Franchising Solutions
Leadership development across a franchise network
Gallup attributes at least 70% of the difference in engagement between one business unit and another — how committed the people there are to the work — to the person managing it. In a franchise network there are two groups of leaders: your own field and head-office teams, who lead the network, and the franchisees and managers who run each location. Few people in either group were chosen for their ability to lead.
How Psych Press helps
We are a firm of organisational psychologists. We measure how the leaders in your network actually lead — your field and head-office teams, and the franchisees who run your locations — including how the people who depend on them see them. Then we work one to one with those who want to improve.
Start a conversation with usLeading people is rarely what they were chosen for
Your award process tests whether someone can fund a unit, follow a system and run a business. It doesn't test whether they can build and hold a team, because that isn't what an award process is for.
The same gap sits inside your own business. Your field and area managers are hired for operational judgement and brand knowledge rather than for developing the people they oversee. Yet much of their job is leading people who don't report to them.
Much of what goes wrong in a unit turns out to be a people problem — turnover, service, a franchisee covering shifts because staff keep leaving. And leading people is rarely what either group was trained for. The training that does exist is often generic, or built for a job unlike the one they actually do.
What that costs
None of this shows up on a P&L as a leadership problem.
- Staff who leave within months, and the rehiring that follows every time
- Field visits that complete an audit and leave the business unchanged
- Customers served by people who would rather be somewhere else
- Field visits that turn into personnel counselling instead of business review
- Franchisees who stay at one unit because they can't build a team to run a second
- Growth that depends on recruiting new franchisees, because the ones you have can't expand
The skills involved are ordinary, teachable ones. And it is possible to know in advance which person needs which.
Your field team is the leadership franchisees see
Their job is to change businesses they don't own, and few were developed for it.
Your field consultants and area managers have to improve what happens in businesses they don't own, through people who don't report to them. Most came into the role from running a store or a region, where they could decide things themselves, and learned the rest as they went. One industry survey found that most franchise organisations have no dedicated training programme for their field staff.
You judge them on what reaches head office — compliance scores, network results, how their visit reports read. The franchisees they visit know how they actually work, and are rarely asked in a way that lets them answer honestly.
The same applies to the head-office teams franchisees depend on: operations, training, marketing, franchisee support. Their work reaches the network, and franchisees are best placed to say whether it helps. These are the leaders you can develop most directly, because they work for you.
Choosing field consultants who can influence people they don't manage starts at hiring. Developing them once they are in the role starts with asking the franchisees they support.
Why two similar sites get different results
The person leading the team, not the site.
Two locations, comparable catchments, the same fit-out, the same products, the same induction. One holds a steady team and a steady margin. The other has staff leaving every few months and a manager who spends Sunday night filling shifts.
Most of that difference sits with the manager rather than the site, and Gallup's finding is about exactly that comparison: one business unit against another.
In a franchise network that manager is the franchisee, or someone the franchisee appointed. So one of the biggest influences on how a unit performs is a person you chose on other grounds. The Franchise Finder is built for choosing franchisees who can lead a team as well as run a business. For the franchisees you already have, the answer is development.
Some of this is trainable and some of it isn't
It's worth knowing which, before deciding what to fund.
Part of being good with people is disposition — how comfortable someone is with conflict, how much they need to be liked, how easily they hand a task to somebody else. Disposition doesn't shift much in a workshop. Skills do: someone who avoids hard conversations can be taught how to structure one.
Measuring first tells you whether you are looking at a missing skill or a disposition, and therefore whether to train, coach, or shape the role to fit the person. It is the difference between sending everyone on the same course and knowing who it would actually change.
360 degree feedback adds the part the person cannot see: how the people who depend on them experience them, set against how they see themselves. For a field consultant, those people are the franchisees they support. For a franchisee, they are the franchisee's own staff. The gap between the two views is often the most useful thing in the report.
For the people in your own business, performance reviews can then show whether anything changed. We keep those separate from the 360, so the feedback in the 360 stays candid.
Developing franchisees, who don't work for you
Development a franchisee opts into, framed around their own profit.
Most franchisees have run a business or worked in one. Fewer have led a team of their own. The difficulties are consistent: hiring, giving feedback that actually changes what someone does, and holding people to a standard without driving them away.
These are skills, and most people pick them up from a manager who trained them. Someone who has always run their own business never had that.
When it goes wrong, franchisees usually read it as a staffing problem — bad luck with hires, a difficult employee, a tough labour market. Which means the thing they ask you for is help recruiting, not help leading.
Franchisees own their businesses. Development can be offered; it can rarely be required. What they take up is whatever visibly makes their own unit easier to run — so the framing decides the take-up. An offer described as keeping staff for longer will usually get more interest than one described as leadership development.
One-to-one coaching fits this better than classroom training. It works on the franchisee's own problems, on their own schedule, and it doesn't ask them to sit in a room admitting difficulty in front of the people they compare themselves to.
360 degree feedback gives a franchisee something they have almost no other way of getting: how their own staff see them, alongside the view of the field consultant who supports them. It is offered, not required, and the report belongs to the franchisee. In a small team, staff answers are combined with the franchisee's other feedback rather than shown separately, so no one can be picked out.
One-to-one time sounds expensive next to a workshop, but the comparison that matters is against the cost of the turnover it prevents in that unit. And because you measured first, you are funding it where it will change something rather than putting the whole network through the same programme.
It also gives you something to offer a franchisee that isn't a demand, which is rarer than it sounds in a franchise relationship.
You chose your franchisees on their ability to run a business, then handed them the hardest part of running one.
How Psych Press helps
We measure how someone actually leads, from the view of the people who depend on them, and we work with the ones who want to change it.
360 Degree Feedback
SurveyConfidential feedback from the people who see someone's leadership up close. For field consultants and head-office teams, that includes the franchisees they support; for franchisees who opt in, their own staff. Set against the person's own ratings, so the conversation starts with the gap rather than with a score.
Development and Coaching
ServiceOne-to-one work with one of our organisational psychologists, starting from what the assessment or 360 found and ending in specific actions. For field consultants stepping up from running a store, head-office leaders in growing roles, and franchisees who want it — private, practical, and fitted around the job they are still doing.
Performance Reviews
ServiceFor the people in your own business. Objectives drawn from your network's strategy, and feedback from the people who see the work — including franchisees, for any role that serves them. Kept separate from the development 360.
Business Personality Reflections
AssessmentOur own assessment of business-related competencies, with industry and job-level norms. Used here to establish the disposition side — what someone will find easy, what they will find hard, and which of the two a development plan should address.
If you also need to decide which managers in your own business are ready for a bigger role, the Enterprize questionnaire and our assessment centres are built for that.
Our pricing scales with the situation: how many people, whether you want measurement alone or coaching alongside it, and whether this runs once or becomes part of an annual cycle. A scoping call is free and gives you a real figure.
What this looks like in practice
A franchisor with ninety units has been running an annual leadership workshop for franchisees for three years. Attendance is good and the feedback forms are positive, and nothing measurable has changed.
Instead of a fourth workshop, the network offers 360 degree feedback to any franchisee who wants it, with no reporting back to head office. Thirty-one take it up. The reports separate into two groups: about two thirds are missing specific, teachable things — mostly giving feedback and setting expectations early — and the rest are finding the role uncomfortable in ways a course was never going to fix.
The first group gets a short, targeted programme. The second gets one-to-one coaching, and two of them decide to hire a manager rather than keep doing it themselves. The next year's workshop is built around the two skills the reports raised most often, instead of the same content as before.
Frequently asked questions
Our franchisees are independent. Can we actually require this?
Usually not, and we would not advise building it that way. Development that is mandated gets completed rather than used. What works is making it available, funding it, and framing it around the franchisee's own problem — staff who keep leaving, rosters that are hard to fill. Take-up then rests on whether franchisees see it solving a problem they already have, with nothing written into an agreement.
What if a franchisee doesn't want to be developed?
Then they don't take it up, and that is a legitimate answer. It is also information: a franchisee declining every form of support offered is worth a conversation with the field team for other reasons. But the offer only works if declining it is genuinely available.
Can people game a 360, or manage their answers on an assessment?
Less than you would expect, for a structural reason: 360 degree feedback isn't a report on what someone says about themselves. Most of it comes from the people around them, who are answering confidentially and are not the ones being assessed. Someone who rates themselves generously mostly widens the gap between their view and everyone else's, and that gap is the part the report is about. On the assessment side, unlike a selection decision, nobody has much to gain by managing their answers, because the output is a development plan rather than a yes or a no.
Who sees the results?
That is a decision worth taking before you start, and it changes the take-up. For franchisees, the arrangement that works is that the report belongs to them and head office sees only that the programme ran. For your own employees, results usually sit with the individual and their manager as part of the normal development cycle. Franchisees rating a field consultant answer in confidence, and their answers are combined so no single franchisee can be identified; the same applies to staff rating a franchisee in a small team. Either way, the people giving 360 feedback are told who will read it before they answer, because otherwise you don't get honest answers twice.
What does it cost?
It depends on how many people are involved and whether you want measurement alone or coaching alongside it, so we scope it with you. The figure worth putting it next to is what one under-performing unit costs over the term of its agreement — and how much of your growth currently depends on recruiting new franchisees rather than existing ones taking a second site.
Start a conversation with us
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