Leadership Development
LEAD: the leadership development programme that turns high potential into measurable performance.
Most organisations identify their high-potential talent. Wharton Global accelerates that talent, with measurable outcomes at every stage.
A structured leadership development programme designed and delivered by chartered occupational psychologists, available to organisations globally.
LEAD is Wharton Global's flagship leadership development programme. A 12-month programme grounded in occupational psychology, built around the real challenges your organisation is navigating right now, and measured against outcomes you can see and report.
01
The problem
Often organisations identify their high-potential talent, invest in a development programme, and find at the end of it that the people are slightly more self-aware but not measurably more capable. The programme was well designed, the facilitators were engaging, the feedback was positive, yet six months later, behaviours remain largely unchanged.
The cause is almost always the same, participants learned the frameworks and attended the workshops, but what they did not receive was a structured process for translating learning into different behaviours in the specific context of their next role, their team, and their organisation.
02
What Wharton Global does differently
Anybody can run a leadership development programme. What sets LEAD apart is the content built on the Wharton Global Five Factor Leadership Model, developed over more than 30 years of working with real organisations, it identifies the most effective leadership behaviours to ensure your people become better leaders. The material is current rather than off the shelf, refreshed continually to cover today's issues: AI, DEI, mental health, geopolitical turbulence, and resilience. It's delivered by chartered occupational psychologists, not generic facilitators, and blends group work, individual coaching, and peer learning, with action learning sets built in to keep development active rather than theoretical. Our psychologists are multi-sector experts, so the programme is adapted to each organisation's specific context rather than delivered as a standard template.
03
Our approach
01
Individual diagnostic
The programme opens with a rigorous psychometric and behavioural assessment for each participant: validated instruments selected for the population and context, integrated with 360 degree behavioural data and observed performance to build a picture no single tool could produce alone.
02
Group workshops and peer learning
Group workshops are where the teaching happens. Peer learning is where it's tested, participants come back together to share how they've applied what they've learned, trading real experience rather than theory. Both draw on the strategic and operational challenges the organisation is working through right now.
03
Individual coaching
Runs alongside the group programme throughout. Each participant works one-to-one with a chartered occupational psychologist, who holds that relationship for the full 12 months. This is bespoke, providing a confidential, safe space to discuss personal needs and accelerate development at an individual level.
04
Progress measurement
Tracked formally against agreed individual and organisational objectives. The organisation always has a clear account of what LEAD was designed to produce, and most importantly whether it produced it.
04
What it produces
Nearly three-quarters
of LEAD participants progress to next-level roles within their organisation
7x
average return on the coaching investment within LEAD
More than 30%
average improvement in retention of LEAD participants
Wharton Global has delivered the LEAD programme for a UK university for five consecutive years. Running up to eight workshops per cohort alongside individual coaching sessions, the programme works across leadership resilience, adaptive team leadership, change through collaboration, psychological safety, inclusion, mental health, and the effective integration of AI into leadership practice. Each year the programme is reconfigured around the organisational context the cohort is actually operating in, so the content stays current and the development stays relevant. The LEAD programme has become the university's primary succession infrastructure. Over five years, 90% of first-to-second-line leadership appointments have been made from the programme cohorts, and delegate satisfaction has reached 98%. The university no longer recruits externally to fill those roles. It develops people into them, with a pipeline it can see, measure, and trust.
05
Who this is for
HR Directors, Chief People Officers and organisational development professionals who need to show a measurable return on a major development investment, especially those who have previously commissioned programmes that could not demonstrate impact.
Organisations with a defined cohort of high-potential individuals whose development is a strategic priority.
PE-backed and high-growth businesses where the pace of value creation is constrained by the pace at which the leadership layer can develop.
06
Questions we get asked
07
Investment case
The cost of LEAD is significantly less than the cost of one avoidable departure from the cohort it develops, and considerably less than the cost of external recruitment to replace the pipeline it builds.
Talk to us about LEADClient feedback
“I have worked with Wharton Global over many years and the relationship has lasted for good reasons. They develop people brilliantly, the work is always constructive and always grounded in your desired outcomes. Few partners have earned this kind of continuity from me.”
Chief Operating Officer, UK Higher Education sector
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