Build the Strengths That Make Leaders Extraordinary
Research-backed development solutions that help leaders and individuals identify and build the strengths that create greater effectiveness, stronger teams, and measurable results.
Organizations
Assessments
30+
Years
45
Global Partners
150K+
Participants
20M
Data Points
One research-backed system — delivered as programs, employee and team development, and the 360 assessment underneath it all. Start anywhere.
Cohort-based experiences that turn assessment insight into habits — for new managers through senior leaders.
Strengths-based growth designed for individual contributors and emerging talent, not just people managers.
Move teams from functional to genuinely high-performing, with the same evidence base behind our leader work.
The most validated leadership 360 in the market. See exactly which behaviors separate your best leaders from the rest.
Three flagship experiences, one shared research base. Each starts with an assessment and ends with measurable behavior change.
Our flagship · 50+ countries
The program that defined strengths-based leadership. Leaders discover the few competencies that will move their effectiveness furthest — and build them intentionally.
Manager-as-coach · certifiable
Leadership is a conversation. This program gives managers a practical, repeatable coaching framework — and the skill to hold the conversations they’ve been avoiding.
Newest · non-manager track
Development shouldn’t start at promotion. Extraordinary You brings strengths-based development to individual contributors — closing the development gap before it costs you talent.
Most leadership training starts with what’s broken. Three decades of our data says that’s backwards.
When we analyzed over 2 million 360-degree assessments, the pattern was unambiguous: leaders who built a small number of strengths to a high level moved their effectiveness dramatically further than leaders who spent the same effort remediating weaknesses.
Fixing a flaw makes a leader less bad. Building a strength makes them extraordinary.
Read the research →
Gain in leadership effectiveness
Based on a study of over 2 million leadership assessments.
Whether you’re designing a program for 500 managers or growing as a leader yourself.
Design and defend a leadership strategy with aggregate reporting, benchmarking, and measurable ROI your executive team will accept.
Find out where you actually stand, then build the specific strengths that raise your effectiveness fastest.
Get certified to deliver Zenger Folkman assessments and programs at your own organization.
Get certified →
A sequence, not a catalog. Most clients start with assessment and expand from there.
Establish what extraordinary leadership looks like using a validated behavioral model.
Assess leaders against differentiating behaviors and understand their effectiveness and organizational impact.
Leverage leaders’ strengths to support organizational strategies, goals, and sustainable growth.
Embed development into everyday leadership activities through practical, ongoing development tools.
We didn’t adopt a leadership model. We derived one — from the largest strengths-based leadership dataset in the field.
Data points behind The Extraordinary Leader’s competency model — the basis for every program we deliver.
Differentiating competencies identified as the behaviors that separate top-decile leaders from average ones.
360-degree assessments completed, giving every client a benchmark no competitor can match.
From 300-person manufacturers to global enterprises — and the partners who deliver our work in 45 countries.
“Our manager effectiveness scores moved further in nine months than in the previous four years of training combined.”
VP Talent Development · Healthcare, 4,000 employees
“The 360 gave us language executives actually trusted. It stopped being an HR initiative and became a business one.”
Chief People Officer · Manufacturing, 900 employees
Research-backed articles, webinars, and podcasts for leaders who want evidence, not opinion.
A leadership development company helps organizations assess, build, and sustain leadership capability. At Zenger Folkman that means validated 360-degree assessments, cohort programs, coaching, and certification — sequenced so insight turns into measurable behavior change.
A 360 gathers confidential ratings from a leader’s manager, peers, and direct reports alongside a self-rating. We use it to pinpoint the few strengths that, built further, will raise a leader’s overall effectiveness the most.
Traditional training targets gaps. Our research across 2 million assessments found that elevating existing strengths produces significantly larger and more durable gains — so we build programs around what’s already working.
Most engagements run 3–9 months: assessment and debrief in the first weeks, skill-building over the following months, then sustainment tools that keep the work going indefinitely.
We re-administer the 360 to measure behavior change directly, and pair it with the engagement, retention, and performance metrics your organization already tracks.
Schedule a call to design a program with our team or continue exploring our solutions.
