Leadership consulting

Expert advice and support

Whether you want help applying the insights from our assessment tools, or need a bespoke programme to drive engagement and performance, our experienced consultants are here to help.

How we can help

As a well-established provider of leadership consulting, we have a valuable depth of expertise, and pool of research and thought leadership to answer our clients’ needs. We leverage the vast amount of data we collect on leaders and employees from around the world and across industries in order to help us to design and run bespoke tools, research and development programmes that are rooted in evidence and best practice, but tailored to fit the needs and context of the organisation.

Our clients love working with us for our friendly service and extremely high quality, evidence-based and tailored services that help them get the results they are looking for – this is why we have many long-term client relationships and many word-of-mouth referrals.

Every great project starts with a conversation

Pick up the phone or drop us a line, whether you know exactly what you want or are still working it out. We’re always happy to help.

Consultancy

Leadership development

Our leadership programmes aren’t abstract or one-size-fits-all: we focus on what you need to do for your particular organisation to achieve its strategic objectives. We work in partnership with our clients and specialist providers of leadership development and Executive Education to create integrated programmes that make a measurable impact.

Our clients get the very best support from some of the most prestigious business schools (Oxford Saïd, Harvard, Henley, Duke CE) as well as from small, independent providers to create organisations that thrive.

Consultancy

Employee research

Since the 1990s we’ve known that leadership, employee engagement and long-term performance are powerfully linked. Innovation, customer service and productivity all depend on how employees feel about their role and the organisation.

We also know that confidence in leadership and a visible, open and communicative style are the top drivers of engagement; but they are often among the lowest rated elements, making them priorities for improvement.

Using our benchmarked employee surveys, pulse surveys, focus groups and interviews, we build quantitative and qualitative data sets to help leadership teams identify their impact on people in the organisation, and what needs to change for people to excel.

Consultancy

People analytics

It’s often difficult for companies to know what leaders should do to drive engagement and performance in their organisation. They often have plausible-sounding behavioural frameworks, but these have often been developed intuitively and never tested.

Our leadership analytics are some of the most sophisticated available. We combine deep insight with advanced analytics to understand what the right leadership looks like for your organisation, and how your people can be developed to achieve it.

Our methods help clients make data-driven decisions and develop business cases for investment at all stages of the talent cycle. Most importantly, they drive sustained improvements in critical areas such as employee productivity, customer experience and organisational agility.

Consultancy

Leadership behaviours

We’re just going to say it – we don’t like most competency frameworks. They describe what has worked in the past, but if anything changes – your strategy, structure, technology, culture – they may no longer apply.

We take a different approach. The set of essential leadership tasks defined in our Primary Colours® model creates the conditions for people to thrive and succeed in any sector or function, and operates at individual, team and organisational levels.

What varies is how these tasks need to be performed from one place to another – the behaviours which work for each individual case. We have successfully adapted this framework for global engineering companies and consultancies, UK Government, retailers, technology companies and many more. We can do the same for you, defining leadership in simple, memorable and directly actionable terms which work throughout your organisation.

Consultancy

Cultural change

The first step to changing a culture is to understand it. We’ve only found one culture measure which gets beyond the espoused culture of values statements, codes of conduct and the like, to look at where culture really lives: in how people behave day-to-day.

Once you have this insight, it becomes possible to intervene purposefully and create new ways of working. We rarely see top-down, programmatic culture change efforts work; instead we find that psychologically informed strategies are most effective. This means small changes in the system structure, rules and incentives, role-modelling and reinforcement of the desired behaviours, story-telling and visible, symbolic acts.

Consultancy

Wellbeing and resilience

Our employee surveys can include measures of wellbeing and factors such as burnout, stress and general mental/physical health, to highlight areas at risk for sickness absence, turnover, and performance issues. We offer training and workshops to help employees understand their level of resilience and give them techniques to boost it, helping to build a resilient and adaptable organisation.

Building on some award-winning academic research produced in-house, we are currently conducting research into novel methods of improving wellbeing, resilience, engagement and innovation.

Latest consultancy case studies

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