TPC Leadership develops leaders with a heart for leaders AND their organisations. They are engaged and passionate in what they do. They focus on the individual, but will always keep the vision and objectives of the organisation into account.
Janna Kramer, Learning & Talent Development Leader
EY – NETHERLANDS
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We recently spoke with Biran Yilancioglu, TPC Leadership UK Head of Coach Training, and Andrea Cardillo, TPC Leadership Managing Partner, Italy, about the growing impact of team coaching and why it offers something fundamentally different from traditional one-to-one coaching.
Individual coaching is powerful. It builds awareness, sharpens thinking and strengthens leadership capability.
But here is the reality many organisations face: an individual can change, and still return to the same dysfunctional system.
Team coaching works at a different level.
The Limits of One-to-One Coaching
When we coach an individual, we help them reflect and behave differently. Yet many performance issues are not rooted in one person. They sit in:
Unclear roles and responsibilities
Hidden conflict
Misalignment with strategy
Unspoken expectations
Systemic pressure from stakeholders
Low psychological safety
As Andrea explains, sustainable change is difficult when only one person shifts but the surrounding environment stays the same. Team coaching changes the environment itself.
Treating the Team as the Client
One of the most important distinctions in team coaching is this:
The team is the client, not just the individuals within it.
Biran highlights that effective team coaching begins with understanding the full system. It’s important to conduct one-to-one interviews, gather climate data, and contract clearly with both sponsor and team members. It is not simply about running team-building exercises. It is about diagnosing what is really driving performance, whether that is structure, process, role clarity, or wider organisational dynamics.
This systemic lens is what elevates team coaching beyond individual conversations.
From Working Inthe Team to Working Onthe Team
Andrea describes one of the most profound shifts team coaching creates:
Teams move from working in the team to working on the team.
Conflict becomes discussable rather than avoided. Trust becomes examinable rather than assumed. Decision-making improves. Alignment between team strategy and organisational strategy strengthens.
A critical part of the coach’s role is to normalise conflict and tension. Many teams feel uncomfortable naming what is not working. When dynamics are surfaced and examined with clarity rather than blame, teams gain maturity and resilience.
The result is not just better relationships, it is better performance.
A Step Change for the Coach
Team coaching is not simply “one-to-one coaching with more people in the room”.
It demands:
The ability to read group dynamics as a living system
Comfort working in the here and now
Sensitivity to invisible patterns and power dynamics
The discipline to distinguish what belongs to you versus what belongs to the system
Andrea describes this as developing the capacity to pick up on subtle signals within the team and use them to create deeper awareness. For many coaches, this represents a significant professional evolution.
In a market saturated with individual coaches, team coaching remains a specialist field. It positions you to work with senior teams, transformation environments, and complex organisational challenges.
When Is Team Coaching Needed?
According to Biran, the signals often include:
Newly formed or restructured teams
Teams under high pressure
Major change initiatives
Teams overly focused on internal issues
Even high-performing teams who want to sustain excellence
In each case, the leverage point is collective, not individual.
The Bigger Impact
Individual coaching changes a person.
Team coaching changes the system in which people operate.
When the system shifts:
Alignment strengthens
Accountability increases
Psychological safety improves
Strategy execution accelerates
Cultural change becomes real
And when the environment changes, individual growth becomes sustainable.
If you already coach individuals, the question is not whether one-to-one coaching works. It does.
The real question is:
Do you want to influence behaviour inside the system, or transform the system itself?
Empathy has rightly become one of the most valued qualities in modern leadership. In a world shaped by change, pressure, and uncertainty, leaders who can understand and respond to the human experience create workplaces that feel safer, more connected, and more sustainable. At the same time, many organisations are still driven by the need for results, pace, and delivery.
The real challenge for leaders today is not choosing between empathy or accountability. It is knowing how to hold both, consistently and well. This is the defining capability of mature, human leadership.
When One Without the Other Starts to Falter
Empathy without clarity can lead to blurred expectations. Leaders may soften difficult feedback, delay key decisions, or absorb too much emotional load themselves. Over time, this can create uncertainty, uneven performance, and quiet exhaustion.
Accountability without empathy can feel efficient on the surface but costly underneath. Work still gets done, yet trust thins, people withdraw, and important issues remain unspoken. Performance may be delivered in the short term, but engagement and creativity fade.
Both approaches are usually driven by good intention. Neither is enough on its own. Strong leadership is not found at either extreme.
Where Strong Leadership Really Lives
Effective leadership lives in the space between empathy and accountability. It is the ability to care deeply while also holding clear standards. To listen with openness and still name what needs to be addressed. To support the person without weakening the work.
Leaders who operate with this relational maturity can:
Understand another’s experience without losing sight of outcomes
Offer challenge without damaging trust
Hold steady when emotions rise
Create clarity without losing warmth
Protect both people and performance at the same time
This is not about personality. It is a set of learnable leadership capabilities. It is also what transforms empathy from an intention into meaningful impact.
Human Leadership in Practice
When empathy and accountability are integrated, conversations change. Leaders ask different questions. They listen with genuine presence, and they also make expectations explicit. They explore what support is needed and what still must be delivered. They stay curious rather than avoidant. They remain clear rather than harsh.
This balance is not always comfortable, but it is what builds trust that lasts. It allows people to feel both supported and stretched. It is what enables teams to perform without burning out.
This is the shift that our Leadership 3.0 concept is designed to support.
How Leadership 3.0 Builds This Balance
Leadership 3.0 helps leaders understand how they naturally show up across three interconnected dimensions:
Personal How grounded and self-aware a leader is, especially under pressure. This includes emotional regulation, clarity of intention, and how they respond when stakes are high.
Interpersonal How effectively a leader navigates relationships in real moments. This is where boundaries, feedback, trust, challenge, and compassion meet in practice.
Connected How a leader creates psychological safety, fosters belonging, and builds strong relational networks across the wider system.
Rather than judging style, the Diagnostic reveals patterns. It shows where leaders may lean too far toward softness or firmness, and where strengthening relational capability will have the greatest impact on both confidence and performance.
Take the free diagnostic here Explore our leadership assessment services here
Human Leadership Is About Integration, Not Extremes
Empathy is powerful. Accountability is essential. But neither creates impact on its own. Human leadership at its most mature is the capacity to integrate both with steadiness and intention.
When leaders learn to combine care with clarity, they create environments where people feel valued, trusted, and motivated to perform at their best. This is not soft leadership. It is leadership that is fit for the real demands of today’s organisations.
What is it? Vertical Development isn’t about teaching leaders a new skill. It’s about transforming how leaders think, impacting their (inter)actions.
Simply put: Horizontal Development = More information, skills, competencies Vertical Development = More complex and sophisticated ways of thinking.
Some experts compare the different stages of Vertical Leadership to a human being growing up. From a need driven baby to an impulsive toddler, then a child that starts mastering many skills, through adolescence to adulthood. Each stage represents a new level of development. The first is not better than the second, but an adult can often handle more complex challenges than a young child. As adults, we have the capacity and the responsibility to continuously develop ourselves further. Moving from being defined by others to defining your own life. Or your organization.
Why does it matter? Leaders today grapple with the challenge of constant change, requiring them to adapt strategies swiftly and effectively. They also face significant ambiguity, having to make decisions with incomplete information, balancing risks and uncertainties. Mastering professional skills alone is not enough in this environment. In contrast, asking questions, making observations, and reflecting before taking action or offering advice are crucial skills for navigating uncertain and complex situations. This approach yields numerous benefits, including improved decision-making, greater resilience, stronger relationships, increased creativity and innovation, greater social impact, and better organizational performance.
An organization trying to navigate these complexities should hence ask itself whether their people are a good fit for the task, depending on the current stage of their Vertical Development.
How to get started? Implementing Vertical Development requires a deliberate and ongoing effort to cultivate self-awareness, personal growth, and promote a more holistic and socially responsible approach to leadership. Leaders don’t grow because they like to; they grow because they have to. Vertical growth begins when you face a challenge that is so difficult for you to solve, that you almost have to grow to survive it. Some life events, such as a serious illness or a change of country, force you to reevaluate and see the world in a new way. Workshops can be designed to create that same developmental heat, but at a level that leaders can tolerate. They also need to experience colliding perspectives, and take time to integrate the learnings from both the heat experience and the different views to arrive at an elevated level of sense-making.
In summary, three elements are key:
a “heat experience”
colliding perspectives
space for making sense of both.
The complex task about implementation of vertical leadership is that it doesn’t have firm goals and time frames, and implementation depends on the organization. It is a long term, strategic investment, and requires giving space and allowing for transformational thinking to happen.
However, leaders need to experience all three dimensions (heat experience, colliding perspectives, sense-making) in roughly equal terms.
Reflecting on their careers, leaders often cite intense heat experiences as times of greatest growth. Those who have learned to love the heat have the tremendous advantage of embracing and seeking out challenges as learning opportunities. They have become self-motivated learners. This is invaluable for any organization.
To create the right framework, emphasize the importance of self-awareness, presence, and connection, and offer insights into how individuals can cultivate greater wisdom and compassion.
Additionally, ensure you partner with experienced practitioners who truly embody vertical leadership in their interactions. Can you trust them right away? Are they inquisitive and attentive listeners? Are they credible and collaborative? Designing the right program isn’t just a cognitive exercise — it should exemplify applied Vertical Leadership.
In this series TPC Leadership wants to lend a helping hand to Professional Service organisations and dive into discussions surrounding virtual teams. In this second blog, we consider how to set up your team to succeed – what are the key components to make it work efficiently? How do you ensure that you build a team that will thrive in hybrid working environments?
What makes a successful team?
The best teams have clarity. They are clear about the purpose of the organisation and their objectives within it. Team members know what their roles and responsibilities are both in terms of the business and in terms of making their team work. Whether they are a motivator, timekeeper or they simply help the team to be practical, each member is clear about their role.
A successful team is also built on supportive,trusting relationships. Teams who have each other’s back, challenge each other in a supportive way and embrace a growth mindset will model high performance.
The 4 pillars for setting up a virtual team
Catherine Bardwell, CRM Partner, says that as a high-performance team coach, she often refers to Rubin, Plovnick and Fry’s GRPI model of Team Effectiveness. One of the first models of its kind, but still essential to understand today, the model is based on 4 pillars:
Supportive behaviour — team performance is based on frequent, honest communication. Everybody helps each other and understands how individuals work and fit into the team. A common, clear purpose is instrumental to this.
Effective process — there is clarity across the team around all processes from meetings to decision making to accountability and reviews.
Clear roles — the roles and responsibilities of team members and leaders are clearly defined. When defining roles, the best leaders play to their team’s strengths. AsCharles Brook, Founder of TPC Leadership, explains, “you don’t want someone in defence who’s really a natural striker.”
Shared goals — team objectives are shared, and individuals understand how their performance impacts the bigger picture. Communication of goals and progress is continuous and transparent.
How can we further improve virtual teams?
It’s important to regularly revisit the ground rules. Remind people to stay on mute unless they’re speaking, keep their cameras on and agree to switch off mobile phones during meetings. Encourage teams to listen but not interrupt, to challenge ideas creatively and build on the ideas of others. Promote positive behaviours and openly evaluate how well teams adopt them.
As a leader, look at how you can pull the team together and ensure everyone collaborates. Every team has extroverts who can take up a lot of airtime, so create space for introverts to have their say by providing structured, dedicated time for everyone to speak — and time to prepare. Catherine suggests sending out the agenda in advance of the meeting.
Charles warns that regular meetings can become boring. He advocates mixing up the style and focus. Your schedule could include meetings that are purely operational, some that focus solely on innovation or that provide a space for sharing vulnerabilities. It could be a good idea to include a monthly accountability meeting followed by a forum for celebrating success. “After all, it’s so easy to just look to the next challenge without taking the time to celebrate.”
What is the ROI on a successful team?
Investing in successful teams takes effort and hard work, but Catherine and Charles believe the ROI is more than worth it. Engaged, motivated teams with a can-do attitude will be innovative, proactive and hungry for success. They will retain and attract talent, beat the competition and drive results.
Want to know more about building successful teams in your organisation?Get in touch with us to find out how we can help.
In this series TPC Leadership wants to lend a helping hand to Professional Service organisations and dive into discussions surrounding virtual teams. In this first blog, we consider the importance of trust in hybrid working environments.
As the impact of the first UK lockdown hit and forced many businesses to switch how they operate overnight, we now are functioning two years later in a hybrid working world. We have moved from the comfort of the traditional office environment to virtual working and it looks like it is here to stay. Teams have now got used to working remotely together, but, are remote teams working with trust?
How do we define trust?
Patrick Lencioni, who devised a pyramid model to illustrate the five characteristics of a cohesive team, defines trust in terms of vulnerability — if team members are comfortable being open about their mistakes and weaknesses because they know they have the support of their colleagues, performance will improve.
Once trust is established as a foundation, teams have confidence to tackle conflict resolution, and this leads to a firm commitment to each other and to the team’s purpose. Then they hold each other accountable and this accountability gets results.
Why does trust matter?
In today’s workplace people need to be proactive, creative, able to take ownership and be confident in prototyping ideas. Team members need a level of openness to challenge and a willingness to co-create with others. Trust underpins all of that — unless you can win and feel trust, it’s difficult to maximise the resources you have in your team.
Charles Brook, Founder and Partner at TPC Leadership, often refers to how our company has worked virtually for 20 years. Part of our USP has been to offer employees the space to live their lives as they wish, trusting they will make sure clients are happy. “We don’t measure inputs, we measure outputs,” Charles explains. “I’ve only had one experience in that time where trust was given and results weren’t delivered.”
Organisations who have been thrown into virtual working because of the pandemic have had similar experiences — they had to trust their people to work virtually and consequently found they worked effectively, and in some cases exceeded expectations, without the burden of constant evaluation.
One concern for Charles is that organisations will try to leverage software to monitor people working virtually and that this will undermine the trust it can inspire. Removing trust from the core of your virtual teams risks stifling their creativity and productivity.
How to create trust
Charles explains that “trust is not a given — it takes time and effort to create it.” New teams can tend to bypass that and focus on results. But when this happens Lencioni’s pyramid is upended, and teams lose the stability and productivity that comes from the trust at its foundation.
“Remember that teams are made up of people and people need good relationships with those around them” Charles says. “It’s difficult to think beyond results, but by taking time to build relationships, you are securing the foundations of trust. The results will follow.”
“I always start off by asking everyone in the team what’s going on for them — I want to hear what they’re thinking and what they’re feeling,” Charles explains. It’s about giving employees and leaders the opportunity to share vulnerability and grow trust with each other.
Catherine Bardwell,TPC Leadership CRM Partner, recalls the impact of sharing her vulnerability as a leader at a training event. Having just received a message that a friend was passing away, Catherine had the courage to share how she was feeling at that moment. This inspired her trainees to offer deep insights about themselves as leaders and a foundation of mutual trust and growth was established.
Trust improves ROI
The bottom line is that investing in trust will positively impact your ROI. When built on trust, teams will be more functional, creative, engaged and committed. Team members will hold each other accountable and achieve better results.
Looking for insight on developing your virtual teams?Get in touch with us to find out how we help Professional Service organisations.
Our experience of delivering leadership development programmes that make an impact
What makes a successful leader has always been a subjective question. But when it comes to developing leaders in a way that leaves a lasting, positive impact on the individual and their teams, there are some common threads that we see time and again.
To get more insight into this topic, we’re in conversation with Frédéric Lhospied, Managing Partner at TPC Leadership France, and Marcus de Vasconcelos, Managing Partner at TPC Leadership Switzerland, about their experiences of leading programmes and what factors can help foster the required change.
It starts with alignment to change
A successful leadership development programme obviously needs experienced people to guide it. But if the input is only coming from one side, the effects of the programme will only go so far. To achieve a truly lasting impact, leadership development has to take place in a culture that’s not only willing to change, but is also ready to embrace self-leadership.
“The role of a consultant is to help bring the message across and structure the programme,” Marcus says. “But there should be a lot of co-creation workshops so everyone is involved in deciding how to transform.”
Frédéric recalls working with one client to deliver a leadership development programme for their mid-senior management. It began with strong ambitions for a multiple-year journey, but they were also putting a lot of pressure on the consultants to come in and deliver the skills and behavioural shift that would trigger a cultural transformation.
“What we did was progressively find that balance,” Frédéric says. “The CEO and the HR Team were really supportive, and their buy-in helped us to find an efficient, effective programme for the participants. But if there’s no willingness, it doesn’t work.”
Developing leaders takes bravery
To make a lasting, positive impact on an organisation, a leadership development programme doesn’t just need a willingness to embrace change. It also needs willingness to face some very tough decisions.
If a leader has gone through a development programme but won’t listen or enact the changes in their own role, it’s tough to justify keeping them in that position. When a manager won’t role model a new culture, their behaviours will inevitably filter down through their direct reports and jeopardise the effectiveness of the programme.
Frédéric remembers one firm that managed to turn around a deep-set problem with low team engagement by making brave decisions. “They fired some toxic people in the team and invested in recruiting the right people,” he says. “Two years later their annual assessment survey saw a huge increase in engagement across the whole organisation.”
That’s not to say every successful leadership development programme has to end with some leaders being pruned away. But the reality often is that some people aren’t going to evolve in the way the organisation needs. That’s not always about a personal failing either – sometimes people are simply put into leadership roles at the wrong point of their career.
“Leadership development has to be seen as including tough decisions,” Marcus says. “Sometimes people are simply in the wrong position or their mindset is not aligned with the organisation’s needs. I can’t think of a transformation initiative I’ve been involved in where that hasn’t been the case.”
When it works, the signs are clear
A crucial aspect of any leadership development programme is being able to measure the effect it’s having on the behaviour and culture in your team. And we believe that when a programme is making a positive impact, the proof is hard to ignore.
Sometimes the results are very clear and tangible. Marcus recalls one example of a programme he saw at a global service centre for a Fortune 100 company. Prior to the programme the team was struggling with a deeply toxic culture, in which a lack of accountability was leading to poor client service, high turnover and total disengagement within the team.
But after two years of effective leadership development, the company managed to turn its negative Net Promoter Score around to a positive of 50, and customer satisfaction scores increased tenfold. As for the bottom line, the team also managed to keep costs within the operating budgets for the first time in years.
“That change happened because people started to care,” says Marcus. “Before the programme they would come to work, do the minimum possible, and leave with tasks half done. But after the journey those fundamental attitudes changed, and they started to care about the people in their team and their reputation with clients.”
But sometimes it can’t be put into figures. There are always aspects of leadership development that remain intangible – the quality of discussions in the room, the engagement levels of the participants – but nevertheless these give a strong signal of the impact being made.
“I remember one participant who was fully against a programme in the beginning,” Frédéric says. “But in the end he was so happy about it and took part in a really authentic way. In that kind of situation, when you’re in the room as a trainer, you can feel people developing and you can tell it’s working.”
Looking for leadership development or consultancy? Get in touch with us to find out how we can help.
“Back to the fundamentals of leading yourself”
In episode 5 of The Leadership Sessions, Tom Van Dyck, Senior Partner at TPC Leadership Belgium, and Laurent Jacquet, Partner at TPC Leadership Belgium explore Going back to the fundamentals and taking complete responsibility for our lives.
“Ask what is it that I believe in… because if we don’t, we feel lost, we don’t feel authentic, relationships are not strong enough…”
Having recently published his book “New Leaders” Laurent delves into his personal mission to create better leaders. From the hockey pitches of international competition, Laurent traces the influences and reflections that have led him to develop a clear philosophy and approach to help new leaders immediately step up and add value to their teams. Their discussion focuses on the need to understand oneself, to question one’s own beliefs and opinions in order to be authentic in one’s interactions, motivations and relations, and how this is just as true for old hands as it is for new, junior leaders.
The Leaderships Sessions is a podcast series of captivating conversations with exceptional leaders from around the world sharing their insights, experiences, thoughts, and personal opinions about what leadership means and what it takes to be effective.
On your personal journey of creating better leaders:
“It really is a journey about contrasts”
“In an environment in top sport, you have to imagine a place full of emotions… there’s an incredible dynamic… and the interesting aspect there for me was I couldn’t find that back into my professional life.”
“I really wanted to have that same engagement in my professional life than I had in my sports, so I went on a quest of meaning I went on a quest of purpose”
“I really wanted to have that same engagement in my professional life than I had in my sports”
On the magic formula:
“The number one thing we should all do is take complete responsibility of our lives”
“There’s this thing that says: you are the CEO of your life. It’s exactly that” • “I moved to taking responsibility for everything. That’s a very hard thing to do, but it’s very freeing!”
“We all have a backpack… the thing we need to do is to basically, open that backpack, look what’s inside, and really ask ourselves, is this really mine? The things I received from my parents, the values, the beliefs, all these things? Are they really mine?
“…the things I received from my parents, the values, the beliefs, all these things, are they really mine?”
“Ask what is it that I believe in… because if we don’t, we feel lost, we don’t feel authentic, or relationships are not strong enough. And it’s going to be much harder in the end to positively influence others”
“It’s a conscious and continuous effort that happens through actions through trials and errors. So, you need to be okay with making these mistakes and failing”
On Why People Should Pick Up His Book:
“We’re too much focused on the skills first, sometimes we forget what we want to achieve in doing what we do, ”
“There’s this special philosophy that helps new leaders, from tomorrow on, immediately, start to have an impact on their teams”
“It comes back to fundamentals about leading yourself, and some key concepts about how you can take people with you because they want to follow you not because they have to…”
“It comes back to fundamentals about leading yourself …”
How to measure the value and success of a leadership development programme
Businesses that view success from a broader perspective beyond short term financial profitability may implicitly understand the benefits of leadership development programmes – and be prepared to invest in them.
In reality though, for many businesses almost everything is ultimately driven by bottom line results and concrete figures. And when it comes to something like a leadership development programme, it’s difficult to know how to translate its value into numbers.
If profits increase or employee turnover decreases or the company is better perceived by public opinion, how can you be sure that’s the result of more effective leadership and not some other variable?
To gain some insights, we’re speaking to Marcus de Vasconcelos, Managing Partner at TPC Leadership Switzerland, and Frédéric Lhospied, Managing Partner at TPC Leadership France.
They recently shared their insight on the foundations you need to ensure a leadership programme is successful. Today, they’re discussing where organisations can look to assess that success.
Why measuring leadership matters
Discussions about values and culture can often feel pretty hazy to those who aren’t familiar with leadership development. We can all agree that successful organisations need ‘good’ leaders, but when businesses invest in development programmes they often seek some concrete proof that the investment has helped the bottom line.
“When we work with organisations on self- and team-awareness, it’s not easy because it’s not tangible,” Frédéric says. That lack of definition can sometimes be a barrier to people who need the reassurance of figures – especially in large corporations, where rational data reigns supreme.
Before starting any leadership development programme, it’s crucial to know how you’re going to measure its impact. The value of a leader might not sound like something that can be quantified. But in order for an organisation and its leaders to grow, there needs to be some kind of benchmark for how things were before the programme and what changed as a result.
5 levels of success – from simple to complex
Marcus identifies five levels to look at the impact of a programme, each with a different degree of complexity and depth of insight.
1) Participant reaction
As a first step, you can look at how participants react to the programme. This information can be gathered and codified fairly easily, for example through a satisfaction questionnaire.
It can also be useful to track how reactions change, comparing the post-programme thoughts to what participants perceived that the programme would deliver before they started.
“I can remember one guy who was fully against participating in a leadership development programme,” Frédéric remembers. “And by the end he was so happy with what he’d learned and achieved. He could see why it had been important for him to participate.”
2) Benefits gained
Next, think about what was gained from completing the programme. How many people completed the course? What modules did they complete? How many people did they interact with?
Although this information doesn’t necessarily tell you what actual impact the programme has had, it indicates the potential impact based on participation.
3) Behavioural change
This is where you can start to see the lasting impact that a leadership development programme is having on the behaviours of the individuals taking part.
To track behavioural change, it’s important to create a benchmark at the beginning, which can then be compared to similar information post-programme completion. At TPC Leadership, we usually do this by conducting 360º assessments. These assessments can be used to measure perception of leadership behaviours, such as empathy, for example, or self-awareness.
“Take each competence and give a score between zero and five,” Frédéric says. “Do it again at the end of the journey and you get a concrete figure for how each individual and the whole team has changed.”
Frédéric shared an example of a programme delivered for a team of senior middle managers. Comparing the first and second set of results showed that positive scoring increased by 9.7% while negative scores were reduced by 4.9%.
4) Tangible team measures
Impacted individual leaders should go on to impact their teams, which is the next level to measure. It may be possible to see clear results in terms of increased retention levels, for example, or a reduction in absences.
Although it is likely that factors other than a leadership programme will have contributed to these changes, it’s useful to understand if there is a general positive trend. These trends will typically only be observed in the mid-term, hence the importance of seeing leadership development as a continuous investment.
5) Bottom line impact
The final level of measurement, which Marcus calls “the holy grail”, is the bottom line impact – how the leadership programme affects the company’s success, whether that’s in terms of profit margin or other metrics that present a more holistic view of an organisation’s contribution to its stakeholders. Often, measuring impact at this level is a mixture of quantifiable data and qualitative insight.
With each level the evaluations get more subjective. The key to ensuring the figures stay meaningful is to always have a clear idea of why you’re measuring them. Don’t set out to measure arbitrary criteria – set clear aims from the start about what valuable change looks like to your organisation and what each of your direct reports is looking to achieve.
As important as measuring is, sometimes you have to let go
Even with these ways of measuring, there will always be an element of uncertainty around assessing the impact of a leadership development programme.
The simpler an outcome is to measure, the less meaningful it generally is. And as you move through the degrees of complexity, the issue becomes proving causality. With so many variables at play, can you empirically say that a change in staff retention or customer satisfaction is predominantly caused by leadership development?
Ultimately what makes leadership development so difficult to measure is that some aspects are just unmeasurable. Leadership is by nature an intangible skill, and some of its impacts will remain outside the reach of meaningful concrete figures. Assessing the outcome of a development programme is about finding the balance between evaluating rational data and trusting your gut.
“There is one automotive company we began working with at the beginning of the pandemic, and their financial future was not looking promising,” says Fred. “They were looking at minus 50% forecasts – and as you can imagine this affected the atmosphere within the company.”
But even though this organisation was under tremendous pressure to protect themselves financially, they decided to keep our leadership development programme in their budget. They understood they needed this kind of support more than ever.
“In some cases, leadership development is a leap of faith,” says Marcus. “You have to believe that better leaders will produce better working environments, which in turn will produce the results the company wants to see.”
Looking for leadership development or consultancy? Get in touch with us to find out how we can help.
Launching a leadership development programme
When organisations look to embark on a leadership development programme, the goal is to create a lasting positive change. But achieving a cultural or behavioural transformation isn’t as simple as bringing in consultants to run a programme. When the right foundations aren’t in place, the change is often short-lived and may even fail to take root at all.
To understand more about what those essential foundations are and how to put them in place, we’re speaking to Marcus de Vasconcelos, Partner at TPC Leadership Switzerland, and Frédéric Lhospied, Managing Partner at TPC Leadership France, for their insight into what organisations need for a successful leadership development programme.
While there are no simple solutions, three elements are essential to give a leadership development programme a chance to deliver real results.
1) A clear vision and purpose
It all begins with a clear vision and purpose for the programme. A leadership development programme should be seen as a transformational initiative, and like any initiative it needs thorough planning before any work can begin. Without a distinct purpose, it risks being development for development’s sake, and the changes are unlikely to be as far-reaching or long-lasting as you had hoped.
What is the motivation for seeking leadership development? What kind of cultural transformation are you hoping to achieve, and why is it needed? And when it comes to the end of the programme, how are you going to evaluate its impact?
Defining this purpose is often a collaborative effort. “Sometimes clients aren’t aware of the importance of their contribution in the process,” Frédéric says. “You need an iterative approach, with discussions and meetings to find what’s needed.”
While answering those questions, it’s important to keep your goals reasonable. A leadership development programme isn’t going to deliver an overnight shift in culture or business outcomes by itself. If you put too much pressure on the programme from the outset, the result is likely to be disappointing.
“It’s dangerous to expect a leadership development programme to do everything for you,” Marcus says. “It’s not the case that if you do X, you get Y. It has to be seen as one part of a holistic transformation.”
One business the TPC Leadership team had discussions with was still trying to choose a leadership development partner a few short weeks before their cultural transformation programme was due to start.
“For them, the leadership development programme was an afterthought,” says Marcus. “And that’s where the danger lies. It has to be considered as integral to transformation. If it isn’t, then the expectation for what it can deliver will always be too high.”
2) A culture that is committed to change
For a leadership development programme to be successful, the participants and the overall culture of the organisation also need to be open to change. Development isn’t something that can be mandated. It takes a significant degree of buy-in – on an individual and a company-wide level – for the effects to truly be felt.
To some extent this willingness to try a different approach is inevitable. In the US there is a growing trend of people citing “toxic culture” as their main reason for leaving an organisation. Signs of a similar trend are emerging in European businesses too, as a healthy, supportive work environment climbs the list of priorities for employees. The wider culture is changing, and businesses need to follow.
“This trend is going to have an impact on leaders in a positive way,” Frédéric says.
Marcus adds: “In the past leaders could become complacent, allowing this toxic culture to embed itself in the organisation. Nowadays values, purpose, developing people and supporting the ‘right’ culture are a crucial aspect of any leadership role. A leader who is not sufficiently self-aware will not be able to thrive or help others thrive.”
One way to encourage the ‘right’ culture is by fostering a commitment to making change happen. This goes beyond investing in leadership development programmes. It also means carving out the appropriate time and space for participants to engage with the programme, and accepting that it is a long term initiative rather than a quick-fix.
“Leadership development has to be seen as a continuous endeavour,” Marcus says. “It can’t be something you do now and don’t look at for another decade.”
It takes time – not to mention patience – to grow a culture that’s ready to accept a new direction. Barriers to change are notoriously stubborn, especially when longstanding ways of working are concerned. Without that foundation in place, the seeds sown by a leadership development programme will almost always fall on hard ground.
“If the culture isn’t there you might still end up developing some people,” Marcus says. “But they will find they’re left to fend for themselves in an environment that doesn’t really support what they’ve learned. In the end, their behaviours will fall back in line with their environment.”
3) A willingness to embrace self-leadership
Finally, there needs to be a willingness at a senior level to embrace self-leadership.
Often a senior executive will ask for a development programme for his or her direct reports. But for that programme to be successful, those same senior members have to be ready to role model the changes they expect from others. Without this – “the tone at the top” – it becomes extremely difficult to ask middle managers and employees to do what they don’t see reflected elsewhere in the organisation.
“If you really want your organisation to evolve it starts with you,” says Frédéric. “If the CEO and board members aren’t prepared to move with their direct reports, the impact of what we do is going to be peanuts.”
The problem for many organisations is that their senior leadership’s priorities are rarely in line with role modelling this change. Even in the most enlightened companies, people are rewarded most of all on the basis of their short-term performance on tangible achievements. Very quickly, self-awareness becomes much lower priority compared to business outcomes that translate more directly to bonuses and promotions.
By making sure the behaviours the company wants to see are rewarded as well, self-leadership can be woven into the roles of managers and senior leaders. And as they develop self-awareness of how their behaviours impact others, that in turn will change what their reports are prepared to do around them. Not only does this help their team become a more cohesive, motivated unit, it also helps the desired change to filter through the organisation.
“What you need is to get critical mass,” says Marcus. “When you’ve got enough people who support the new culture and behaviours, they can champion leadership development in the whole organisation.”
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Business context and drivers
The aim of this on-going programme is to support emerging and future leaders to make the transition from being an individual contributor, expert in technical knowledge or skills, to becoming a leader and enabler of others.
TPCL has been working with this global client on a long term program for numerous years, ensuring its current and applicable as the emerging leaders adapt to new working environments. This program has further developed into working with their subsidiary in the digital consulting space where leaders operate in a very fast-moving working environment.
Our approach
Maintaining a faculty to deliver the workshop six (6) times/year in person and translating online with additional 1:1 coaching to embed their learning.
The workshops cover ‘understanding yourself as a leader’, leading others and leading under pressure, uncertainty and change.
Key objectives
Enhance capability in leading others
Embed the learning and best practises across the organisation
Shift in mindset and developing self-confidence
Feedback from the client indicates that participants:
Are more effective at delegating and setting clear expectations for performance
Are better able to recognise and leverage strengths in their team members
Are more confident at handling difficult conversations and feedback
Have a clear vision about themselves as a leader, the values that drive them, and the behaviours to put their vision into action
Understand their patterns in responding to stress and have strategies for maintaining performance and actively managing their resilience
Feel supported to embed their learning and put new behaviours developed into practice
“The 3-days-leadership-part run by the TPCL facilitators has been the best-rated elements of the program. While participants still miss the live-in-person element, they have been surprised how much you can still advance your level-of-leadership virtually”, Senior L&D Manager
To learn more about this case or other interventions of relevance for your organisation don’t hesitate to get in touch
In this blog TPC Leadership founder Charles Brook discusses the need for better leadership development for emerging leaders. It’s essential to ensure emerging leaders are equipped to lead in the new working environments that are rapidly becoming established.
Every organisation plans for growth, but not everyone attains it.
Leadership development for emerging leaders is arguably the most pressing challenge facing organisations today. A report by Deloitte in 2019 revealed that 86% of companies believe the situation to be ‘urgent’ or important,’ yet only 14% claim to develop global leaders excellently. This is not something that we can easily overlook.
At first glance, with $40 billion invested annually (according to Boston Consulting Group), leadership training in the present moment can seem a bloated affair. But the flipside is seen in the financial results of those companies rated strongest on BCG’s 20 leadership and talent management capabilities – they increase their revenues 2.2 times and their profits 1.5 times faster than the companies rated weakest.
A new people strategy is critical
The expressions “to get the best out of someone” and “your hidden potential” imply that more lies within the person waiting to be released.” – John Whitmore
Here’s the thing. Employees say that developing their own leadership skills is the No.1 reason for staying with their organisation. Unless companies are willing to confront their approach to leadership development, their leaders will migrate elsewhere, searching for an opportunity to become something more.
Every seed wants to grow. Although defective seeds do exist, it is usually other conditions – the soil, the light, the space – that determine whether growth is stunted or explosive. When our people strategy is off kilter, our organisations will be hollowed out by the migration of frustrated leaders. More than that, we might struggle to attract anyone with the same level of potential. So how do we make sure our leaders can grow?
Looking beyond traditional leadership skills
“Organisations have grown skilled at developing individual leader competencies, but have mostly ignored the challenge of transforming their leader’s mind-set from one level to the next. ”– John McGuire and Gary Rhodes. Transforming Your Leadership Culture, The Centre for Creative Leadership
When we think of developing leadership skills, what are we imagining? Does our mind jump to management techniques and theory? Or persuading people to be more like a particular personality type? What does real growth actually look like?
If the growth of our organisations is to be secured, we need leaders who are ready and willing to upgrade their way of thinking. For their emotional intelligence to be increased at the same time as their understanding of key principles. We cannot simply add more knowledge on top of existing knowledge. Otherwise nothing will truly ever really shift.
It is this deeper, emotional level of development that creates in leaders the capacity for creative risk-taking, powerful communication and the ability to thrive under pressure.. As John McGuire and Gary Rhodes explain, “Today’s horizontal development within a mind-set must give way to the vertical development of bigger minds.” To get an idea of the kind of leadership coaches that can achieve this, check our 15 signs a coach can deliver what they claim.
Creating room for the exponential
Managers tend to be too risk averse: they focus on the costs of investing in bad ideas rather than the benefits of piloting good ones.’ – Adam Grant, organisational psychologist. Originals
Although you can predict the effect leadership development will have on an individual, you can never truly estimate the impact it will have on the organisation. Ultimately, the greatest organisations to date have been formed because of the quality of the people within them – it is the people who determine the strategy, develop ideas and solve problems daily: The best ideas can come from anywhere.
If we are content to trundle along, expecting the next five years to be much like the last, then maybe we can afford to keep on keeping on. But if we desire to grow, if we long to make a real impact in the world, we have to invest in the leaders and emerging leaders within our organisations.
Leadership development changes with the world it is a part of. It’s well-established that everything is going digital, and the best leaders must adapt to it.
Anywhere, anytime
“They say, in real estate, success is based on location, location, location. Well, in coaching, we will be saying technology, technology, technology.” – Brad Federman, F&H Solutions Group
The model of coaching as a one hour sit-down every Wednesday doesn’t match the working lives of many leaders. Increasingly, coaching is becoming a remote experience snatched from whatever minutes happen to work that week. The rise and rise of video calling means that distance and time zones matter less and less. Coaches can be on-call when you need them.
This is pretty useful for as-you-need-it support, but there’s also a limited amount of introspection that can occur in fifteen minutes between two other mind-demanding appointments. If coaching is going to bring out the deep potential of leaders, intentional time will still need to be carved out.
There’s an app for that
“Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviours, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.” – Jon Radoff, Game On: Energize Your Business with Social Media Games
An old limit of leadership development used to be, ‘How do you keep learning between training/coaching sessions?’ It was easy for learning to be forgotten in the everyday, or forced out by the pressures of the next deadline.
With the rise of technology, there are now digital coaches like Everskill and AI programs like Volume to fill in the gaps. Especially when it comes to team development, these resources can increase engagement by a significant degree. Digital coaches can embed learning via nudges during ordinary office hours – prompting the practice of new habits. Whereas other AI programs can teach specialised training or reinforce an organisation’s culture via app.
There’s also the video game factor. Leadership development processes don’t exactly look like Call of Duty but they have more in common with it than you might think. Static forms of learning are going through gamification and are developing teamwork and key skills in a surprisingly effective way. Such a shift naturally attracts scrutiny because it appears the company budget is being channelled into ‘fun’. But as the digital age keeps spiralling upwards, traditional development strategies will have to embrace gamification.
What kind of leaders will we need?
“A lot has been written about…artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, etc. Some describe a future where most of the work still done by human beings will require strong interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.” – Kathy Bernhard, KFB Leadership Solutions
As more responsibilities are passed into the hands of technology, many forms of traditional expertise will depreciate in value. But the importance of being creative, daring and resilient as a leader will only increase. Processes may require less attention, but leadership will be as essential as ever.
The world will still need adventurers, dreamers and leaders with the tenacity to take on the status quo. People who can ask better questions and stay steady in the face of the unknown. And while there is speculation about the possibility of imbibing robots with emotions, the emotional intelligence of the internally agile leader will not be replaceable.
The continuing rise of technology could kill off poor leadership coaching by natural selection. It will certainly force leadership development to move away from old models. When so much is being done for us, the power to make a real difference as a human being will depend increasingly on how deep we are willing to go to do the work on ourselves.
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