Leadership
Leadership work for executives, teams and technical leaders.
Leaders are made by daily practice. Here's how we support it.
What we believe
We believe leadership is the multiplier on everything else an organisation does. Strategy, systems and plans all pass through people, and people follow leaders.
Executive coaching
Confidential coaching for executives and senior leaders.
One-on-one coaching for leaders facing a new mandate, a hard transition or a change that has to work.
Who it suits: Chief executives, executives and senior leaders. Founders stepping back from the day to day. Technical leaders moving into broader roles.
What you get
- A coach who has led under pressure and will tell you what others won't.
- Sessions built around the problems on your desk this month, with a development plan that follows from them.
- A written summary after each session, with the actions agreed.
- The option to start with a Vitr 360, so the coaching works from how your people see you.
How it works
Most engagements start with a block of at least six sessions, in person or online. Some leaders keep a coach for years, in the same way they keep an adviser. Everything discussed stays between you and your coach.
Leadership workshops
Workshops built around your leadership team's real problems.
Facilitated sessions for leadership teams and rising leaders, designed around the decisions in front of you.
Who it suits: Executive teams, leadership teams and cohorts of emerging leaders.
What you get
- One or two days, in person where possible. Online works when it has to.
- A session built around your context, your people and the decisions in front of you.
- You leave with decisions made and habits to practise.
How it works
Tell us what you're facing and we'll shape the day around it. The workshops below are the starting points we build from.
Workshops
Workshops for leaders
Practical sessions that build the reps leaders need. Delivered live, built around your context.
Technical Leadership Course
A leadership course for engineers, scientists and technical specialists.
For technical experts moving from solving problems themselves to leading the people who do.
Who it suits: CTOs and heads of engineering in start-ups, scale-ups and growth companies. Senior engineers, scientists and technical leads stepping into leadership. Deep-tech leaders in hardware, robotics, energy, biotech and advanced manufacturing. New managers of technical teams.
What it covers
- Leadership foundations: the shift from technical expert to leader, and the styles that fit different stages of a business.
- Self-management systems: organising yourself before you organise others.
- Technical team leadership: leading, coordinating and prioritising technical teams and projects.
- Developing new leaders: mentoring, sponsoring and growing leadership in others.
- Strategy: connecting technical work to business and product strategy.
- Influence: stakeholders, politics, coalitions and telling the story well.
- People and culture: fair, scalable systems for hiring, feedback, growth and promotion.
How it works
Two formats. A two-day intensive, with a Vitr 360 snapshot and a role-time audit beforehand, guest CEOs and CTOs in the room, and four weeks of one-on-one coaching afterwards. Or an eight-week online cohort with a weekly session and weekly coaching. Cohorts of up to eight. Developed for Defence Trailblazer for technical leaders in defence industry start-ups.
Executive hiring and board fit
Structured support for executive and board appointments.
A mis-hire at the top costs multiples of the salary, and the damage to the team is usually worse. We help you test the fit before you commit.
Who it suits: Owners, boards and executive teams making a senior appointment, and growing companies hiring their first executives.
What you get
Our CLEAR hiring framework, adapted from Topgrading for Australian businesses, run alongside you:
- Clarify the role. Define success in measurable outcomes, competencies and values, before anyone is interviewed.
- Learn their history. A structured career history form that surfaces patterns no CV will.
- Examine via interviews. A structured, chronological interview with two interviewers.
- Audit via references. The candidate arranges direct calls with their former managers, rather than nominated referees.
- Reach a decision. A debrief against the scorecard, on evidence rather than impressions.
How it works
For boards, we start with a skills matrix: the skills, experience and attributes the board needs for the strategy ahead, mapped against the directors it has, so the gaps are clear before anyone is approached. Our whitepaper Hire like it matters explains the framework, and The gun hire shows what happens when a company skips it.
Vitr 360
See yourself the way your people do.
A 360-degree leadership diagnostic built from a review of the research on effective leadership, and debriefed one-on-one by a coach who has led.
Who it suits: Any leader who wants an honest picture, on its own or as the start of coaching. Leadership teams who want to see their shared strengths and gaps.
What you get
- Ratings on 32 leadership behaviours across eight domains, grouped in four quadrants: getting things done, doing things, enabling yourself and enabling others.
- Feedback from your manager, peers, direct reports and other stakeholders, alongside your own self-rating.
- A confidential report showing each rater group separately, the largest gaps between how you see yourself and how others see you, and written comments grouped so no individual can be identified.
- A one-on-one debrief with a Vitr coach, and development priorities you can act on straight away.
How it works
You nominate your raters, they complete a short survey, and your report and debrief follow. Everything is confidential to you.
Who we've worked with
Field note
The gun hire
The revenue promise was real. So was the risk. A field note on the hardest kind of hiring call, and what rebuilding looks like when it goes the wrong way.
4 min
Whitepaper
The average mis-hire costs 15 times their salary. Here's the fix.
The Vitr CLEAR Hiring Framework: Topgrading distilled for Australian SMEs. Roughly 80% of the benefit at 25% of the time (our estimate).
19 pages
Leadership is a daily renewable contract.
A title gives you authority. Leadership shows in how you decide, how you communicate and how you carry your people through change, and it develops through repetition, feedback and small wins that compound. That is why everything we do is built around the work your leaders are doing now.
Further reading
Guide
The leader's role in change: what sponsors and managers need to do
What executive sponsors, leadership teams and middle managers each need to do to make a change work, and the mistakes that stall it.
9 min
Guide
Adaptive leadership: a practical guide for problems with no easy answer
What adaptive leadership is, how to tell technical problems from adaptive challenges, and how to put Heifetz's principles into practice.
7 min