Case studies
Most of the leaders we work with were not trained for the level they are operating at. They built the company, were promoted into it, or inherited it. Our job is to help them grow into the role and stay in it.
The four case studies below are stories of leaders who arrived at a level they were not yet equipped for, and who stayed in the seat after the work. Names and details have been changed to protect client confidentiality. We can share more during a conversation.
1. Leading a different company than the one they built
A B2B tech scale-up, 50 to 200 people over 18 months.
A leadership team that had built the company on its technology suddenly had to lead a different company after investment, making product decisions together that none of them had made before. Two years later, they were running their own operating cadence and the way of working had spread across the company.
They asked for a familiar kind of transformation.
Introduce agile ways of working, turn engineering teams into product teams. A common request, a recognizable shape, the kind of thing a board hands to a transformation hire and expects to be executed.
The harder work was at the top, in how they led together.
The leadership team had built the company on shared confidence in the technology, and the investment now asked them to lead a different company. They needed to make decisions together about which products to build, in what order, for which customers, and how to know when something was working.
None of them had made those decisions before at this level, and they did not yet have a shared way of having the conversation. The managing director, hired by the investors and new to the company, was finding his footing at the same moment the rest of the board was finding theirs.
We did what was asked, and then we did what mattered.
We started with what they had asked for. Engineering teams were reorganized as product teams, new ways of working were introduced, the surface change happened. It became clear early that the harder work was at the top, because the team-level transformation could only go as far as the decisions the board was making. So the work expanded.
Alongside the team transformation, we worked with the management board on how they led together, helping them establish an operating cadence for the decisions that had been drifting, and coaching them individually as they took on responsibilities they had not owned before.
They kept what was built and ran it themselves.
By the end of the first year, three things had shifted in ways the board could see and run without us.
They had an operating model with a regular cadence for the decisions that mattered, and they were making product calls in their own meetings rather than hoping the answer would emerge from the engineering work.
The way of working had spread beyond engineering, with the functional teams across finance, sales, and HR running their work in similar ways and in their own variants, so that the transformation had become the company’s way of operating rather than a program implemented on top of it.
The leadership team that had built the technology was now leading a product company, not in title but in capability.
“We thought we were learning a new way of running teams. We learned how to lead a different company than the one we had built.”
— Managing Director
The managing director stayed in the seat, the board kept their cadence, and the structures held without us in the room. The work had been about how the leaders themselves operated and not about a process they were running, which was why it stayed.
2. Growing the leaders the company needed, from the people it already had
A software services agency, 30 to 300 people over more than a decade.
A software services agency growing from 30 to 300 had to build a leadership layer from inside, with engineers stepping into roles none of them had held before. The agency now runs at ten times its original size, led by people it grew itself.
There was no leadership team, only engineers who were good at their work.
The founder was a salesman who had never led delivery, and the first hire ran projects and held the operational weight of everything that shipped. The teams below them were engineers, hired because they were the best at their craft. As the company began to grow, it became clear that someone among them would need to lead the next layer, and none of them had ever done that. There was no model in the company to follow.
Every step of growth exposed a leadership the company had to invent.
The pattern repeated as the company scaled. A team grew past the size one engineer could hold, a new department had to form because the work no longer fit in one place, a senior engineer was asked to be the head of something with responsibilities none of their previous job had prepared them for.
Each time, the person promoted had been excellent at the work and was now being asked to lead people doing the work, which is a different job. The company needed roles, responsibilities, and decision rights that had not existed the day before, and it needed the people stepping into them to grow into the role faster than the growth would wait.
We built leadership from the inside, alongside the people stepping into it.
The work was continuous rather than a program. As each new leader took the seat, we worked with them on the basics they had not been taught, the conversations they had not had to have, and the decisions they had not had to make alone.
We coached them as they tested their authority, mentored them through the moments they wanted to take a problem back rather than help a team work through it, and helped them learn to let decisions go to the people they led rather than holding them out of habit.
We built the structures as the company needed them, naming roles and responsibilities only when the actual work demanded it, and we kept what we built only as long as it served. Over time the agency developed its own internal logic for how leaders were grown, by the leaders who had been grown that way.
“I was the best engineer on the team, and then I was asked to lead a team of engineers, which is a completely different job that nobody had taught me. The company taught me as I learned.”
— Department head
Today the company runs at ten times its original size, led by people it grew itself.
Three hundred people, multiple departments, a leadership layer staffed almost entirely from within, and a way of growing the next leaders that has outlasted any single intervention.
Not every promotion landed cleanly, and the work of growing leaders is never finished, but the company has built the muscle to do it. The structures held because they were invented to fit the actual work, the leaders held because they had been built rather than hired, and the agency continues to grow leaders the way it grew the first ones.
3. An app was the request, and the company underneath it was the work
A family-owned hospitality and food-service business, 200 people, six months.
A second-generation CEO came in asking for an app and left with a vision for the company his father had built and that he now had to grow. Six months later, the management board was making strategic decisions on its own, and the company was beginning to look like the one he intended rather than the one he had inherited.
He asked us to build him an app.
A second-generation CEO, recently in the seat after inheriting the company from his father, came to us with a clear request. Build an application for ordering restaurant ingredients and supplies, modernize the customer experience, and bring the company onto the right side of the digital shift his sector was moving through. A reasonable ask, a defined scope, a six-month build.
He had inherited a company shaped for his father’s era, not his.
The product work was real and necessary, and as we got into the details a different conversation surfaced. The company his father had built had served its market well for a long time, and the structure, the processes, and the way decisions were made had been shaped by that market and by the founder’s instincts.
The market had moved, and so had the company, and so had the new CEO’s sense of what it could become. He had not yet articulated what that future was, his management board had not been asked to help him think it through, and the leadership team in front of him was the team his father had assembled, not the team for the company he wanted to lead.
The app was a real need, and it was also the visible part of a larger question he had been carrying.
We built the app, and we built the conversation he had not yet had.
Alongside the product work, which proceeded on its original track, we opened a second stream. We worked with the CEO on a mid-term vision for the company, several concrete ideas for where it could expand, and a clear-eyed view of where the leadership gaps were against the version of the company he wanted to build.
We brought the management board into the conversation rather than handing them the answer, so that the vision was not the new CEO’s privately, but the board’s collectively. He learned, in those six months, that he could lead a conversation his father had not led, and that the team around him could rise to it.
“I came in asking for an app. I left with the vision for the company my father had built and that I now had to grow.”
— CEO
Six months later, the company had a new way of taking orders and a new way of seeing itself.
The order acceptance process was redesigned and the new application was in use.
More importantly, the management board had absorbed the elements of the vision into their business plans, so that the strategic direction was not a document on the CEO’s wall but a set of choices the company was actually making.
The CEO stayed in the seat, leading a company that was beginning to look more like the one he intended and less like the one he had inherited, and the leadership gaps that had been named were ones he could now choose to close on his own terms.
4. New ways of working, in a place that does not allow many mistakes
A pharmaceutical business, departmental scope of around 300 people, two years.
A regulated pharmaceutical environment needed new ways of working, and the leaders being asked to adopt them were also leading teams for the first time in their careers. Two years on, agile principles run through the production process in the company’s own version, and the leaders who learned to lead are still leading.
They asked us to bring agile to their teams.
The chief digital transformation officer was new to the company and had been brought in to modernize how the work got done. He had seen agile work before, and he wanted to introduce it here. The request was clear: bring it in, train the teams, make it stick.
He had executive backing, a budget, and the authority to make changes. What he needed was someone who had done this kind of work in this kind of environment before.
A regulated industry does not bend, and the leaders inside it had not led teams before.
Two things made the work harder than the request suggested. The first was the obvious one: pharmaceutical work runs on regulatory rails that are not negotiable, and any new way of working had to fit inside the constraints those rails imposed. Some of the standard agile playbook would survive contact with the regulation, and some of it would not.
The second was less visible but more decisive. Inside the department, a number of newly appointed leaders had been promoted because they were strong in their craft, and were now being asked to lead teams in a way they had never led before. Asking them to also adopt a new operating model risked layering one unfamiliar challenge on top of another.
The CDTO was clear on the destination. The path through it had to be built carefully.
We adapted the work to what the regulation allowed and to what the leaders were ready for.
Rather than impose a uniform model, we worked with the CDTO and the department to find where agile principles served the work and where the regulated process needed to remain as it was. We built an internal structure for process improvement that the company’s own people would run, so that the change had a home after we left.
Alongside that, we coached the newly appointed leaders individually as they learned to delegate decisions they had been making alone, to develop teams rather than direct individuals, and to lead in a way none of their previous work had asked of them.
Where one part of the work lifted, the other did too, and over the two years the people inside the department began to recognize themselves as leaders rather than as engineers who had been promoted.
“I had been promoted because I was the best at the work, and now I was being asked to be the best at something else, in a company that does not allow many mistakes. They taught me how to be both.”
— Department leader
Two years on, the new ways of working hold, and so do the leaders who learned them.
By the end of the engagement, agile principles ran through the production process where they belonged, in the company’s own version rather than a textbook implementation. Portfolio management became more visible across the department, with decisions made and tracked in ways the leadership could see and act on.
The newly appointed leaders were leading, not perfectly, but durably, with the skills to keep growing into the role. The CDTO stayed in the seat and continued the work after the engagement closed. The company kept the structure for process improvement and the rhythms it had built, because they had been built to fit the company rather than imposed on it.
