These are from clients who agreed to be quoted. We have anonymised job titles where the client requested it.
Rachel coached me through the first six months of a CEO role I was not sure I was ready for. She pushed me to stop trying to please everyone on the board and start making the calls I was hired to make. By month four, the chair told me the board had more confidence in the direction of the organisation than at any point in the previous two years.
We brought Leadership Catalyst Consult in after a merger left us with two leadership teams that did not trust each other. The two-day workshop was uncomfortable at times, which I think was the point. The operating agreement we signed at the end gave us a shared language for how we make decisions. Six months later, we have not had a single escalation to the CEO that should have been resolved at director level.
The capability audit was thorough. Priya interviewed 22 people across our organisation and the report identified patterns I had sensed but could not articulate. The development plan was practical: specific actions for specific people, with timelines. We have implemented about 70% of the recommendations so far and the feedback from middle managers has been noticeably positive.
I was sceptical about coaching. I had done it before with another provider and it felt like paying someone to listen to me talk. This was different. Tom came prepared with observations from my 360 feedback and challenged me on specific behaviours. After session three, I changed how I run my weekly one-to-ones and my team told me, unprompted, that the meetings had improved.
In early 2022, an NHS community trust in south-east England contacted us after three of its seven directors left within eight months. The remaining four directors were overworked, mistrustful of each other and struggling to agree on priorities. Staff engagement scores in the most recent survey had dropped 14 points year on year.
We started with individual coaching sessions for each of the four remaining directors. These were not therapy sessions. Each one focused on a specific question: what decisions are you avoiding, and why? After three rounds of individual sessions, we brought the group together for a two-day team alignment workshop.
The workshop surfaced two core problems. First, decision rights were unclear: nobody knew who had final say on budget reallocation between services. Second, the directors had stopped giving each other honest feedback because previous attempts had been met with defensiveness. We facilitated structured feedback exchanges using a protocol we have refined over dozens of engagements, and the team drafted an operating agreement that defined decision rights for the twelve most common decision types.
At the six-week follow-up, the directors reported that they were resolving disagreements faster and that board meetings had shortened by an average of 40 minutes because fewer issues were being escalated. The trust re-ran its staff engagement survey nine months later and scores had recovered to within three points of the pre-crisis level.
A London-based fintech company grew from 35 to 110 employees in 18 months. Twelve of those employees were promoted into management roles for the first time. None of them had managed people before. The CEO noticed that several teams were struggling with basic management tasks: running effective one-to-ones, giving performance feedback, handling absence and underperformance.
We designed a six-month programme specifically for these twelve new managers. It combined group workshops (one full day per month) with individual coaching sessions (two per manager, spaced across the programme). The group workshops covered concrete skills: how to prepare for and run a one-to-one meeting, how to write a performance improvement plan, how to have a conversation about underperformance without it becoming adversarial.
Between workshops, each manager completed a practical assignment. One month it was "conduct a one-to-one with your most senior direct report using the framework we practised and bring your notes to the next session." Another month it was "identify one piece of feedback you have been avoiding giving, deliver it and write a paragraph about how it went."
At the end of the programme, the company ran a brief survey asking direct reports to rate their manager on five dimensions. Eleven of the twelve managers scored above the threshold the company had set for "effective." The twelfth scored just below and opted to continue with individual coaching for an additional three months, after which they also crossed the threshold.
If you are dealing with a leadership challenge that sounds like any of the situations described above, we would like to hear from you. The scoping call is free and takes 30 minutes.
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