Identifying high-potential leaders in a global services company
A global professional services company faced a talent visibility problem. Rapid expansion had created layers of mid-level management, and leadership potential was unevenly distributed across regions. HR wanted an objective, experiential process to identify who was ready to lead larger teams and who would benefit from targeted development. The solution had to build on their psychometric profiling assessments, providing a more practical, hands-on insight into their actual behaviours.
Audience: Mid-level managers
The project
We delivered a Leadership Impact Event, a one-day team-based business simulation comprising two rounds and set in a competitive marketplace. In round one participants were tasked to lead through ambiguity, constructing a plan for initial growth. In round two, as an established but evolving business, participants were confronted with shifting client demands, strategic trade-offs and operational resourcing constraints.
Simulation facilitators, who doubled up as observational assessors and coaches used a behavioural framework aligned to the company’s global leadership model, tracking strategic focus, collaboration, decision-making, and influence under realistic pressure. Each participant received real-time feedback after each round as to how effectively they worked as a leadership team from a leadership and commercial perspective, as well as a more thorough debrief as a follow-up aligned to their psychometric profiles.
The solution
We partnered with the firm to design a Partner Business Simulation – a flexible digital simulation that could be run in 2-hour chunks across a period of time, so as to minimise time away from the workplace. The simulation offered an immersive experience that replicated the pressures and dynamics of senior leadership within a professional services environment. Participants were placed in an evolving realistic partner scenario – managing and resourcing a new client assignment, managing a potential team conflict, handling an unexpected change in project scope, and making decisions that affected firm profitability and reputation. All scenarios were tailored to reflect genuine organisational context and performance measures, and the digital simulation included an intuitive performance dashboard that collated all data to be utilised as part of the assessment process.
The session had to be delivered by internal HR professionals, so we provided comprehensive Train-the-Trainer sessions and trainer notes to enable the effective delivery of the simulation as well as guidance around observing key leadership behaviours such as influencing, negotiating, delegation, and strategic thinking, as well as structured feedback and guided reflection around leadership identity, emotional intelligence, and commercial awareness.
The impact
The assessment surfaced a clear group of high-potential leaders, while also revealing development themes across regions. HR used the insights to refine their leadership pipeline and succession planning process. The assessment identified a number of high-potential leaders across six regions who consistently demonstrated composure, critical thinking, and the ability to galvanise teams under stress. These individuals were fast-tracked into a new Emerging Leaders Acceleration Programme. At a strategic level, the behavioural insights revealed previously unseen patterns, for instance, strong decision-making but lower resilience in certain regional teams. HR used these insights to refine its global leadership competency framework, ensuring it reflected both corporate expectations and cultural realities.
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