Emerging Leaders

Lead yourself. Lead without authority. Get ready to lead others.

For high-potential specialists, individual contributors and project leads preparing for their first leadership role.

Your most promising people have been valued for their own output: the expertise, the quality, being the one with the answers. Leading means being valued for other people's output, influencing peers and other functions without authority, and deciding with incomplete information. Many stall at this point, not for lack of ability, but because the habits that made them successful now get in the way.

Start a conversation

Signs your organisation needs this

Strong performers are promoted and then struggle, or hesitate to step up.
High-potential people leading projects still do the hardest parts themselves.
Good ideas are raised in private, not where decisions are made.
Project leads struggle to get peers and other functions to deliver.
Promising people leave because they were promoted without preparation, or not developed at all.

What changes

From doing to leading: a clear view of what to keep, what to hand over and what to start.
Speaking up in senior forums, clearly and without needing to prove anything.
Influence without authority across peers and functions.
Feedback handled well, and first difficult conversations held early.
Decisions under uncertainty: less overthinking and perfectionism, more decisions made and learned from.
Confidence built on evidence from a real stretch assignment, and a working relationship with a senior sponsor.

Six modules

Clear head as a leader
From doing to leading
Speaking up and influence
Influence without authority
Feedback and first difficult conversations
Decisions under uncertainty

What makes it different

A real stretch assignment. Each participant carries one leadership challenge through the programme: a project to lead, a cross-functional problem to solve, or a change to drive. It is the live issue they work on each week.

A senior sponsor. Each participant is paired with a senior leader, who meets them before the Immersion and midway through, and joins the final review where each person presents what they predicted, what happened and what they learned.

How it works

Introduction · 2 hours. "From doing to leading". Often the launch of your high-potential programme, with sponsors joining the last half-hour.

Immersion · 2 days, in person, 12 to 20 participants. All six modules, and each participant shapes their stretch assignment.

Integration · 6 weeks. A weekly 90-minute clinic on the stretch assignments, ending with the sponsor review. Six weeks is the default here, because a stretch assignment needs time to show results.

Example: the project lead who did everything

A composite illustration.

Tomás, a senior engineer at a renewable-energy company in Madrid, was asked to lead five engineers, two of them former peers. Six weeks in, he had written most of the design himself, two milestones had slipped and he was working late three nights a week.

His Wise Walk surfaced the belief underneath: "My value is being the one who solves it." His brief said otherwise: delivery, and the team's growth. He handed one component each to his two most experienced engineers, with clear outcomes, and started asking before answering in stand-ups.

Four weeks later, one component arrived late and better than his own design would have been; the other arrived on time. His sponsor noticed that the team now debated the design, which it never had before.

Safeguards

Being nominated is never presented as a verdict on anyone's worth. Nothing participants write or say in sessions is shared with sponsors or HR. The final review is a learning conversation, not a promotion panel.

Start a conversation