Scalefocus builds software for clients in Europe and the United States. Most of its people are engineers, and many of the managers in its leadership program had spent the pandemic years on calls with their cameras off, doing something else at the same time.
Hristina Bogdanova, a senior learning and development specialist who has been with the company for almost ten years, remembers the moment she saw that change.
Two hours without multitasking
She joined the program halfway through its first run, back from two and a half years of maternity leave, half participant and half coordinator. She knew these people. They were the ones who always multitasked, always kept their cameras off, and were never quite there.
“Out of 24 people, maybe one or two were multitasking. Everyone else was there. They were present.”
The sessions lasted two hours, and the managers stayed with them. Part of it was the format: the group moves together, so if someone isn’t there, everyone feels it. Part of it was curiosity. “You feel something is coming next, and we will discuss it. And no one will lecture me for ten hours of theory, then ask me at the end what I heard.” Years and many programs later, that is the moment she remembers.
Every topic opened together
The leadership program, LEAD, was blended, and built by three teams together: Scalefocus’s learning team, a facilitation partner, and AhaPlay. Stavros Stavru designed the AhaPlay sessions as a journey, LeaderCRAFT: A Transformative Journey to Exceptional Leadership. Hristina and Tsvetan Angelov, Scalefocus’s L&D manager, reviewed every design, and new sessions were tried with a pilot group first.
Each module followed the same path:
- An AhaPlay session opened the topic: the theory, through a game scenario each group worked through together.
- A week later, managers handed in a practical task from their own teams.
- A week after that, a facilitated workshop brought them back: how is it going, what works, what doesn’t.
The program set out to change the things that matter most in a manager’s week:
- People sharing more with their managers
- More feedback, given and asked for
- Seeing the big picture
- Delegating
The first session, Defining Your Leadership Role, shows how it worked. Each manager started with a single word for leadership. Then each group weighed five famous definitions, without knowing who wrote them, and had to agree on the one that captures it best:
Review the five definitions below. Which one correctly and fully captures the essence of leadership?
- “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.”
- “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”Martin
- “Leaders will be those who empower others.”
- “Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.”DanielaIvoKalina
- “Getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”
The twist came next: every definition came from a renowned leadership expert, and each has a flaw. The groups met Kevin Kruse’s definition, leadership as social influence that maximizes the efforts of others toward a goal, wrote their own, and agreed on one shared working definition. Then they went back to the single words they had started with, and saw how far apart they had been:
Although we’re using the same word, most of the time we assign different meanings to it, leading to mismatched expectations.
Afterwards, each manager took it into their own work: a conversation with their line manager about whether the team shares an understanding of leadership, and three leaders around them, observed against what the group had agreed.
Nothing was generic. Every session was built around the managers’ own reality, their clients, their teams and their projects, so what they discussed was their work, not general leadership knowledge. For one module, Hristina asked for a specific message: a leader who sets the vision for a top-tier tech team, one that doesn’t just write quality code, but advises the client and brings new ideas into the client’s projects. The session was built around it.
Each run lasted a few months, an hour or an hour and a half every two weeks. The second, renamed LEAD Excellence, brought together 30 managers in three groups of ten: in Sofia, in Skopje, and online from Bitola, Istanbul, Varna and Plovdiv.
Before AhaPlay, Scalefocus had used Miro boards and facilitated workshops. “Nothing with real gamification,” Hristina said: nothing where you move forward together, where something changes, where you are a team that has to do something together.
“I met my colleagues here”
What surprised the learning team most was not the format. It was what managers said about each other. In both groups, people said the same thing: that through the sessions they had finally met their peers, not their own team, but the other managers at their level, and heard how they think.
Those bonds outlived the program. The managers who had worked through the same questions every two weeks kept turning to each other afterwards, as a community of people facing the same challenges.
Asked to describe AhaPlay to someone who had never heard of it, Hristina kept it short: “A place to play and talk. A place where a remote team meets and, through something enjoyable, opens important topics.”
And for middle managers, she said, it is “great as a tool”.
The second time, no debate
The first run convinced the company. When the program was redesigned and ran again, with new groups, keeping AhaPlay wasn’t even a question:
“People bought into it, and we knew we had to bring it back a second time.”
Other vendors in the program went through a decision. This one didn’t. “This element we have to repeat, for sure,” was the answer. Over the two runs, Scalefocus’s managers spent about eight months opening topic after topic together.
Back to the cameras
The managers who used to sit behind black screens didn’t change because someone asked them to turn their cameras on. They changed because, for two hours, something was happening that they didn’t want to miss, and a group that couldn’t move on without them.
What we learned
Scalefocus ran the same leadership program twice, and the two runs showed us what makes sessions work for managers who are hard to reach. Five principles came out of it.
1Open every topic together, then practice it
Theory sticks when a group works through it together first, then tries it in real teams, then comes back to talk about how it went. At Scalefocus, every topic started with an AhaPlay session.
In ExecuteOS: sessions open a priority for every team, and the check afterwards shows whether it took hold.
2Presence comes from the group, not from rules
Nobody asked the managers to turn their cameras on. When a group can only move forward together, people stay with it.
In ExecuteOS: every team step needs the whole group, so nobody can quietly drift away.
3Build a community, not only a cohort
The biggest surprise was managers meeting the other managers at their level, and hearing how they think. The bonds they built outlived the program, and peers who understand each other align faster.
In ExecuteOS: the people who have to act on a priority together work through it together.
4Put it in their own context
Engineers stop listening to general leadership theory and corporate language. Every session was built around the managers’ own clients, teams and projects, and in the first run Stavros Stavru, who has spent his career in software teams, used their examples and their words. That is what made it relevant.
In ExecuteOS: every program starts from a priority in the leader’s own words, not in HR language.
5Make the first session effortless
The aha comes in the first sessions, not in the logistics around them. One invitation, one link and a short guide let people get to it.
In ExecuteOS: access and invitations are checked before the first session, with a short guide for every participant.