For 500+ Employee Organizations
The leadership training system for the layer that moves 70% of team engagement.
Sturdy Beacon converts accidental managers into intentional leaders across your organization. Twelve modules. SCORM-ready. LMS-native. Built for CHRO, L&D, and CFO defensibility.
- SCORM 1.2 & xAPI ready
- WCAG 2.1 AA
- Deploy in any LMS
- Founder responds within one business day
The Cost of Untrained Managers
Three numbers every HR, L&D, and finance leader
already suspects and cannot afford to ignore.
Of the variance in team engagement scores traces directly to the manager, not the organization, the compensation, or the role.
Source: Gallup
Estimated annual cost of disengagement to the global economy, driven overwhelmingly by preventable management failure.
Average delay between an employee's first management role and their first formal leadership training. A full decade of unsupported managers.
Source: Zenger Folkman
Sturdy Beacon closes the ten-year gap, systemically and evergreen, for every accidental manager an organization promotes.
The Accidental Manager Problem
Your Organization Manufactures Accidental Managers Every Quarter
Every 500-plus employee organization runs a silent machine underneath its official talent process. High-performing individual contributors get promoted. Titles change. Reporting lines shift. Training does not follow — not for ten years, on average. By the time formal leadership development arrives, the manager has already spent a decade shaping culture, retention, and engagement outcomes with no scaffolding beneath them.
Sturdy Beacon is the evergreen SCORM-native leadership development system designed for this exact gap. It transforms accidental managers into intentional leaders through durable behavior change, grounded in time-tested leadership principles that hold true across decades, industries, and generations of the workforce.
Enterprise Foundations
Every Question Procurement Will Ask, Answered on Day One
Drops Into Any LMS
Sturdy Beacon is SCORM 1.2 native. Every module packages as a standard SCORM 1.2 file and installs into any conforming learning management system with no engineering support, no middleware, and no custom integration work.
Measures What Matters
Every module is xAPI ready. Manager behavior signals flow into any modern learning record store, turning leadership development into a measurable input for retention, engagement, and performance decisions.
Accessible to Every Manager
Sturdy Beacon is verified against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level AA. Every screen, every interaction, every learning path works for every manager the organization has ever hired, on any device, with any accessibility need.
Founding Cohort Access
Founding Cohort organizations shape the modules currently in build. Direct input into the roadmap. Direct relationship with the founder. Direct influence on the leadership development standard the market will use for the next decade.
What Changes
The Manager Your Organization Promoted, Twelve Months Later
Sturdy Beacon transforms accidental managers into intentional leaders through three durable behavior shifts, measurable within a single annual cycle.
Decision Confidence
Before Sturdy Beacon: the manager escalates every non-trivial call to their director, protecting themselves at the cost of speed.
After Sturdy Beacon: the manager names the decision, weighs the tradeoffs, and owns the outcome — because they have the framework, the vocabulary, and the practice to do it.
Feedback Fluency
Before Sturdy Beacon: the manager waits for the annual review to raise the concern that has been growing for six months.
After Sturdy Beacon: the manager delivers specific, timely, respectful feedback in the week the behavior occurs, because avoidance is no longer the default response to discomfort.
Priority Discipline
Before Sturdy Beacon: the manager says yes to every request and misses the outcomes that matter.
After Sturdy Beacon: the manager names the three priorities of the quarter, defends them under pressure, and leads their team toward measurable results.
The Cost of Bad Management
Put a real number on manager quality at your organization.
Every field below drives a specific research-backed calculation using the same formulas leadership development analysts, HR benchmarking firms, and turnover economists use in practice. Adjust the inputs to match your organization and share the result with your CFO.
Your Organization
Anyone who has at least one direct report.
Headcount across the organization.
Base + benefits, USD annual.
If unknown, leave the US average of 13.0% (Mercer 2024–2025).
Appears in the personalized analysis emailed to you.
Estimated Annual Impact
Managers untrained for the role
41
50 managers × 82%
Gallup's State of the American Manager finds that 82% of manager hires lack the innate traits needed to manage, and only 18% of current managers have the high talent required for the role. Source: Gallup, State of the American Manager
Estimated annual voluntary turnover cost
$1.82M
500 employees × 13% × $85,000 × 33%
Work Institute's 2024 Retention Report uses a conservative replacement cost of 33% of annual salary per departing employee, consistent with SHRM's benchmark range of 50% to 200% depending on role level. Source: Work Institute 2024 Retention Report
Turnover cost attributable to manager quality
$1.28M
$1.82M × 70%
Gallup meta-analysis: managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, and engagement is the primary driver of voluntary turnover. Every retention gain or loss traces back to manager quality. Source: Gallup, Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Engagement
Estimated annual recovery from top-quartile engagement
$268K
$1.28M × 21%
Gallup's Q12 2024 Meta-Analysis of 183,000+ business units finds top-quartile engagement teams deliver 21% lower turnover in high-turnover organizations. This is the conservative published figure. Source: Gallup Q12 2024 Meta-Analysis
Sturdy Beacon Founding Cohort payback
1.28x
$268K ÷ $210,000
Every 1.0x means the estimated first-year recovery covers the Founding Cohort license. Values above 1.0x indicate net annual return. This estimate excludes productivity, customer loyalty, and profitability gains also documented in the Q12 2024 meta-analysis. Related: Gallup Q12 2024 full meta-analysis
Get this analysis as a PDF for your CFO.
A one-page ROI brief with all inputs, formulas, and primary-source citations formatted for procurement review. Delivered within one business day.
Methodology
This calculator uses the same formulas that leadership development analysts, HR benchmarking firms, and turnover economists apply in practice. Turnover cost is modeled at 33% of annual salary per departing employee, the conservative figure published in Work Institute's 2024 Retention Report, within SHRM's documented 50% to 200% range depending on role level. Baseline turnover defaults to 13.0%, the US voluntary turnover average reported in the Mercer 2024–2025 US Turnover Survey. Manager-attributable share reflects Gallup's finding that managers account for 70% of engagement variance. Recovery potential reflects the 21% turnover reduction observed in top-quartile engagement teams in high-turnover organizations, per the Gallup Q12 2024 Meta-Analysis of 183,000+ business units. The 82% untrained-manager figure comes from Gallup's State of the American Manager.
These figures are estimates for planning and budgeting conversations, not projections of guaranteed outcomes. Actual results vary by organization, industry, baseline engagement, current manager capability, and implementation quality. This tool is not a substitute for a formal engagement analysis and does not constitute a financial guarantee. Sturdy Beacon does not warrant any specific financial outcome from participation in the program.
From the Founder
Built by a Leadership-Development Practitioner With Years of Direct Work
Sturdy Beacon is the work of Rachel Giercyk, a leadership-development practitioner, coach, and author whose direct work developing stronger leaders and self-leaders spans years of coaching, teaching, and writing. Her core conviction shapes every design decision: the people inside an organization are the whole of what it can do, and the accidental manager is the point at which that potential is most often made or lost.
Sturdy Beacon is the first organization-scale delivery system for that practice. Every module — the twelve-part architecture, the lighthouse metaphor, the branching scenarios, the personal mission statement work, the badge and progression systems — was built to translate proven leadership-development practice into a SCORM-native standard organizations can deploy at scale, defend to their boards, and rely on across decades and industries.
The people are the company. The accidental manager is where the people are made, or lost.
— Rachel Giercyk, Founder
Book The Walkthrough
Five thousand dollars to train the layer that moves seventy percent of team engagement.
Request a walkthrough of the Sturdy Beacon system. The founder personally responds within one business day.
For Managers
Field notes for the newly-promoted. One idea. One tool. One next move.
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For Organizations
Briefings for HR, L&D, and CFO leaders on the manager layer that moves seventy percent of team engagement.
Submission did not go through. Please try again, or email hello@sturdybeacon.com directly.
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