Your agency's structure has changed.
The way it's led needs to catch up
The Leadership Line works with established creative, events, experiential, production and exhibition agencies after a merger, acquisition, restructure or new leadership appointment. I help build the leadership layer the business needs, so responsibility moves with the structure and the MD stops being the bottleneck.
The leadership transition is your highest-risk moment and your highest opportunity.
The leadership transition is your highest-risk moment and your highest opportunity.
Mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, EOTs, restructures and new leadership appointments all do the same thing: they create a new leadership configuration inside an established business. Experienced people. New context. No shared language. No shared operating standard.
The MD or regional leader becomes the load-bearing wall by default propping up a team that is technically capable but operationally misaligned in the new structure. Decisions escalate upward. Standards drift. The culture gets set not by design but by whoever shouts loudest or avoids conflict most successfully.
In my experience, the first year after the change is when this gets set. After that, the wrong habits become the culture, and they are much harder and more expensive to shift in year three than in year one.
Generic corporate leadership training won’t fix it. Week-long offsites and theory-heavy courses aren’t built for the pace, pressure and commercial reality of agency life. Your leaders don’t have time for that and neither does your business.
The Leadership Line is built specifically for creative, events, experiential, production and exhibition agencies. The frameworks, the language and the scenarios all come from inside this world.
so why now?
The numbers your agency can't afford to ignore.
Staff turnover in UK creative and other non-media agencies reached 27.6% in the year to September 2025.
IPA Agency Census 2025
82% of new managers in the UK take on the role with no formal management or leadership training.
Chartered Management Institute, 2023
Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement.
Gallup
The cost of not investing in your leadership layer is already showing up in your business. The question is whether you name it.
Leadership team work scoped to your agency
A shared way of leading across your senior team.
Most leadership development treats each leader as a separate problem to solve. Leadership team work builds a shared framework, shared language and shared standards across your senior team: the things that disappear in a merger, restructure or leadership change, and that the business can’t scale without.
It’s built on the five pillars of Above the Line and applied directly to your agency’s real conditions, using your own scenarios rather than case studies from other industries.
The scope is set in a proposal after a discovery conversation. It usually combines workshops for the team with 1:1 coaching for individual leaders, and it can start with a single pillar if you’d rather begin with one area.
Above the Line is a single, practical pressure model.
Above the line, your leaders are choosing their response: coaching their teams, making decisions and holding standards without rescuing.
Below the line, habit takes over: they firefight, take work back and become the solution to every problem.
No leadership team stays above the line all the time, and in agency life that would be unrealistic. The best teams notice when they’ve dropped below it and recover quickly, and that’s what this work builds.
The five pillars are the architecture of that shift.
The Five Pillars
Pillar 1 Aligned Leader How your leadership team shows up now compared with what the business needs, and a shared leadership identity that holds consistently without you.
Pillar 2 Holding the Line Where accountability is breaking down, and how to hold people and standards without rescuing, avoiding or controlling. The conversations your senior team isn’t yet having.
Pillar 3 Clear to Lead Decision-making under pressure. How to create direction when you don’t have all the answers, and how to stop the culture of upward referral that keeps landing on your desk.
Pillar 4 Full Presence Leadership attention as a commercial asset, and what depleted, distracted leadership costs the team, the client and the culture.
Pillar 5 Become Resilient How your leadership team processes difficulty and change, building adaptability across the team rather than relying on individual endurance.
What a proposal usually covers
⏺ A briefing with the MD before the work starts and after it ends
⏺ The Leadership Line Diagnostic for each leader before the work begins, showing where your team sits on the line across the five pillars, so the work starts from where they actually are
⏺ Workshops for the leadership team, built around the pillars that matter most for your agency
⏺ 1:1 coaching for individual leaders alongside the workshops
⏺ The Diagnostic repeated at the close, so you can see what has moved
Making the case internally
Most of the cost of weak leadership never appears as a line in the accounts. It shows up as senior time spent on decisions that belong a level below, client decisions that wait, and good people who leave. If you need to put the case to a board, a finance director or a People team, I can help you frame it around the specific changes you want to see, and how we’ll know they’ve happened.
Other ways to work together
LEADERSHIP PARTNERSHIP
Sponsor one of your senior leaders.
Strategic 1:1 coaching built around Above the Line and the specific challenges your leader is facing now, scoped to their role and the needs of the business.
Ideal for MDs investing in a high-potential leader, supporting a move into bigger responsibility, or addressing a specific leadership gap in a key person.
the above the line programme
A development pathway for your future leaders.
A nine-month group programme for heads of department, senior producers, client services directors and rising leaders making the shift from doing to leading.
Limited to eight participants and often sponsored by agencies as an investment in leadership and retention. Next cohort: January 2027.
“The Above the Line framework gave me something I didn’t expect, a reference point I can actually use. I can feel when I’m dropping below the line now, and I catch myself before it affects the team. That awareness alone has changed how I lead.”
Managing Director | Event Production Agency
“I was supporting the team and doing a lot of the doing as opposed to leading. Now I have definitely moved away from the heavy doing and my leadership style is more coaching and delegating. My team look up to me now as a leader and I have created a safe environment. We’re seeing better performance and great profit output from the team. I feel like I’ve grown to be a good leader, fair to the team, and have created a safe space for my team. They respect me and my time.”
Operations Director | Callow Events
Meet Suzy
Leadership coach and adviser to creative, events, experiential, production and exhibition agencies
I co-founded and ran 4D Design, an exhibition and events agency, for nearly 30 years, delivering global brand projects under real commercial pressure.
I know this industry from the inside: the client dynamics, the delivery pressure, the margin conversations and the leadership decisions that sit alongside all of it. I’ve made them all.
I also know what it costs when a leadership transition isn’t handled well.
A merger creates a team with no shared language. A new MD inherits a business that runs on someone else’s culture. The right people are in place, but nobody has built the way for them to lead as a team.
I’m a qualified coach, and Above the Line is built on established coaching practice as well as nearly 30 years inside the industry. That combination keeps the work commercially grounded and rigorous.
I work with a small number of agencies at any one time. The work is specific, tailored and built around what your agency actually needs, rather than a generic programme with your logo on it.
If you’re ready to build the leadership layer your agency needs, I’d like to have that conversation.
Let's Connect
Leadership coaching and advisory for creative, events, experiential, production and exhibition agencies
The Leadership Line works with founders, MDs and senior teams at the point when responsibility needs to move: a new MD, a period of growth, an acquisition, a founder stepping back or a new structure. We build the leadership layer behind the vision, so the business depends less on one person and its leaders have more choice about what comes next.
Founded by Suzy Malhotra, leadership coach and adviser, who co-founded and ran 4D Design, an exhibition and events agency, for nearly 30 years.
Read View from Above, Suzy’s fortnightly letter for MDs, founders and agency leaders.
Based in Henley-on-Thames | Working with agencies across the UK and internationally
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