5 Best Leadership Advisory Firms To Help You Grow Your Business

What is a leadership advisory firm? Sometimes referred to as a leadership consultancy, these firms focus on helping businesses make smarter decisions related to the leaders within their organisations. Services can include executive search to help you pinpoint the best senior leaders to bring into your company, but you may also see things like succession planning, coaching, and so much more.

The bottom line is that these firms exist to help you build a business with exceptional leadership - and that’s how you’re able to grow. You need the right people to lead your company in the right direction, and so many organisations are actively looking for leadership advisory firms to step up and help them out.

Lucky for you, we’ve looked around for some of the best contenders available, and these firms stand out:

1. CJPI - Best Choice

CJPI is a senior-lead consultancy that’s worked with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies, as well as top high-street brands like LUSH and Tropic. It’s a firm that comes with bags of experience and can offer fantastic advisory services to help you get the most out of your leadership team.

Headlined by an impressive executive search service that allows you to find the best senior leaders that suit your brand, CJPI also dips into the realms of executive coaching and succession planning. All three services combine to give you a complete leadership-focused package. You can find and hire the best executives, coach existing employees to develop into better leaders, and then plan for the future by ensuring you’ve got the right processes in place for when any leaders retire or move on.

It’s all intentionally bespoke as well, meaning every service is built for you. CJPI will support you in making smarter and more value-driven decisions to turbocharge your leadership strategy for good.

2. Spencer Stuart

Spencer Stuart provides leadership consulting to some of the UK’s top brands and has been a highly regarded executive search and advisory firm for over 65 years. What’s fascinating here is that the firm provides some of the usual services you associate with a leadership advisory firm, but it also has a set of proprietary tools that you can use along the way.

The Executive Intelligence tool is one of the mains ones to stand out, using a complex algorithm to evaluate three dimensions of intelligence to predict performance potential. It’s something the firm uses to help distinguish among top leaders and reveal hidden gem executives within your organisation.

As thorough as this firm is with its leadership consulting services, some may find their methods a bit too complex. You can either rely on their methods and tools, taking their word that they work, or you can find somewhere else that makes a bit more sense.

3. Heidrick & Struggles

Heidrick & Struggles gives you a remarkable range of leadership consulting services, including coaching, Chief Executive acceleration, succession planning, digital leadership, board effectiveness and more. There’s a separate executive search service as well, so they’ll even help you find the right leaders for your organisation.

The one thing that stands out about this firm is that it seems dedicated to helping you plan for the future. You’ll enjoy that a key part of its advisory service centres around aligning leadership planning with your business strategy. It does this with a data-driven, enterprise-wide approach that means you’re always moving in the right direction.

According to the firm, this makes your business more confident that it will always have the leaders it needs to drive value.

4. Russell Reynolds

Russell Reynolds focuses on four key areas of leadership consulting: executive search, succession, performance and accelerators. In other words, it will help you search for the ideal candidates, but it also helps you make the right decisions to plan for leadership succession. At the same time, you can use the performance and accelerator services to improve your existing team and focus on getting people ready for those future leadership roles.

It’s pretty much everything you need from a leadership advisory firm, but the level of detail provided on the website isn’t quite on par with what we’ve seen so far. That’s the only reason it’s further down this list; you’ll find everything this business offers from some of the firms higher up, just on a deeper level.

5. Redgrave

Redgrave is another firm that mainly focuses on executive search services, but it also branches out into the leadership advisory world. Partnering with lots of amazing organisations and individuals allows this firm to create a fantastic network of potential leaders for any company. It’s helped some of the biggest brands in the UK with their executive search, including EasyJet, Pret and HSBC.

There’s an argument to place Redgrave higher on this list, and that would certainly be the case if this was all about executive search. As it stands, we’re looking for leadership advisory firms that offer multiple services to help you get the most out of your leadership structure. Unfortunately, Redgrave doesn’t really have that much to offer when compared with the other contenders. It offers leadership coaching and integration post-recruitment, but it lacks things like succession planning and the other key services.

Benefits of Using a Leadership Advisory Firm

Why go to the effort of partnering with one of the firms on this list? Working with leadership advisory companies can help steer your business in the right direction by offering the following key benefits:

• Hire better and more experienced leaders
• Train existing employees to become leaders, keeping them at your company
• Implement succession planning so a leader leaving doesn’t rock the boat
• Save money by hiring the right leaders for the right rules
• Allow your business to grow in a direction that’s built around the leadership structure

Singling out one company from all of these firms is a difficult decision, but CJPI looks like it has the most well-rounded service at the moment. A brilliant executive search service melds with fantastic succession planning and leadership coaching to help any business find and develop the leaders they need.

Take your time when picking the right partner for your business; it’s definitely recommended that you do some extra research to gain the best possible viewpoint and understand which of these firms suits you the best.