Six ways we work on the same problem
Every engagement below comes back to one question: does this organisation have the leadership it needs for the decade it is heading into, and if not, what would close the gap?
Advice that survives contact with the board
Our services are usually bought one at a time and rarely used that way. A search reveals a structural problem; a succession process surfaces a development need; a culture programme fails until the top team is aligned. We are organised so that moving between those pieces costs you nothing.
Engagements are led by the consultant who sold them. There is no handover to a delivery team, and the person in the room when the board makes its decision is the person who built the shortlist.
Talk to a consultantExecutive Search
Most searches fail at the brief, not the shortlist. We spend the first weeks arguing with the specification: what this role has to deliver, what the organisation will genuinely tolerate, and which of the listed requirements are real.
What follows is a mapped market rather than a network. We are explicit about who declined, who was ruled out and why, so the board is choosing between people rather than between summaries.
- — Board and chief executive appointments
- — Executive committee and direct reports
- — Critical scarce-skill and founder-succession hires
Board Advisory
A board can hold every required competency on paper and still be unable to have a hard conversation. We look at composition, but we spend more time on how the board actually works: what gets raised, who defers to whom, and what the chair is carrying alone.
Effectiveness reviews are written to be read by the whole board, not filed. Where a review leads to a director search, the same team carries the reasoning through.
- — Non-executive director search and refresh planning
- — Board effectiveness and chair transitions
- — Committee composition and governance advice
CEO Succession
Succession is a multi-year programme that most boards start as a project. Done properly it runs continuously: a defined view of what the next chief executive must be able to do, a live internal slate, and enough external calibration to know where the internal candidates genuinely stand.
We stay through the transition. The first year of a new chief executive is where a good appointment is either consolidated or quietly undermined.
Read our succession research
Also part of the practice
04Leadership Assessment
Structured evidence about capability, potential and readiness — for an individual appointment, a whole executive committee, or the leadership inherited in a transaction.
Leadership Development
Executive coaching and integration support for leaders whose scope has just grown faster than the habits that got them there.
Team Effectiveness
Work with intact top teams on the small number of decisions they keep failing to make together.
Culture & Transformation
Diagnosing the gap between stated strategy and observed behaviour, then working on the leadership conditions that hold the gap open.
Diversity & Inclusion
Widening the field a board actually considers, and examining the appointment and promotion decisions that keep narrowing it again.
Family Business Advisory
Governance, generational transition and the question of when the right leader is not a family member — handled with the discretion that requires.
Not sure which of these you need?
That is usually the right place to start a conversation.