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Executive development centres

Fast-track your leadership development

Your best leaders deserve the best support

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Time is a premium. Unlock your senior leaders’ potential fast with an Executive Development Centre.

In a rapidly changing world, leaders are facing more challenges than ever before. Time is a precious resource in any organisation – so how can you maximise it to assess and develop your top leaders to secure your company’s future?

Through our end-to-end service offering, from emerging leaders to C-suite assessment and development, we don’t just create agile leaders – we build a pipeline of trailblazers.

Our executive development centres are immersive, intensive, on-site (or virtual) programmes that provide leaders with vital self-awareness and development understanding, and you with an in-depth assessment of your senior talent.

Through experiential, real-world situations and live coaching and feedback, our psychologists put your leaders to the test and identify their strengths, weaknesses and core development areas, so you know exactly what they need to succeed.

Identify and grow your future company leaders, whether for future Director, Partner or C-Suite level roles with our proven leadership intensives.

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Our approach to executive development

As a team of business psychologists who are also accredited coaches, we use proven, evidence-based methods to accurately and objectively assess and develop senior talent.

Executive development centres
Executive assessment
Executive coaching

Executive development centres

Our development centres are intensive, immersive programmes that put your leaders to the test over a 1-3 day period.

Designed to reflect the real-world challenges demanded of your senior leaders, participants are immersed in a variety of individual and group exercises where situational judgement, leadership skills and potential will be assessed by our business psychologists.

Exercises include psychometric assessments, group discussions, interviews, presentations, our proprietary INBOX communications tool and live role-plays with professional actors to simulate real-world scenarios and put your leaders’ language, behaviour and decision-making skills to the test.

With live feedback and coaching throughout the event, your executives are pushed to demonstrate their potential, unlocking their strengths, weaknesses and core areas for development.

Whether you want to know who’s ready to make partner or step up to board-level, these centres allow you to make decisions on development and promotion with confidence.

Executive assessment

Our executive assessments provide you with an objective, bias-conscious evaluation of your prospective or existing executives, complete with clear recommendations from our business psychologists.

Whether you’re looking for support on who to hire, who to promote or who to develop (and how) our executive assessments eliminate human error and allow you to make these critical decisions with confidence.

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Executive coaching

Our 1-to-1 coaching supports both emerging and established executives to accelerate development, overcome career challenges and fulfil their potential faster.

Personal to each individual’s needs, our approach is rooted in evidence-based practice and delivered by accredited coaches, who are also all trained business psychologists.

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Our executive development centres are trusted by

“Only Pearn Kandola understood where we were coming from, and gave us confidence that they could deliver a truly different approach. In practice, participants find the process professional and realistic and feel motivated to realise the investment in them.”
Lesley BrooksTalent & Leadership PartnerAXA

What are development centres and why are they needed?

Development centres are an efficient, effective and in-depth way to objectively assess senior talent, potential, and identify development needs.

Usually taking place on-site or, where required, in a virtual online setting, a development centre is an intensive 2-3 day event that a cohort of top leaders traditionally go through.

Using a series of individual and group exercises, including psychometrics and assessment interviews. Perhaps most unique to development centres, these experiential events put leaders into real-world situations, using professional actors, to test how they would fare in a more senior position, to help support promotion and development decisions.

Our development centres are designed and delivered by our business psychologists, each acting as coaches to specific individuals throughout, supporting and observing in order to fully test and draw out your leaders’ strengths, weaknesses and core development areas, benchmarking against higher level competencies unique to your organisation.

Popular in the legal sector, for partner promotion, and professional services firms, development centres are vital for ensuring a pipeline of empowered, capable, resilient and high-performing leaders.

Ultimately, development centres act as accelerators for senior talent, and help organisations to make empowered decisions for promotion and development decisions.

Our executive development centre process

Design
Planning
Delivery
Review

Design

  • We’ll work with you to understand your overall objectives, the demands that leaders would expect in executive roles, your organisational values, industry, and clients.
  • From here, our leadership-focused business psychologists will design a development centre that will reflect the real-life demands of your organisation’s senior leadership.

Planning

  • Once designed, our dedicated resourcing and project managers will take care of planning in your development centre and co-ordinating the day with your selected cohort.
  • During this stage, participants will be provided with any necessary ‘pre-work’ materials and access to diagnostic tools (if applicable).

Delivery

  • Our project managers ensure smooth running of the event, so your cohort are always in the right place at the right time, and can focus solely on their individual and group tasks.
  • Our business psychologists will be assigned to two participants each, observing and assessing your leaders while acting as a live-feedback coach between sessions.

Review

  • As well as providing participant feedback and coaching throughout the process, we will provide you with detailed participant reports to enable you to have a clear picture of your current talent pipeline.
  • We deliver your written participant reports on the final day of the development centre, so you don’t have to wait days or weeks for feedback.
  • We measure what matters most to you and make clear recommendations for each participant, so you can make confident decisions about promotion or development.

What sets Pearn Kandola’s executive development centres apart?

Accredited psychologists
Inclusive and culturally aware
Holistic approach and unique leadership insight
Proven partners

Accredited psychologists

Our business psychologists are qualified psychologists and accredited coaches, providing insights that delve beyond the surface and address the core of leadership potential.

Leadership development is about understanding and assessing your people. What drives them, where their strengths lie and their weaknesses.

Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and human behaviour.
Without understanding your leaders as people first, how can you best support and develop them?

In short, we understand your people, and how best to develop them in line with your needs.

It’s this aspect in particular, the depth, quality and speed of our feedback and personal, immediate coaching, throughout our programmes, that clients say sets us apart.

Inclusive and culturally aware

As trailblazers in the field of inclusion, our services are rooted in our in-house research and over forty years’ expertise, eliminating assumptions and minimising bias.

Working across more than 90 countries globally, we understand that the ‘ideal leader’ can look different across different locations.

Our development centres are designed to push your leaders to show their full potential, in a psychologically safe and inclusive environment that ensures all participants receive the same level of support and a fair and objective assessment.

So much so, that our development centres were independently verified to show 0% gender or racial bias.

Holistic approach and unique leadership insight

We’ve been consulting in the areas of talent assessment and development, as well as inclusion training, since 1984.

As a firm of business psychologists, we see your organisation as a whole, across departments and seniority levels. We consider where you were, where you are now – and where you want to be.

Whether you’re succession planning or identifying future leaders, assessing graduates or training your C-Suite to be more inclusive, we’re with you every step of the way.

Building on our psychology-backed foundations, we use our proprietary leadership model, Pearn Kandola model of Leadership Capability to benchmark talent across organisations and help you stay ahead of the curve.

Proven partners

There’s a reason multi-national organisations run their development centres with us year after year.

We’re in it for the long-run, invested in your talent pipeline as much as you are.

Together, we create a culture of continuous growth that drives individuals, teams and organisations to success.

Our development centre insights

New webinar: inclusive talent management – developing the developers
Insights

New webinar: inclusive talent management – developing the developers

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Psychological safety week live events announced
Insights

Psychological safety week live events announced

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Exclusive pride month webinar series with Professor Binna Kandola OBE
Insights

Exclusive pride month webinar series with Professor Binna Kandola OBE

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Frequently Asked Questions

Who are development centres for?

Typically development centres are investments reserved for an organisation’s high-potential talent, such as those on track for director, partner, c-suite or equivalent roles.

Often used for both assessment and development, they offer a uniquely objective, insightful and efficient assessment of your current talent.

Development centres are vital tools to understand your talent pipeline and offer clear, objective and robust assessments and recommendations from our business psychologists.

In short? You can make informed, confident and ultimately, easy decisions around promotion, development and hiring.

Get in touch with us today.

Who is responsible for executive development in organisations?

Senior executives in HR, talent management and learning and development (L&D) are typically those with responsibility for leadership development and assessment.

Role titles may differ from organisation to organisation but ultimately those with the responsibility for talent pipelines, training and succession planning are those who benefit the most from our executive development centres, aside from the participants themselves!

It’s important to remember that individuals also carry a weight of responsibility for their own personal development and career ambitions, and development centres allow them to face and understand their own strengths and weaknesses, with clear, targeted feedback from our coaches to enable them to tackle their development areas.

How many people should take part in a development centre?

Development centres are an important investment that is usually reserved for an organisation’s top talent. While the total number will depend on the scope and design of your centre, you’d typically find 12 participants per cohort.

Whether participants will apply for consideration, or be nominated by people managers, we can support you with the process to help ensure a fairly selected cohort.

What should the leadership development process look like?

There is no silver bullet, off-the-shelf, leadership development process.

Each organisation is unique, with its own culture, people and goals. It’s vital that yours are understood, and a programme is designed that will accelerate talent identification and development to ensure your top talent are supported to smash their potential.