Dr. Stephen Brown’s observation – “You are not a good leader until you have produced another leader who can produce another leader” – sits at the heart of how we think about leadership at Performance Catalyst. It’s a deceptively simple idea, but it points to something that many organisations can find difficult: building leadership capacity that doesn’t depend on any one person. That’s what our New and Aspiring Leader Developer Programme is designed to do.
Who the programme is for
The programme is aimed at two groups. The first is people who have recently moved into a management role and are finding their feet – those who are good at what they do but are still working out what it means to lead. The second is people who have been identified as future leaders within their organisation, and where there’s a deliberate intention to invest in developing them before they step up.
That said, we’d also push back gently on the idea that leadership sits only with those who hold a title. One of the programme’s underlying beliefs is that the best leaders think of themselves as developers of other leaders. If an organisation genuinely holds that view, then the programme has relevance well beyond any particular tier.
For those looking at senior leadership programmes, this one operates over eight modules, spaced roughly four to six weeks apart. That pacing is intentional. The goal is for participants to apply what they’ve explored before they return for the next conversation, rather than absorbing everything in one concentrated block and moving on.
The three phases: Clarity, Connection, Collective Intelligence
The programme is structured around three ideas, which build on each other progressively.
Clarity comes first. Before anything else, participants spend time getting honest about their own preferences, their default leadership style, and the assumptions they bring to the role. Insights Discovery profiling is central to this as a starting point for self-reflection. The question isn’t simply “what colour am I?” but rather “how does my particular way of seeing the world shape how I lead, and what does that mean for my team?”
The second phase focuses on Connection, between the leader and their team, and between the team and a shared sense of purpose. This is where some of the more practical work happens: building a leader-developer mindset, understanding what creates psychological safety, learning how to have difficult conversations well, and thinking carefully about what actually motivates different people. These are skills that participants practise and take back into real situations between sessions.
The third phase – Collective Intelligence – is probably the one that surprises people most. The argument here is that genuine leadership capacity isn’t located in one person; it’s distributed across a team that has learned to think and work together well. When that happens, the group becomes capable of things that no individual could achieve alone. The role of the leader, at this stage, is less about directing and more about enabling, creating the conditions for people to contribute their best thinking.
This is also where leadership development for executives often stalls in practice. Organisations invest in individual development but rarely create the conditions for that development to compound across a team. This programme addresses that directly.
What participants say
Chloe Saunders, Manager of Client Services at JH&P, described the sessions as “a safe space for us to confide with each other about challenges we are facing within our teams.” That quality, the sense that the group itself becomes a resource, tends to be one of the things participants value most.
An attendee from Dot Dot Dot Property described the coaching module as “invaluable,” noting that it “really opened my eyes to how coaching can facilitate answers to bigger questions for leaders.” That shift in perspective, from managing to coaching, is one of the real changes the programme tries to embed.
A note on how we work
At Performance Catalyst, we don’t deliver programmes in a formulaic way. What we offer is structured, but it’s also responsive, to the people in the room, to what’s happening in their organisations, and to where the conversation needs to go. As Emma Beal, Managing Director of WLWA, has described it: our work “flows and develops, it isn’t formulaic.”
Executive leadership coaching and structured group learning aren’t mutually exclusive approaches. This programme brings them together, combining the rigour of a defined curriculum with the kind of reflection and individual attention that makes the learning stick.
If you’re thinking about how to develop the leaders your organisation needs, not just for now, but for what comes next, we’d be glad to talk.
Find out more about the New and Aspiring Leader Developer Programme