Clarity Lead Consulting was founded in 2019 by two people who had spent fifteen years inside large organisations watching leadership development money disappear into off-site retreats and personality assessments that changed nothing.
The pattern was always the same. A senior team would recognise a problem: slow decisions, unclear accountability, managers promoted for technical skill who had never learned to run a team. They would hire a consultancy. The consultancy would deliver a report. The report would sit in a shared drive. Six months later the same problems would surface again.
We decided to work differently. Every engagement starts with observation. We sit in your meetings, read your Slack channels (with permission), and interview people at every level before we recommend anything. The diagnostic phase typically takes two weeks. Only after that do we propose a scope of work, and we tie our fees to deliverables you can see and measure.
Since 2019 we have worked with 47 organisations across healthcare, education, financial services and technology. Our average engagement lasts five months. About 60% of our clients come back for a second project within two years, which tells us the first one worked.
Four principles we hold ourselves to on every project.
We will not propose solutions in a sales meeting. We need to see your organisation working before we can say anything useful. The two-week diagnostic is non-negotiable, even for small engagements.
Generic leadership models look tidy on slides. They rarely survive contact with a real team. Our recommendations name specific people, specific meetings, and specific behaviours that need to change.
We write operating agreements, coaching plans, and redesign proposals so your team can run them without us. If a client needs us indefinitely, we have failed.
We tell senior leaders things their direct reports will not. That includes when the problem is the leader's own behaviour. We do this with care, backed by evidence from interviews and observation, never from guesswork.
A small team. Everyone here has managed people in real organisations, not just advised them.
Fiona spent twelve years in NHS management before moving into consulting. She led a 300-person division at Belfast Health Trust and knows what it feels like when your organisation chart says one thing and reality says another. She runs most of our organisational design projects.
Marcus was a regional director at a FTSE 250 financial services firm for nine years. His coaching work focuses on executives who have been promoted into roles they were not prepared for, which is most of them. He holds an MSc in Organisational Psychology from Birkbeck.
Aisling joined us in 2021 after five years in management consulting at a Big Four firm. She leads our team effectiveness programmes and is particularly good at getting groups of senior people to have the conversations they have been avoiding for months.
Numbers from five years of work.
We are happy to have a short call to see whether our approach is the right fit. No pitch deck, no pressure.
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