Leadership Predicts Culture. Culture Predicts Results. Why Aren't We Measuring Leadership?

I’ve spent almost 30 years in corporate roles, always on mandates that involved building, transforming, and growing something that didn't yet exist.

I was good at it. But somewhere at the peak of my career, I started struggling to find my value, not because the work wasn't meaningful, but because the system I was working inside wasn't built to let leaders become what they were actually capable of.

That gap between what leaders could be and what the traditional model of managing, coaching, training, and development was producing is why I left and launched a startup executive coaching company. And that’s what I've been working on ever since.

My firm has evolved from an executive coaching company to a leadership performance firm that’s reflective of leaders needs.

We are a firm that delivers tech-enabled solutions, consulting and scalable services. We continue to keep pace with what’s happening around us.

What Coaching Actually Taught Me

When I launched Pivotal Growth almost 10 years ago, it was an executive coaching firm. One coach and one leader at a time. This coaching work gave me something that no consulting engagement ever could: I got to see what was actually happening inside organizations and in the leaders tasked with enabling teams to do the work.

This level of visibility isn’t something that surfaces in a boardroom presentation. It’s the real version - the one where leaders can speak in a confidential space, and where they're not filtering for political consequences or carrying the weight of what their team or board needs to hear from them. They’re just thinking out loud.

That intimacy with what leaders were actually experiencing; the real pressures, confusion, and gaps between what they were being asked to do and what the tools and playbooks around them were built for. That became the foundation for everything we built next.

Every evolution of Pivotal Growth started there, including what leaders were telling us, directly, about what wasn't working. It wasn’t about market analysis or a competitor audit.

That's our firm’s inside-out principle. We listen first. We build from what we hear.

The Problem With How the Industry Works

The leadership development industry spend is billions. And organizations have almost zero visibility into whether any of it is working.

The assessment tools most organizations are using were built 20 or more years ago. These tools measure personality. You take a test, get a profile, and then nothing tracks whether you actually grow or adapt, or whether your team experiences you differently than they did 12 months ago. There's no remeasurement, baseline or way to answer the one question that matters: Did this work?

And then the consultant reports arrive, sometimes six inches thick. And they often sit on the shelf, not because organizations don't care, but because the recommendations feel too heavy, not custom enough, or require a level of internal capacity that nobody actually has right now.

I watched this play out from the inside for years. Intelligent, committed leaders were investing in themselves. Organizations were spending on development they couldn't measure. Boards were treating leadership as a soft-skill budget line when it's actually a predictor of everything downstream: culture, systems, process, performance and results.

That's a design problem, not a funding problem. The tools weren't built for the questions organizations actually need answered.

What We Built Instead

When an organization came to us with a large workforce and leadership transformation mandate, I didn't arrive with a framework. We sat with them and asked: what are you really trying to get at? What actually matters here?

What followed wasn't an off-the-shelf program. We designed a leadership strategy for them. We built a custom diagnostic from their own internal leadership competency model, adding behavioural indicators that reflected their actual culture and direction. Every senior leader completed it. Everyone went through a debrief. Everyone left with a personal development action plan.

The organization got a team development plan, including a 12-month customized learning experience. We did the same at the director level and manager level, which is 10% of their workforce.

That engagement didn't push us off our groove. It deepened it. It's the clearest example of what inside-out looks like in practice: you start with what the organization and its people are telling you, and you build from there. It’s not the outside-in approach of a consultant who comes in with a point of view and adapts it around the edges.

That case also illustrated something Chief of Staff, Buddy Walzak, often says about us: We're small, but we punch above our weight.

The Team Behind the Vision

I'm an ideas person. I’m curious about technology enablement. I'm the energy, the builder, and the one who sees a possibility and wants to move on it.

I’ve surrounded myself my team members and contractors who nurture the vision, and enable the impact. Everyone plays their role in ensuring we stay true to our core capabilities, even when an idea is exciting enough to drift toward.

That dynamic; the ideas person and the north star working in real tension, is part of why we can go into complex, enterprise-scale environments without being thrown off our groove. Master service agreements, long procurement cycles, and bilingual delivery requirements and none of that destabilizes us. We've been in complexity long enough to know how to move through it.

And the team around us, including contractors and debrief coaches, reflects the same belief: rigorous leadership development doesn't have to be slow, generic or unmeasurable.

Why This Moment Matters

There is a crossover happening in the workforce right now. Boomers and Gen X are on their way out. Millennials and Gen Z are on their way in, and they're not just entering the workforce. They're taking seats at decision-making tables. They're holding authority and influence. And they will leave organizations where the leadership culture doesn't match how they work, what they value, or what they expect from the leaders above them.

The traditional playbook, the one many of us relied on and knew could deliver results, isn't serving anymore. It was right for its time, but the workforce it was designed for has changed.

What we see in the organizations we work with is leaders caught between two playbooks: the one that got them here, and the one the people around them need. That transition is uncomfortable because it's not linear. Also, it's happening inside one of the most complex operating environments most leaders have ever faced, with AI accelerating everything faster than most organizations can keep up with.

We built what we built because of that, not ahead of it, but in response to it.

What We're Doing Now

From day one of my business, everything has been about “leadership as a driver of growth.”

We're taking into that market the same thing we've taken into every engagement since the beginning: the belief that if you start with what leaders and organizations are actually experiencing, and build from there, you create something they can actually use.

We are not the 20-year-old assessment service. We are not the traditional playbook.

We represent what leadership development looks like when it's built from the inside out, informed by leaders, enabled by technology, and anchored in the belief that the human element is not the soft part of this work, it's the whole point.

That's what I left corporate for, and I haven't eased up on it since.

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Lisa W. Haydon MBA, CEC is Founder and CEO of Pivotal Growth Inc.,a leadership performance firm helping organizations modernize how they measure, develop, and scale leadership capacity.

Drawing on decades of executive leadership experience across banking, capital markets, technology, and professional services, she helps organizations turn leadership into a measurable driver of growth through data-backed insights, AI-enabled systems, and human-centric methodology.