Most leadership consulting sells you a framework built from opinion. Ours starts from 2.0 million leadership assessments — so when we help you define competencies, build an instrument, or read what your data says about your leaders, the answer is grounded in evidence rather than a model somebody invented in a workshop.
Build the model
We help organizations build custom leadership competency models aligned to their unique strategy and culture, combining research-based insights with a collaborative process to create, measure and implement competencies that drive targeted development and business impact.
Our research is direct about the design trade-off: a small set of competencies accounts for most of the difference between average and extraordinary leaders. A 30-competency model quietly asks leaders to be adequate everywhere, which produces competent and unremarkable. A short one asks them to be exceptional at a few things.
Measure the Model
Competencies must define excellence, be quantifiable, and offer a clear development path. Using decades of research and access to our global database, we build assessment tools that reliably and validly measure the competencies your organization has deemed critical — whether we helped create the model or you arrived with one.
Deliver development experiences
The Zenger Folkman Facilitator Certification process is an intensive training and feedback process that provides skilled facilitators with the knowledge and tools to confidently deliver standard or customized versions of all Zenger Folkman development experiences within their client organizations.
Coach leaders using 360-degree feedback
The Extraordinary Leader™ 360 Assessment Certification experience is designed to equip participants with a proven process and the necessary tools and skills to coach leaders using The Extraordinary Leader 360-degree Assessment.
Bring it to life
Focused on a specific capability — coaching, trust, inspirational leadership? Have a competency model or set of values that needs to become something leaders actually experience? We apply our proven development framework and feedback experiences to your organization’s specific need, combining research-based insight with a collaborative design process..
Read the data
Our data analysis offerings use a large global database to uncover insights about individual and organizational effectiveness — helping organizations identify strengths, target development, and measure impact over time. This is the service for the question “what does our leadership data actually tell us, and what should we do about it?”
See the whole organization
Combines data from multiple participants’ assessments into an overall view of leadership effectiveness. These reports highlight shared strengths, key development opportunities, and patterns across teams and the organization — turning hundreds of individual reports into one picture you can build a strategy on.
We deliver it
Our global cadre of accomplished facilitators, coaches and implementation specialists delivers our development experiences on your behalf — in person or live online, at whatever scale a rollout requires. The option when you want the program running now rather than after your team is certified.
▸Definition
Leadership consulting is expert partnership on the infrastructure behind leadership development — defining the competencies that matter, building valid instruments to measure them, interpreting what the resulting data says, and equipping an organization to run the work itself.
Our programs are built to work out of the box. But some organizations need something the catalog doesn’t cover: a competency model that reflects their strategy, an assessment built around a model they already have, an answer to what the last three years of leadership data actually mean, or the capability to deliver everything internally.
That’s what these services are. Same research foundation as every program we sell — applied to your specific situation rather than the general case.
What makes this different from generalist consulting: we don’t arrive with a blank page. Every engagement starts from a global database of 2M+ assessments and decades of published research into what actually differentiates effective leaders — so the model you end up with is validated against real outcome data, not just internally consistent.
ASSESSMENTS IN THE RESEARCH BASE
YEARS OF RESEARCH
ORGANIZATIONS
DATA POINT
Competencies must do three things: define excellence for your organization, be quantifiable, and give employees a clear development path to stated expectations. A model that fails any one of those is decoration. Our role is making sure yours does all three — and that you can prove it moved.
An existing competency model, three years of 360 data, a values statement nobody has operationalized. We begin by auditing what exists rather than proposing a rebuild — most organizations need less new than they expect.
Whatever we build gets validated against our global database. That's the difference between a model that's internally consistent and one that predicts actual leadership effectiveness.
A small number of competencies accounts for most of the gap between average and extraordinary. We'll push back on long models — asking leaders to be adequate at thirty things reliably produces adequate leaders.
Every competency needs a quantifiable instrument behind it and a benchmark to compare against, or you have language rather than a system.
Models change nothing until leaders encounter them as feedback and a plan.
Leadership consulting is expert partnership on the infrastructure behind leadership development: defining which competencies matter for your strategy, building valid instruments to measure them, interpreting what the resulting data says about your organization, and equipping your team to run the work internally. It differs from leadership training in what it produces — training develops leaders, consulting builds the system that develops them.
We don’t start from a blank page. Every engagement draws on a database of 2M+ leadership assessments and four decades of published research, so the model you end up with is validated against real outcome data rather than being merely internally coherent. The narrower focus is the point: we do leadership measurement and development, not org design or strategy.
No, and having one doesn’t rule anything out either. If you have no model, Leadership Competency Model Consulting builds one. If you have a model you believe in, Custom Assessments builds a valid instrument around it. If you have a model nobody uses, we’d usually start by asking whether it’s too long — that’s the most common reason models sit unused.
Fewer than most organizations expect. Our research consistently finds that a small set of competencies accounts for most of the difference between average and extraordinary leaders, and that leaders reach the top decile through three to five profound strengths rather than by being adequate across a long list. A 30-competency model implicitly asks for adequacy everywhere, which is exactly what produces unremarkable leadership.
Aggregate reporting combines data from many participants’ assessments into a single view of leadership effectiveness across your organization. Rather than hundreds of individual reports nobody can synthesize, you get shared strengths, the development opportunities that recur, and patterns across teams — the level of view you need to set a development strategy rather than run one person’s plan.
Yes — that’s what Certification Programs exist for. Led by a Zenger Folkman Master Trainer, Facilitator Certification equips skilled facilitators to deliver our development experiences internally, and 360 Assessment Certification prepares coaches to debrief Extraordinary Leader 360 results one-on-one. Both are available live online or in person, and most large clients move to internal delivery once a program is established.
A competency model, an instrument, an answer from data you already have, or the capability to run it all internally. A short conversation is usually enough for us to say which service fits — or that you don’t need one.
