EXECUTIVE TRANSITIONS
The first hundred days are the easy part. The real test comes later.
A first CEO position. Or a first seat on the executive team. Or a familiar title in a far larger context. The step up is rarely a question of competence, since competence is what earned the appointment. It is a question of judgement under unfamiliar conditions, with new stakeholders, greater exposure and less margin for error.
Authority comes with the title. Credibility and trust have to be earned, and are built slowly and lost quickly.
We work with executives before they take up the post and well past the first hundred days, when the early goodwill has gone and the harder questions arrive. Much of the work concerns the relationships a leader inherits rather than chooses: a board to be kept in step, a team assembled by someone else, a predecessor whose judgement is still the reference point.
Throughout, one thing stays in view: the strengths that earned someone the role are the easiest ones to overuse.
This is counsel, not onboarding.
LEADERSHIP TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
A group of capable executives is not a team. Ability is rarely what is missing.
Senior leadership teams differ from other groups. Their members each lead a part of what they are meant to steer together. Everyone has spent years leading others, but rather fewer have spent them as one among senior peers.
The research on leadership teams is clear about what has to be in place. It must be a real team, with stable membership and work that genuinely requires its members to depend on one another. Its purpose must be compelling enough to be worth the effort, and clear before it is ambitious. And it must have the right people, meaning people able to work in a team as well as run a function.
Most of our work is with the team as it stands. It usually turns on focus, trust and agreement: what the time actually goes to, whether dissent reaches the table, and whether anyone has agreed how the work gets done. Where these are unresolved, the cost is not conflict but drift.
Not all of the work happens with the team. A CEO or business area head may want a sounding board, in confidence, on the design of the team itself: what it exists to do, who belongs on it rather than who reports in, and whether one leadership team is the right answer at all.
This is advisory work, not a programme.
BOARD DEVELOPMENT
Board members are recruited one by one. They are expected to perform together.
Selection, induction and evaluation are well covered. How a board works together is not. Groupthink, self-censorship and the weight of a dominant voice rarely appear on any agenda, yet they shape how decisions are made.
An evaluation tells a board where it stands. It does not change how the board behaves in the room, and the room is where judgement is exercised.
We work with boards that treat the Corporate Governance Code as a floor, not a ceiling.
This is development, not assessment.