This paper concerns cascaded, shifted, fractional-order, lead compensators made by the serial connection of two stages introducing their respective phase leads in shifted adjacent frequency ranges. Adding up leads in these intervals gives a flat phase in a wide frequency range. Moreover, the simple elements of the cascade can be easily realized by rational transfer functions. On this basis, a method is proposed in order to design a robust controller for a class of benchmark plants that are difficult to compensate due to monotonically increasing lags. The simulation experiments show the efficiency, performance and robustness of the approach.