A feature for Directors, VPs, and Executives
LeadStrong.
For the corporate leader carrying decisions that nobody else in your week can help you think through.
For the corporate leader carrying decisions that nobody else in your week can help you think through.
You're already operating at a high level. That's not the problem.
The problem is the gap between the decisions you're making and the thinking those decisions deserve.
The promotion happens. The remit expands. The decisions get more consequential. But nothing changes about how you think about them. You're still making them in the same fifteen-minute windows between meetings, and you know it, because the one that matters this quarter has been sitting at the back of your mind for a month and you have not yet given it an hour.
The result: you're operating at the new altitude with the old way of thinking.
That's the gap LeadStrong is built around.
Fifteen years across organisational consulting and executive coaching, much of it inside large organisations as a senior business analyst and transformation specialist, which is where the habit of putting a problem on a wall and working it comes from. Gallup-certified in CliftonStrengths and a FITT16 practitioner. Leaders coached inside Toyota, Lexus, Convatec, Cambridge University Press, Autoglass, the University of Oxford and NextEnergy Capital, and individually from AWS, Volkswagen Financial Services, Nexans and Bassett Mechanical. The credentials in full
Working with John has been transformative. I came in overwhelmed and stuck; I left with a clear structure for how I lead and make decisions under pressure.
Working with John has given me renewed focus and confidence at a point in my career when I really needed it. The CliftonStrengths work was the most clarifying thing I've done professionally.
LeadStrong is not an open-ended relationship. It is six months of work with two or three outcomes we agree before it begins, a midpoint at three months where we check them, and an end date after which you carry on the thinking without me.
In the first session we agree what has to be different by the end, in two or three measures you would recognise in your own work: a decision made and announced, a team that no longer routes everything through you, a strategy your board has signed. They go on the whiteboard and they stay there for the whole engagement.
We hold the outcomes up against where you are. If the work is doing what it should, we carry on. If it is not, you can stop there, and you pay only for the half you have had. That is not a get-out clause for me. It is how you know I am as exposed to the result as you are.
The outcomes are either met or they are not, and we say which. By then you have run enough sessions to run the method yourself: the question, the board, the decision. Some leaders come back for a second engagement with new outcomes. Nobody drifts on.
Six months, a session a week, so around twenty-four at the board. £7,200 for the whole engagement, which is £300 a session, with the option to stop at three months and pay £3,600. No retainer, and nothing added on.
Every session is a Whiteboard Session. Your thinking, out of your head, onto the board, into a solution. What goes up is your call, and it is always something live.
The decision you are being asked for this month, or the strategic approach you have not had an hour to think through. Not a reflection on last quarter. The thing that is in front of you.
I write as you talk, so the whole of it is where you can see it, then we find what connects, what is missing, where your own way of leading is sitting inside the problem, and what will actually hold. There is no homework between sessions. The thinking happens here.
Written on the board before we finish. And I say what I think. A thinking partner who only asks questions is half a partner, so when I have a view you get it, clearly marked as mine, and you do what you like with it.
Online with the board shared live on screen, or in person in central London or Milton Keynes.
Most senior leaders don't get to think at altitude during the week. The session is where you do, with the day-to-day still in view.
A profile of how you actually operate, used not as a personality test but as an operating language. We use it when the question is about you, your patterns, your blind spots, the conditions that produce your best work.
A 16-archetype model built from your CliftonStrengths Full 34. It maps the drive underneath the strengths, so the strategy fits the leader, not just the role.
Most of the leaders I work with had a coach once and did not go back. The reasons are usually the same five, so here is how this is built against each one.
| What you may have had before | What LeadStrong does instead |
|---|---|
| "It went on for a year and I could not tell you what changed." | Six months. Two or three outcomes agreed in session one, checked at three months, judged at six. You can tell. |
| "They only ever asked me questions. I could have done that in the shower." | I ask, and then I say what I think, marked as my view. You are paying for a second mind, not a mirror. |
| "Homework. Journals. A model with an acronym." | Nothing between sessions. The thinking happens at the board, on the live decision, and ends with it made. |
| "It felt like therapy for people with a budget." | Every session is about a decision in front of you now. If what is in the way is personal, I will say so, and that is a different conversation with a different person. |
| "I never knew if I could stop." | A fixed end date. A midpoint where you can walk away and pay for half. Nobody is kept on a retainer. |
Some leaders come to this on their own account. Others are sent, sometimes because somebody has decided they are the problem, and in my experience the person seen as the problem is usually the one least able to show what they actually intend, beyond how it comes across. Either way, the work is the same and the outcomes are yours.
Where it helps, and only where it helps, I will do a three-way conversation with your line manager at the start and at the end, so the outcomes you set match what the organisation is expecting of you. For a president, a CEO or a leader paying their own way, there is no third party, no sponsor report and nobody to report to but you.
What is said in the room stays in the room. I will say that to you in the first hour, in person, rather than hand you a clause.
The point is to leave you able to do this without me.
Not new knowledge. Not new frameworks. The thinking you'd already be doing if your week had room for it, done often enough at the board that by the end date you can run the method on your own: the question, the whiteboard, the decision. If you come back, it is for a new set of outcomes, not because the first set never closed.
If what comes off the board needs the team to change too, TeamStrong is the next step.
The fastest way to know whether LeadStrong fits is to be at the board for an hour.
You'll know whether the practice is for you. The hour is enough.
Book a Whiteboard SessionOne hour. No charge, nothing to prepare.
Wondering what this looks like when the relationship deepens? Read about going further →