Quality
Leadership and Transition
“When leading became lonely”
“When everyone wants to be a leader and no one wants to be the boss”
Whoever leads is often alone. There are decisions that cannot be shared, doubts that have no room in the official discourse. That solitude comes with the role; the trouble begins when it settles in without a counterweight and starts to corrode the quality of decisions.
Our work with leaders is rarely about "leadership techniques". It is about giving them back a space where they can think out loud, test hypotheses without political consequence, and gain clarity about what the team needs from them, which is not always what they themselves thought.
We don't work for the myth of the hero-leader, forever visionary, forever inspiring. Our ambition is rarer: good-enough bosses, who coordinate, delegate, ask, listen, decide and learn. Those are the ones people remember.
To lead is to know how to ask the questions no one was asking.
Level 1
Provoke
A session for leaders on what it means to lead through conversation. Less training, more mirror. What do the conversations you have, and the ones you avoid, say about the leader you are?
Porto Business School, Employee Experience, desde 2022
A talk on Network Leadership at Employee Experience, Porto Business School's open programme, edition after edition since 2022. Each participant invites colleagues from their company and the room doubles. The provocation: to lead is to create the context where people grow, and to facilitate the conversations a team needs to have.
Level 2
Develop
Individual support, through coaching, mentoring or a Personal Learning Journey, or in a peer group. Sustained work on how the leader converses, listens, decides, delegates and stands by what they decided.
NTT Data · Miniclip, 2025-2026
Two sets of individual processes, for two different clients, both meant to equip people with leadership responsibilities: in one case, preparing those identified as having the potential for the next level of responsibility; in the other, a company in fast growth and change wanted to offer development "accelerators" to its essential leaders.
Level 3
Transform
When the person leading changes — through promotion, departure or reorganisation. Support that includes the leader, the team and the system, because a change of leader alters a great deal around them.
Sonae Capital, LEAP, 2021-2023
A programme for 200 people across five companies and four geographies, designed from fifteen interviews, two focus groups and a co-design workshop that started with "the worst leadership programme in the world". Halfway through, a strategic shift on the client's side forced a full rethink: it could have been the death of the programme; it turned out to be a new life. What remained was a common language of leadership, shared by five companies in two languages.