I went into coaching expecting vague motivational talks. Instead, my coach pushed me to map out exactly where I was avoiding conflict with my direct reports and gave me a framework for addressing it. By week six I had three conversations I had been putting off for months. Two went better than I expected; one was hard but necessary. I would not have had any of them without this program.
We brought Leader Insight Pro in to run a full-day workshop for our product leadership team after a restructure. The pre-session survey surfaced issues we knew existed but had not named out loud. The facilitator handled the room with a mix of directness and care that let people say what needed saying without it turning personal. We left with a written set of decision-making norms that we still reference nine months later.
The emerging leader program gave our first-time managers a shared vocabulary and a safe space to admit what they did not know. One participant told me she finally understood why her team seemed disengaged: she had been solving problems for them instead of coaching them through solutions. That shift alone was worth the investment.
I was sceptical about external coaching because I had tried it before and found it too abstract. This time was different. My coach had actually run a P&L in a similar industry, so when I described the tension between my CFO and my sales director, she understood the dynamics immediately. The advice was specific, practical and grounded in experience rather than textbook theory.
We have now run three cohorts through the emerging leader program. The consistency is remarkable. Each group bonds quickly, the applied projects produce real business value, and the managers who sponsor participants tell me they see a noticeable change in how their people communicate and prioritise. We plan to continue with annual cohorts.
The strategy facilitation day we booked for our board was exactly what we needed. Our facilitator kept the conversation focused when it drifted, asked sharp questions when we were glossing over hard topics, and delivered a clean summary document the next day. It saved us weeks of circular email threads.
This company had grown from 60 to 200 employees in two years. The leadership team noticed that feedback between managers and their teams had become infrequent and surface-level. Exit interviews mentioned "lack of honest communication" as a top-three reason for leaving. Internal engagement survey scores on the feedback dimension had dropped from 72% favourable to 54% over 18 months.
We ran a diagnostic phase with interviews across 14 managers and 30 individual contributors. The data showed that managers felt unprepared for difficult conversations and worried about damaging relationships. We designed a three-part intervention:
The HR director told us: "The shift was not dramatic overnight, but by month three we could see managers initiating conversations they would have avoided before. The coaching check-ins made the difference because they kept the practice alive after the workshop energy faded."
Leaders coached since 2017
Organisations served
Clients who re-engage within 18 months
Average participant rating across all programs