70%
of the variance in employee engagement between teams is attributable to the manager. Which makes manager capability the highest leverage thing you own.
Gallup, State of the American Manager ↗
For HR and L&D leaders
From 5 seats
Leadership training has a transfer problem. You already know this.
The workshop went well. The feedback scores were good. Six weeks later nothing in any manager’s behavior has visibly changed, and the only artifact you have is an attendance list. Voohy is the practice layer that closes that gap, and it leaves behind a competency baseline you can trend.
One time passes · No auto renewal · No IT project
- Deploy
- Email or bulk CSV invite
- Assign
- Packs and tracks with due dates
- Measure
- Readiness and skill heatmap
- Export
- Progress data, board ready
Session transcript
9 min 52 sec
PR
What a manager on your cohort practices
The Underperformer. Three sprints, three missed deadlines. Priya does not know why this meeting was booked.
Priya
Hey, you wanted to talk? Things have been hectic. What is on your mind?
You
Thanks for making time. The last three sprint deliverables landed after the deadline. I want to understand what is going on, and what I can take off your plate.
↳Named the pattern, not the person. Opened with curiosity and offered support in the same breath.
Priya
I did not realise it was that visible. I have been stuck on the new architecture and thought I should figure it out alone.
Debrief
Scored automatically
81
Strong session
Scored automatically, transcript stays private
Empathy
88
Clarity
82
Active listening
79
Resolution focus
71
✓ Made it safe to admit being stuck, which is the whole ballgame in a performance conversation.
✎ Never agreed what happens next. Close the loop with a specific commitment and a date.
You see the score. You never see the transcript.
The question you get asked
“So what did the L&D budget actually buy us?”
Attendance and satisfaction scores are not an answer to that question, and everyone in the room knows it. A movement in measured manager competency is.
01 / The problem
You are accountable for the lever, and you have almost no instrument.
Manager quality moves engagement, burnout and regretted attrition more than any program you can fund. It is also the thing you have the least measurement on, because the only signals you get are lagging ones.
44%
of managers worldwide report ever receiving formal training for the role. The gap is not a nice to have. It is most of the population.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace ↗25.5%
of tech workers rate their manager as highly effective. Manager effectiveness was the strongest driver of burnout in the dataset, ahead of role and company size.
Lenny’s Newsletter, 2026 survey ↗0.5 – 2×
annual salary to replace one employee. One badly handled manager relationship is a line item, and it lands in someone else’s budget, which is why it stays invisible.
Gallup on turnover cost ↗What you have today
- ×A half day workshop, good feedback scores, and 70% of it gone within a week.
- ×No way to tell whether a single real conversation went differently afterwards.
- ×Coaching that works, but costs too much per head to give to every manager.
- ×Headcount growing faster than you can run cohorts.
- ×An attendance list as the artifact when leadership asks what changed.
What a practice layer gives you
- ✓Managers rehearse the real conversation as many times as they need, before it happens.
- ✓Every session scored on four competencies, so improvement is visible per person and per cohort.
- ✓Assign a pack or track to an entire cohort with a due date, and let reminders do the chasing.
- ✓Runs asynchronously across timezones. No scheduling, no travel, no cohort start date.
- ✓Exportable readiness data you can put in front of a board.
02 / The dashboard
What you are looking at on a Tuesday morning.
Not a completion percentage. A view of which managers are practicing, which competency is weak across the whole cohort, and who has quietly stopped.
Team dashboard · Manager cohort
18 / 25 seats used
Avg readiness
71
up 9 this quarter
Active, 7 days
14
of 18 managers
Sessions, 30 days
96
5.3 per manager
Certified
4
Practitioner track
Team skill heatmap
| Manager | Empathy | Clarity | Listening | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D. Okafor | 88 | 84 | 79 | 74 |
| M. Bianchi | 81 | 77 | 86 | 62 |
| S. Raman | 74 | 68 | 71 | 58 |
| A. Klein | 69 | 91 | 64 | 80 |
| J. Whitmore | 52 | 61 | 49 | 44 |
Resolution focus is weak down the entire column. That is a cohort problem you fix once, not five separate coaching conversations.
Assigned learning
New Manager Foundations pack
12 of 18 complete
2 overdue
D. Okafor
M. Bianchi
J. Whitmore
J. Whitmore has not practiced in 19 days and holds the lowest readiness on the team. That is a coaching conversation you would otherwise have discovered in an exit interview.
Illustrative dashboard, real feature set
What you do with it
01
Spot the cohort gap
A weak column across every manager is a curriculum decision. Assign the matching pack to all eighteen seats and watch the column move.
02
Spot the individual
Low readiness plus nineteen days of silence is an early warning you can act on, weeks before it turns into a resignation or a grievance.
03
Target one team
When exit interviews keep naming one manager, buy five seats and intervene there. You do not need a company wide rollout to fix a local problem.
04
Answer the budget question
Take a movement in measured competency to the board, not a satisfaction score from a workshop nobody remembers.
How the readiness score is built
Skill 40%
Volume 20%
Diversity 15%
Recency 15%
Consistency 10%
Weighted, then capped by session count, so nobody posts a high readiness score off three lucky sessions. It rewards practicing a range of scenarios, recently and repeatedly. Which is exactly the behavior you want the number to drive.
03 / Rollout
Live in an afternoon. No IT project.
The reason most L&D tools fail is not the content. It is that getting them deployed takes a quarter and three approvals.
-
01
Buy seats
Team plans from five to thirty seats on one time passes. No subscription, no auto renewal, no seat true up call later.
-
02
Invite the cohort
Email or bulk CSV. Managers accept and are practicing the same day. No SSO required below Enterprise.
-
03
Assign the work
Push a learning pack, a scenario or a certification track to every seat at once, with a due date. Overdue flags surface automatically.
-
04
Read the data
Readiness, competency heatmap, session counts and completion, all exportable when someone asks what changed.
04 / Why practice
The transfer problem has a known solution.
This is not a novel claim about a novel format. It is the oldest result in training research, and it is the reason the practice layer is the part worth buying.
Model the behavior, practice it, get feedback, repeat. A meta-analysis of 117 studies found that the knowledge gained this way decayed over time, exactly as your post workshop surveys suggest, but that the effects on skills and on actual job behavior held steady or kept improving.
Transfer was strongest under specific conditions: when trainees practiced scenarios drawn from their own work, when they saw the wrong way handled alongside the right way, and when goals were set. Those conditions describe a simulator far better than they describe a slide deck.
Taylor, Russ-Eft & Chan, A Meta-Analytic Review of Behavior Modeling Training, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2005 · Record
The idea is older than the software
“Microworlds [business simulators] enable managers and management teams to begin ‘learning through doing’ about their most important systemic issues.”
Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline, MIT Sloan School of Management
Written in 1990. What got built afterwards simulated markets and systems. Nobody built the practice field for the conversation itself, which is where manager capability is actually made or lost.
05 / Questions
What buyers ask before procurement.
Something not answered here? Write to the founder directly. You will get a real answer from the person who built it, not a sales sequence.
[email protected] →
How do we roll this out to a cohort of managers?
+
Buy seats, invite by email or bulk CSV, then assign a learning pack, a scenario or a certification track to every seat at once with a due date. The dashboard shows seats used, average team readiness, active managers, a skill heatmap by competency, and per manager progress with overdue flags. There is no IT project and no SSO requirement below Enterprise.
What can we actually report on?
+
Manager readiness per person, competency scores across empathy, clarity, active listening and resolution focus, session counts, scenario range, recency, completion against assigned tracks and certification attainment. All exportable. That is a behavior baseline you can trend across quarters rather than a completion percentage.
How is the readiness score calculated, and can it be gamed?
+
It is weighted: skill 40%, practice volume 20%, scenario diversity 15%, recency 15%, consistency 10%. It is then capped by session count, so nobody posts a high readiness score off three lucky sessions. It rewards practicing a range of scenarios, recently and repeatedly, which is exactly the behavior you want a number to drive.
Can admins read what managers say in their sessions?
+
No. Admins see readiness, scores, completion and AI summaries. Conversation transcripts stay private to the person who practiced. This is deliberate. People do not rehearse honestly when they believe the transcript is a performance management artifact, and dishonest practice is worthless practice.
Does this replace our existing leadership program?
+
No, it sits inside it. Programs teach the framework and coaching works on the individual. Voohy is the practice layer between sessions, which is the part that is usually missing and the reason so little transfers back to the job.
What is the pricing model, and will it survive procurement?
+
One time access passes rather than subscriptions, priced per seat, with team plans from five to thirty seats and Enterprise above that. No auto renewal and no seat true up call in month four. Enterprise adds SSO, custom scenario commissioning, invoice billing and annual contracts.
We have managers across several timezones. Does that work?
+
That is the main reason teams choose it. Every session is asynchronous and takes about twelve minutes, so there is no cohort start date, no scheduling and no travel. A manager in Berlin and one in Singapore run the same assigned track on their own time.
Your managers do not need
another workshop. They need reps.
Take a walkthrough of the admin side, or run a scenario yourself first so you know exactly what you would be putting in front of your managers.
From 5 seats · One time passes · No auto renewal