Sapna Welsh, Founding partner What first looks like an alignment problem may actually be a decision-making problem. Rapid growth may reveal gaps in roles, structure, talent or organizational capabilities that leadership training alone can’t solve. Burnout may have less to do with individual resilience than with how leaders, teams and systems work together. And a succession challenge may reveal a broader need to build the capabilities required for the future.
The challenge is not simply developing people. It is understanding what may be limiting performance or what could unlock the next level of performance and building the capabilities needed to move forward.
For nearly 20 years, Leverage Leadership has helped organizations do exactly that. As a leadership and organizational performance firm, it examines what has already been tried, what may be getting in the way and what the organization realistically has the capacity to take on. Data, assessments, stakeholder perspectives and practitioner experience then help shape the right response.
The firm’s work spans middle-market companies, healthcare organizations and public-sector institutions, with a focus on turning development into measurable improvements in how leaders, teams and organizations perform.
“Development isn’t the end goal. Better performance is,” says Sapna Welsh, founding partner.
Leverage Leadership doesn’t start with a program, it starts with the performance challenge or opportunity and works backward from there - examining what has already been tried, what may be getting in the way or could further enable performance, and what the organization realistically has the capacity to take on. The result is what the firm proudly calls a “one size fits one” approach: the right solution for that organization, its culture and its goals.
Start With What’s Getting in the Way
That approach carries into individual leadership work. Rather than requiring every client to use the same assessment, Leverage Leadership draws from more than 20 tools, selecting what best fits the leader and the challenge. Its Hi-Impact 360 process, for example, goes beyond a standard survey by gathering deeper feedback from key stakeholders and translating it into actionable development priorities.
For leadership teams, stakeholder perspectives and team diagnostics help distinguish the headwinds holding performance back from the tailwinds that could create opportunities. Just as importantly, Leverage Leadership considers what the client has already tried and whether it has the time, resources and capacity to act on it.
The same philosophy shapes its client relationships. Leverage Leadership brings senior-level expertise from the start, pairing sound counsel with responsiveness, transparency and accountability. Quarterly scorecards and check-ins keep progress visible, while agreed-upon KPIs make both sides accountable for the results.
That philosophy has helped turn individual engagements into long-term partnerships. One client had a recurring leadership need but lacked the capacity and funding to act on it. Rather than push a solution, Leverage Leadership continued to revisit the need as circumstances changed. When the organization was ready, the relationship grew into an enterprise leadership university.
Connecting Leaders, Teams, Culture & Talent
Leverage Leadership organizes its work around three interconnected solution areas: Develop Leaders, Transform Teams, and Activate Culture & Talent. While each addresses a distinct need, the greatest performance challenges often cross the boundaries between them.
Develop Leaders builds the confidence and capabilities leaders need to lead at the next level. That may mean executive coaching, targeted development or support through a critical transition. The intervention depends on what the leader and organization need to achieve.
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Development isn’t the end goal. Better performance is.
Transform Teams turns individual talent into collective performance. The firm works with teams to identify sources of friction, focus on the behaviors that matter most, work through real business challenges and measure progress. That helps them strengthen alignment, decision-making, accountability and collaboration rather than treating team development as an exercise separate from the work itself.
Activate Culture & Talent connects people and talent processes with organizational strategy to strengthen organizational performance. That includes succession planning, leadership programs, culture and performance work, or broader organizational initiatives, with the objective of ensuring the organization has the capabilities it needs to execute its strategy.
The three solution areas are intentionally interconnected because organizational challenges rarely fit neatly into one box. Leverage Leadership brings together the right capabilities based on what will move performance—whether that means developing an individual leader, transforming how a team works together, strengthening organizational capabilities, or connecting all three. It’s the firm’s “one size fits one” philosophy in practice: the right solution, at the right size, speed and time for each organization.
Results You Can See
Measurement connects development with performance, beginning before the development work does. Once the business need is clear, Leverage Leadership defines what success should look like, identifies the relevant KPIs and establishes how progress will be evaluated. The goal is not simply to measure participation or satisfaction, but to determine whether the investment created meaningful change.
That discipline applies across the firm’s work. In succession and talent development, for example, Leverage Leadership maps existing development programs against the capabilities different roles and career transitions require. The process reveals ‘white spaces’ where development is missing, overlapping or no longer aligned to what the organization will need in the future and clarifies what each intervention is meant to accomplish.
With team development, the same principle becomes even more measurable. Through Meta Team, for which Leverage Leadership serves as the exclusive U.S. Accreditation Hub, team-level diagnostics and global benchmarks identify the areas most affecting performance, target them through focused coaching and measure the change. Development is then targeted to those priorities, and the team is remeasured to determine what changed. The process is simple in principle: diagnose, target, change and remeasure
“In one healthcare leadership team, we improved agility by more than 25 percent,” says Bob Welsh, Partner. “And in a public-sector field team, we moved performance from the 73rd to the 81st percentile compared with peer teams.”
The combination of data and practitioner expertise is critical. Data helps identify where to focus and whether progress occurred. Data identifies priorities and measures progress. Experienced practitioners turn those insights into changes in behavior and performance. Together, they allow Leverage Leadership to move beyond delivering development to showing whether it made a difference.That philosophy is also shaping how the firm explores emerging technology. The firm’s AI Coaching Environment (AICE) gives participants realistic scenarios in which to practice skills and receive feedback against defined criteria. It does not replace human coaching. Rather, it gives organizations another way to reinforce learning through safe opportunities to practice, reinforce and apply new skills.
Leverage Leadership believes the future of development is not simply providing more development. Leaders already have more information than ever. The greater challenge is turning that information into judgment, behavior and sustained performance. For Leverage Leadership, this represents the future of the field. Leaders already have access to more information than ever; the challenge is no longer simply providing more development. It is helping people turn insight into judgment, behavior and sustained performance. Technology can create new ways to practice and reinforce skills, but practitioner expertise remains essential to translating insight into meaningful change. Development is ultimately a means to an end. The goal is building the capabilities leaders, teams and organizations need to perform.
