The Leadership Performance Project

Our research will help develop more effective leaders in international companies.

By understanding differences in leadership contexts, our research will allow tailoring of recruitment, training and talent management to be better in accordance with contextual demands.

By building a framework to understand leader behaviour, our research will allow companies to qualify the use of existing leadership competence frameworks to tailor the demands for different positions.

By identifying performance parameters influenced by leader behaviour, our research will qualify performance discussions when doing leader assessments, and talent management.

Bringing this together our research will allow leaders to make choices that are more informed and thus increase return on leader behaviour.

The world is changing – and so are the demands to leaders

There is a widespread agreement that leadership is a key performance driver. At the same time many companies experience that, speed and complexity are increasing, and so is the demand for leadership that delivers high performance in different contexts.

Old assumptions – new demands

At the same time a lot of today’s research builds on previous theories repeating old assumptions, and this is a challenge as performance context is changing. A number of trends challenges the approach of re-using leadership understanding built years ago. Recent research into the future of work points to a number of trends influencing leadership demands, among others: Workforce diversity is increasing, level of education is going up, work-life fluency is changing, and globalisation drives a different type of internal and external environment.

Increasing hyper-connectivity changes our interaction patterns, while hierarchies are being replaced with matrix, project and other forms of "lose" organisations. Simultaneously, knowledge abundance demands something else from the leader, and a lot of leaders find themselves facing demands of co-creation & deliberate disruption.

All of these trends are in motion and in our understanding, this calls for a renewed look at how we understand leadership. This is what LP sets out to deliver.

Gain a richer understanding of which leadership behaviour yields business performance

Companies participating will gain insight into which performance-influencing leader behaviours matter the most, given different context characteristics across positions, levels, functions, etc. By applying this insight, you can optimise leadership performance, assessment and promotion, training programmes and recruitment practices.

We set out to provide insight that can enrich your current ways of working with leadership behaviour, competences and values – rather than competing with existing frameworks.
As CEO and co-founder of People & Performance Torben Nørby explains: "LP will enable you to understand which different leader behaviour is most closely related to high performance across your organisation’s different contexts."

Driving unprecedented research into the leadership performance linkage
The project is run as a Henley Business School MSc/Doctorate of Business Administration to ensure the highest level of research. Head researcher is CEO and co-founder of People & Performance Torben Nørby.

Torben has more than 25 years’ leadership experience and 15 years’ leadership development experience.
The research will be grounded in current enacted leader behaviour that delivers high business performance rather than repeating old assumptions about leadership. This means that new insights will be based on best leadership practice among high-performing leaders across a consortium of international companies.
We are gathering a consortium of companies

The project will be established with a consortium of commercial international companies participating in the research, offering the participants a unique competitive edge. You and your company can become part of this consortium driving unprecedented research into the leadership performance linkage.

The Leadership Performance Project

Doctoral research driven in a consortium of international companies - identifying which leader behaviour yields high business performance in the different contexts