The Safe2Great portfolio runs across two distinct shapes of work, all built on Growth Mindset and Psychological Safety. Transformation programmes change how leaders, teams and whole organisations actually operate over months and years — executive team coaching, leadership pipeline development, team intervention sprints, and enterprise culture change. Skills training programmes develop the specific conversations that make the transformation stick — confronting difficult issues, recognising growth, and influencing across authority lines. Both shapes sit on the same underlying architecture: Awareness, Acceptance, Action, Acceleration. What varies is the unit of analysis and the tempo.
Scan the left column if you're considering a full transformation. Scan the right column if the challenge is about specific conversations — feedback, recognition, influence — that aren't happening the way they need to.
Most leadership-development programmes get sequenced backwards. They open with individual 360s, move to personal development plans, and then discover that the environment the leader returns to rewards exactly the behaviours the programme was meant to change. We sequence differently — and we do it because the evidence says it works.
In senior teams where psychological safety is already low, opening with personal 360 data triggers the defensive self-protection we are trying to cure. Individual feedback gets filtered through Controlling, Critical or Pleasing patterns before it ever lands. The conversation becomes about the data, not about the behaviour the data describes.
The Safe2Great sequencing starts with the collective picture — the Culture for Growth survey on the unit the team leads. The question shifts from "what is wrong with you" to "what is it like to work here." That is a question even defensive leaders can engage with. The patterns emerge from the collective data, which makes them harder to dismiss and easier to discuss without anyone feeling personally indicted. Once that collective picture is clear, the individual GML360 data lands in a different emotional register — because the team is already looking at the system together.
The same principle applies between the relational growth behaviours (Lift Others Up, Team Up, Go High) and the challenge behaviours (Explore, Aim High, Transform). Safety comes first — relational, built through the work on recognition and containment. Challenge comes once trust has accumulated. Challenge without safety is aggression. Safety without challenge is comfort. High performance requires both — but safety must come first.
This is not abstract. It shapes which programme we recommend, in what order, and why. See the Danfoss case study for what happens when the sequencing is right.
Each programme is its own commitment of time, people, and executive attention. We've written what each one is good for, what we don't try to do with it, and — where we have it — what the measured evidence shows. These are the shapes of work where behavioural change is the deliverable, not a workshop outcome.
For CEOs, country managers, regional presidents and divisional MDs taking a top team through real strategic pressure — expansion, restructuring, post-acquisition integration, generational handover, or a strategic pivot.
This is our most common starting point, and the shape where our evidence base is strongest. A senior leadership team is the most visible cultural signal in any organisation. How they disagree, how they decide, how they respond when something goes wrong — that's the culture the rest of the organisation will imitate or resist. Everything else cascades from there.
The work is diagnostic before it is developmental. We start with the GML360 for each team member — not so we can rank them, but so the team can see, on the same page, where each leader actually sits on the growth and protective dimensions. We pair this with a Culture for Growth survey of the business unit they lead, so the team is looking at both the signal they send and the signal their organisation receives. In most cases these two data sets are uncomfortably different, and that gap is where the work begins.
From there we move through three structured team workshops spread across the engagement, between four and eight individual executive coaching sessions per leader, and targeted work on the critical situations where the team's behaviour most visibly helps or blocks the strategy. By the end of the engagement we retest — both at the individual level and at the culture level — so the team can see what has actually shifted.
Roughly a day of contact time per leader per month, plus the coaching. Less than most executive education. More than a one-off offsite.
For organisations building consistent leadership standards across levels, typically following exec team work or running parallel to it. Also works as a standalone for HR functions investing in their leadership pipeline after a strategy reset.
Most leadership development programmes are built for a single level. You get a "senior leader programme" or a "high-potential programme" and the levels never talk to each other. The result is leaders trained in different languages, who can't have the same conversation about behaviour when it matters.
Leadership Pipeline Development runs one cohort through one framework, which means when a senior leader and a mid-level leader are in the same room dealing with the same pressure, they can name what's happening between them using the same vocabulary. That's the product. Everything else is scaffolding.
The programme runs over 9 months. Each leader completes a GML360. The cohort meets four times across the engagement for full-day workshops — not to listen to theory they already know, but to work on their actual behavioural patterns in front of each other. Between workshops, leaders work in peer accountability pairs with structured prompts, and receive two individual coaching sessions. A retest at 9 months closes the loop.
Below 15, the peer dynamics are thin — there aren't enough different archetypes in the room for the pattern work to land. Above 30, the workshops stop working as workshops and start becoming lectures. We've tried both extremes. Neither produces behavioural change.
For situations where something specific is stuck and you need it moving in weeks, not quarters. A leadership team in conflict, a new integrated team post-merger, a high-stakes project team, a functional team with visible dysfunction.
Not every engagement is a transformation programme. Sometimes a team needs a short, sharp, targeted intervention — three to five sessions over four to eight weeks, focused on whatever is blocking them right now.
Sprints are not a lightweight version of the longer engagements. They don't try to change how people lead in general. They try to change how a specific team handles a specific set of recurring situations — the meeting they keep having badly, the decision they keep deferring, the conflict they keep routing around.
We use a short team diagnostic — typically the Great Teams Assessment — followed by three to five working sessions and structured practice between sessions. No retest, no long-tail. This is for situations where the team needs to function better now.
Sprints work best when there's a live pressure on the team — a deadline, a launch, a post-merger integration — rather than a generic "we should probably work on our team dynamics" frame. The pressure gives the behavioural shifts somewhere to land. Without it, everything stays in the conference room.
For CEOs and HR leaders running a deliberate culture programme tied to a strategic shift. Most common triggers: geographic expansion, ownership change, strategic pivot, or the aftermath of a public culture failure.
Enterprise programmes are the longest, most complex, and lowest-volume shape we deliver. They combine everything in the other three programmes — exec team work, leadership pipeline cohorts across levels, targeted team interventions — and wrap them in the systems layer that most culture programmes never reach: HR processes, performance management, reward, talent decisions, communication architecture.
We work this way because culture doesn't change when leaders change their behaviour. Culture changes when leaders change their behaviour and the systems around them stop rewarding the old behaviour. You can run the best leadership programme in the world and watch it get absorbed by a performance management system that still pays people for hitting numbers by any means necessary. So enterprise engagements include a formal workstream on what HR and the executive team need to stop incentivising.
In a fully deployed enterprise programme, the architecture runs across eight components:
See the full system diagram on the How We Work page.
A named executive sponsor, a programme director on their side, a core HR partner, and protected calendar time from every leader in scope. Without those four, the work doesn't move. We don't proceed without them.
Run the internal communication campaign. Build the e-learning platform. Replace the client's L&D function. We work alongside those functions, not instead of them — and by year two, internal practitioners are running most of the delivery themselves.
The transformation programmes change the architecture. The skills programmes change what leaders actually say to each other inside it. Three targeted programmes, each addressing a specific set of protective patterns that the diagnostics have already made visible. Built on the same Growth Mindset Compass. Delivered in cohorts. Measured pre and post using the GMPL360.
For organisations where difficult conversations are being avoided — where people raise concerns privately but not in the room, where conflict gets routed around rather than engaged with, and where the gap between what is said in meetings and what is said afterwards is eroding trust and performance.
The strongest single predictor of psychological safety in the Safe2Great research data is constructive conflict engagement — leaders who solve conflicts proactively and constructively correlate with team safety at r = .49. It is the highest-loading behavioural variable in the entire dataset. And it is the behaviour most leaders avoid, because their protective patterns — Pleasing (keep the peace), Conforming (go along with the room), Reactive (withdraw when pressed) — are all, in their own way, flight from confrontation.
Confronting for Change develops the structured capability to raise difficult issues early, separate behaviour from identity, and create shared commitment to change — without tipping into the Dominating or Demanding patterns that destroy the safety you are trying to build. The programme includes the Powerful Feedback module, which addresses the specific case of feedback conversations that need to happen but aren't.
A five-module structured programme, delivered over 8–12 weeks with cohorts of 12–25. Each module combines a working session on a specific skill (surfacing concerns, separating behaviour from person, managing the conversation under emotional load, closing with commitment, following through) with between-session practice on live work situations. Each cohort member completes a pre/post GMPL360 so the behavioural shift is measurable.
Best for senior specialists and middle managers who have the technical credibility but not the confrontational range — finance leaders, engineers, clinicians, scientists, senior project managers. Also works well for leadership teams where Pleasing-Conforming patterns are high and the organisation is stuck on decisions that keep getting deferred.
For organisations where recognition is absent, generic, or used only as a substitute for harder conversations. The symptom looks like disengagement, quiet quitting, or high performers leaving without warning. The underlying cause is almost always the same: people do not know what they are doing well, and cannot tell whether it matters.
The recognition deficit sits underneath two apparently opposite patterns. Ruinous Empathy produces praise so vague it communicates nothing — "great job, team" on repeat, delivered in the hope that encouragement will make up for the absence of genuine challenge. Dominating patterns go the other direction entirely — no praise at all, only challenge, on the theory that high standards speak for themselves. Both fail for the same reason. They don't tell anyone specifically what they did that mattered, or why.
Praising with Purpose is built on the Lift Others Up growth mode — the second-strongest relational predictor of team engagement and psychological safety in the Safe2Great dataset. It gives leaders a structured approach for recognition that is specific, credible, and growth-oriented rather than merely motivational. The goal is not more praise. The goal is recognition that develops the person — that names the pattern, not just the outcome, so it can be repeated and built on.
A three-to-four-module programme over 6–8 weeks with cohorts of 12–25. Each leader identifies a specific person on their team whose development matters commercially and whose current recognition is weak. They practice structured recognition conversations in the working sessions, deploy them between sessions, and report back. Like Confronting for Change, pre/post GMPL360 measurement closes the loop.
Works especially well in technical and performance-driven cultures — finance, engineering, pharma R&D, consulting — where challenge is high but recognition is culturally unpractised. Also the right programme when engagement data shows "I don't feel my work is valued" scoring below sector norm while performance scores are fine.
For leaders and senior specialists who have formal authority in their own domain but need to move things that cross functional, geographic or hierarchical lines — where position power runs out and influence has to do the work. Particularly relevant in matrix structures, cross-functional programmes, and technical functions (finance, engineering, legal, IT) that need credibility outside their own discipline.
Most organisations are structured as hierarchies but operate as networks. The decisions that move the business forward almost always cross boundaries that no single leader controls. A finance director needs the head of operations to change a reporting cadence. A head of engineering needs the commercial team to take a product risk. A programme director needs six functional leaders aligned on a sequence. None of these are hierarchical instructions — they are influence problems. And most leaders try to solve them with the tools they are most comfortable with, which usually means too much push or too much pull.
Influencing for Impact develops the range. Built on the DISC communication model and a push-pull framework — asserting, reasoning, inspiring, consulting — the programme gives leaders a structured approach for matching their influence style to the stakeholder, the situation, and the stakes. It also develops the underlying concept of smart power: the deliberate combination of hard power (position, resources, expertise) and soft power (charisma, relationships, credibility) that actually moves complex decisions in organisations where no one has the authority to simply decide.
At the core of the programme is a five-step approach to influence conversations: state intentions and frame the dialogue, tell your story, ask for theirs, make a tentative proposal, and agree on a path forward. It sounds obvious. It is anything but, because the leaders who need this programme are typically leaders whose default under pressure is to skip steps one and three — the safety-building moves — and jump straight to the proposal. The programme drills the full sequence until it becomes the default.
Four to five modules over 8–10 weeks with cohorts of 15–30. Each leader brings a live stakeholder case — an actual person they need to influence and a specific outcome they need — and works that case through the programme. DISC profiling of self and stakeholder, six-sources-of-influence analysis for diagnosing resistance, and structured practice on the five-step method in pairs and small groups. Pre/post GMPL360 measurement against the Transform and Aim High growth modes.
Best for senior technical specialists, heads of function, programme directors, and matrix leaders whose remit has grown faster than their influence capability. Also the right programme when 360 data shows strong ratings on task and expertise but weak ratings on cross-functional influence and stakeholder management.
The mistake most organisations make when engaging a leadership-development firm is to pick the programme first — usually the one that matches last year's budget line — and ask the firm to deliver it. We do the opposite. The conversation starts with what you are actually trying to change, and the programme is an output of that, not an input.
In practice, that means the first conversation is about the organisation, not the shelf. What are you trying to move? What have you tried? What is the measured evidence that the current state is not sustainable? Which senior people are sponsoring the work, and which are quietly hoping it will not succeed? We ask these questions openly, and we answer them before we propose anything.
From there, if the engagement looks substantial, the typical opening is a Culture for Growth survey on the relevant business unit, or a GML360 on the senior team — usually in that order, for the reasons set out above. The data shapes which programmes are right, in what sequence, and at what scale. In some cases the diagnostic itself produces enough movement that no further programme is needed. That is always a good outcome.
If you are not sure whether the issue is culture, team, individual or skills — you are in the right place. Most first conversations are diagnostic, not commercial. We will tell you what we think the issue is, what we think the right sequence is, and whether we are the right firm to do it.
The first call usually reveals which shape the work wants to take. We'd rather start with the right shape than the biggest one — and we'll tell you if the fit isn't right.
Talk to Skip →Danfoss NER, named and measured. A global enterprise rollout at 600+ scale. And the longitudinal study that shows what didn't work, as well as what did.
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