Closing the Leadership Capability Gap
Helping businesses build the leadership and organisational capability their strategy depends on, with a Chief People Officer's view of both the leader and the system they lead in.
Your business has grown and the leadership hasn't kept pace. Decisions take longer than they should and still get revisited, the same few leaders are carrying everything, change gets announced and doesn't land, and some of your best people are tired in a way that's starting to show.
Your leaders are capable and they were promoted for a reason. But the role has changed around them, and the pressure, the structure and what the business rewards shape how they lead as much as anything they bring themselves.
It always shows up as leadership capability. It's rarely caused by the leader alone.
What This Might Look Like
Building your business's leadership blueprint
Most leadership development either starts with an off-the-shelf program mapped to a generic framework, or coaches leaders one at a time and hopes it adds up. This starts with your strategy, defines what high performance looks like in your business, and builds your leaders against it.
Your business's leadership blueprint defines how leadership works in your business: the competencies that define high performance for you, the behaviours that sit underneath each one, and the leadership your business will need as it grows into its next stage.
Stage one
Define and diagnose
Starting from your business plan and strategic objectives, your executives align on what high performance needs to look like, and it's tested with leaders across levels and functions. From there you get a clear picture of where your leaders sit against it. How that's done is shaped around your business and budget, from 360 feedback and psychometric insight to one-to-one and group conversations with your executives and leaders about what good looks like now, what's missing and what the business will need next. If you already have a framework, the work builds from it.
What you get
Your business's leadership blueprint, owned by your executives and recognised by your leaders, and a clear picture of where your leaders sit against it today.
Stage two
Develop
The gaps get closed through a mix of facilitated group sessions where your leaders work through real challenges together, development programs built around the competencies in your blueprint, and one-to-one coaching for individual leaders. Each leader has their own development plan, and the team works together on the gaps they share.
What you get
Leaders developing against what your business actually needs, and a clear view of your future leaders, their succession and the development gaps.
Then, take it forward or keep building.
FAQs
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Usually during or after a period of fast growth - when the business has scaled but decisions are slowing down, the executive team isn't operating as a team, or results aren't matching the talent on paper.
Often it's the CEO who reaches out, sometimes with the board asking questions they don't yet have clean answers to.
Some organisations bring me in earlier, at the start of a restructure or transformation, to make sure the leadership side of the change is set up properly rather than repaired later.
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I spend time inside your organisation - typically through conversations with your senior leaders, time with the executive team and a review of how leadership is actually operating against what the business needs.
From there you get a clear, direct assessment: where leadership capability is strong, where it's strained, and what to do about it.
The shape and depth depend on the size of your organisation, but it's a defined piece of work with a clear output, usually delivered over a few weeks.
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Mostly fast-growth technology and SaaS companies in Australia, from scale-ups through to larger businesses navigating transformation. The common thread is growth or change that has outpaced leadership capability - the business has moved faster than the way it's being led.
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Off-the-shelf programs teach leadership in general. I work with your leaders on what's actually happening in your organisation - the real decisions, dynamics and pressure they're operating in.
Having spent 16 years inside fast-growth organisations, including as a Global Chief People Officer, I understand the system your leaders are sitting in, which means the work is grounded in your context rather than imported from a framework.
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Both, and often at the same time. Individual work helps each leader operate at the level the business now needs. Team-level work addresses how the executive group functions together - how decisions get made, how trust is built, how tension gets raised and resolved.
Where the work focuses depends on what the diagnostic surfaces.
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The diagnostic is a contained piece of work over a few weeks.
Beyond that, most engagements run between three and twelve months depending on what the organisation needs - long enough for leadership behaviour to genuinely shift, not so long that it becomes a permanent fixture. Everything is shaped around your situation rather than a fixed program.
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We'll talk through what you're seeing in the business and I'll give you an honest view of whether this work would help.