How a leader leads is a commercial matter
The way a leader carries a room, holds a team, and makes the decisions that matter is not a soft skill sitting alongside the business. It is the business — the difference between a strategy that lands and one that stalls, a mandate won and a mandate lost.
Yet it is the part of leadership almost no one is built to help with. Strategy consultants work on the plan. Most development works on fragments — a presentation course here, a workshop there. We work on the whole: the leader, their team, and the leadership tier, performing as one.
Twenty-three years of this work, with the leadership of some of the most demanding organisations in the country, taught us one thing above all: when senior leadership performs, it shows up where the board can see it.
How we work
Every engagement begins with one question: what is holding this leader below their true level? The answer differs in every case, and it is rarely what the leader first names. We find the binding constraint and work on that, rather than running a programme.
We call the method Whole Performance™ — the whole leader, the whole team, the whole leadership, performing as one. It is our own intellectual property, and the reason this is a practice, not a service. Senior leaders come to us for themselves, for an individual in their team, or for a leadership tier they are responsible for.
Four ways in. The Partnership develops the whole leadership in one sustained relationship; Counsel is direct one-to-one work with a single senior leader; Voice and Influence sharpens presence and command of the room. The Performance Advisory — an on-demand standing line to the practice — runs alongside any of them.
The Partnership
The whole leader, the whole team and the firm’s leadership, developed in one sustained advisory relationship.
Counsel
Direct, confidential one-to-one work with a single senior leader, grounded in live decisions.
Voice and Influence
Focused work on presence, voice and command of the rooms that decide outcomes — for a single leader or a team.
The Performance Advisory
On-demand counsel between the set-pieces: a retained line to the principals for the board paper that needs pressure-testing, the difficult conversation to rehearse, the decision to think through aloud.
Wesleyan Assurance Society
Kristy Rowlett – Talent, Leadership and Development
“Nicolette is adept at working with senior leaders to improve one of the most intangible, and yet vital, leadership behaviours – executive presence and gravitas. Through her unique and experiential approach, she has successfully developed the poise of our most senior leaders. She has also worked with our aspiring leaders to develop their skills in presenting succinctly and authentically at Board level. I would definitely recommend Nicolette to other Heads of L&D looking to make a difference to their leadership capability.”