Managing Director of the Year Awards 2026/ 18 Executive Leadership Support MD of the Year 2026 (Midlands): Kate Davies Grip is the difference between a business that runs on its structure and one that runs on its chief executive. Kate Davies, Founder and CEO of Rufus Wren has been awarded in our Managing Director of the Year Awards 2026, for the Midlands. Kate has spent two decades inside Britain's most complex engineering, infrastructure and energy businesses. She works alongside leadership teams to restore Grip when complexity begins to outpace their organisations By the time most chief executives can put words to what is wrong in their business it has been living inside it for months. Decisions slow and meetings multiply. Leaders find themselves controlling conversations they should never have been in. Nothing looks like a crisis, which is exactly why it goes unnamed. But the person running the business usually feels the shift long before anyone can describe it. Davies has watched this pattern repeat across sectors, ownership models and leadership teams. The businesses struggling with it were hardly the least capable. More often they were the most experienced. "The issue is rarely capability," she says. "It is usually Grip." Grip is the difference between a business that runs on its structure and one that runs on its chief executive. When it holds, decisions travel through the organisation intact, accountability sits where it belongs, and leaders build momentum instead of managing exceptions. When it slips, the signals are quiet and consistent. A managing director sits in every escalation. Commercial conversations happen in fragments. The same numbers carry two different versions of the truth. Everyone can describe the strategy and nobody is working from it. Few businesses call this a Grip problem. They call it a people issue, a succession concern, a governance challenge. The label changes. The mechanism rarely does. Rufus Wren starts by building an honest picture of the business, through confidential conversations across the leadership team, before the chief executive is in the room. What surfaces is never the reported version of events. It is the lived one: the risks discussed privately, the concerns that never reach the board pack, the conversations that happen once the meeting ends. That picture becomes the foundation for a Boundary Session. Leaders spend two days with the right people, away from the ordinary rhythm of the business. The first day establishes reality. The second builds the response, a practical plan with ownership attached to each part of it. Most advisers stop there. Rufus Wren does not. Plans rarely fail on design. They fail because nobody holds them long enough for new habits to settle. So the practice stays close, supporting leadership teams, holding workstreams, chairing steering groups and bringing in specialists where they are needed. It never sets out to replace the organisation. The aim is to help it carry its own weight again. "We work alongside leadership teams, never ahead of them," Davies explains. "We codesign what needs to happen, then help them carry it until Grip holds." The confidentiality that protects clients also keeps the work out of the conversations where those clients talk about their wins. Most arrive by referral, sent by someone who has already been in the room. It was never meant as a marketing strategy. It is simply what the work produces. Alongside client work, Davies is building something she believes leadership currently lacks: a practical, evidence-based account of how organisational Grip is lost, recognised and restored. The Grip Research Project sets out to make legible what has long sat as practitioner instinct. Its first public output is the Grip Audit, a free six-minute diagnostic that measures seven branches of Grip: decisions, information, cash and commercials, people and accountability, customer, risk and governance, and strategic cadence. Leaders receive a personalised report at once, and their anonymised answers feed a national benchmark of how British organisations are holding up under pressure. Davies has no ambition to build a large consultancy. She wants Rufus Wren to remain the most precise intervention available when complexity begins to outpace an organisation's structure. "If there is one thing I would ask leaders to do, it is to take the Grip Audit," she says. "You might uncover something worth discussing. More importantly, you will help build a clearer understanding of how British organisations actually perform." Her experience points to one quiet truth. The question is rarely whether Grip slips. It is how quickly a leader notices when it does. Contact: Kate Davies, Founder and CEO Company: Rufus Wren Ltd Website: rufuswren.com The Grip Audit is free at: rufuswren.com/restore-your-grip Arrive with Noise. Leave with Grip.
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