaching sessions per leader, and capstone preparation — roughly four to five focused hours per two-week cycle. Demanding enough to change something; light enough that nobody has to abandon their day job to attend a program about workload.
Not per seat — per cohort, whether you enroll eight leaders or twelve. That's deliberate. Your approval process sees one number; your incentive is to fill every seat; and at twelve leaders it's $4,000 per leader — against a replacement cost of one-half to two times salary for a single regrettable exit, by Gallup's conservative math.
Questions
Yes — and it usually makes the cohort better. The material is about leading people sustainably, not about any one function's content. Mixed rooms surface how the same workload pattern looks in engineering versus operations versus sales, which is exactly the system view the program teaches. The one guideline: avoid putting a leader and their direct manager in the same pod.
Virtual-first: the six sessions and pods run remotely, which is how the program stays deliverable for distributed teams. On-site options are available where they matter most — typically the Week 0 kickoff and the capstone, where being in the room with senior leadership carries weight.
Three ways, agreed up front. The Week 0 success measures give us a baseline. The capstone gives you direct evidence — you watch each leader present a concrete operating plan for their own team. And the close-out debrief includes a retention-risk snapshot against where each team started. We don't promise clinical outcomes or engagement-score miracles; we show you operating changes you can inspect.
The plans belong to your leaders, and the first quarter after the program is where they either harden into habit or quietly erode. That's what the Alumni Circle is for — quarterly masterclasses and a facilitated peer circle that keep the operating plans alive.
Then don't buy a cohort — buy seats. The open-enrollment cohort is the identical program with seats sponsored by multiple companies, twice a year, $5,500 per seat.
Related programs
Run it first and Week 0 starts with data: the cohort is built around the teams the findings flag.
Audit details →The same program for one to three leaders, alongside peers from other companies. Spring 2027 enrollment closes March 31.
Open cohort details →Quarterly masterclass and peer circle for graduates — the maintenance plan for everything the cohort built.
Alumni Circle details →Next step
Thirty minutes. Bring the leaders you're thinking about — or the teams you're worried about. We'll talk through fit, timing, and whether a full cohort or open seats is the right shape.