StoneX set itself one of the more audacious targets: to grow fivefold in five years. There was a clear strategy behind the goal and the next step was to strengthen the leadership layer so they’re better prepared to hold the business together as the company scales. 

393 managers. 13 cities. Bangalore to Buenos Aires, Singapore to São Paulo. All of them are technically strong. A shared leadership language was all they needed to align better. 

This was also one of the most ambitious global leadership development journeys TransforMe has delivered. It has since been recognised with the Brandon Hall Group Gold Award for Excellence in Leadership Development. What earned that recognition was the rigour with which the problem was understood before a session was designed.

The problem beneath the problem

StoneX had grown significantly through mergers and acquisitions. Talented people had come together from different organisations, cultures, and business environments. But talent without a shared leadership standard does not automatically produce aligned performance.

A diagnostic phase — focus group discussions with managers and senior leaders across regions — surfaced two patterns that kept appearing regardless of geography. Managers were confident technically but hesitant when it came to influencing senior stakeholders, holding structured performance conversations, or leading their teams through change. And relationships between functions began to feel transactional.

Training was not the answer to their challenge. This needed a tailored leadership development programme built around StoneX’s actual challenges — one that could hold a consistent standard across 13 cities while remaining grounded in the cultural and operational reality of each one.

Built for the business, not borrowed from a shelf

Before the first workshop was designed, every participant completed a behavioural leadership assessment — establishing a baseline across four success capabilities. 

44.8% were at foundational level.
53.7% at intermediate.
1.4% at an advanced level. 

That data shaped everything that followed.

The Global Manager Development Programme was built around three capability pillars that emerged directly from the diagnostic: Communicating with Impact, Driving Performance Excellence, and Inclusive, Collaborative and Change Leadership Team Development. Generic competency frameworks played no part in the design.

Delivery required a network of global facilitators who understood the cultural dynamics of the regions where they worked. In South America, sessions ran in Spanish and Portuguese while following the same global curriculum. The result was a programme that felt locally relevant without losing global coherence — a balance Australian organisations operating across geographies will recognise as exactly the right problem to solve.

What made it stick

A workshop, however well designed, is only as valuable as the behaviour change it sustains. TransforMe built the reinforcement architecture in from the start rather than attaching it afterwards.

Every participant left each session with a 30–60–90 day action plan co-created with their line manager. Four to five weeks later, cohorts reconvened virtually — revisiting commitments, sharing early wins, peer coaching each other through challenges. Over 12 weeks, personalised learning nudges arrived through an AI-enabled platform: short, interactive, calibrated to individual capability gaps.

Leadership effectiveness is demonstrated through behaviour, not attendance. The architecture was designed with that principle as its foundation.

What the data showed

Against an industry benchmark of 10–15% upward capability movement, the programme achieved 14.8% progression — placing it in the high-impact range.

The behavioural shifts across 393 participants were significant. 

77% demonstrated stronger active listening and empathy-driven communication. 86% reported greater confidence in cross-functional collaboration.
71% showed enhanced customer orientation beyond their immediate teams.
62% demonstrated greater proactive ownership of new initiatives within their functions.

Beyond the numbers, five qualitative shifts emerged consistently across all 18 cohorts: a move from informing to questioning, stronger confidence in difficult conversations, practical adoption of feedback frameworks, peer learning at scale, and a desire to lead from the inside out.

Something less tangible but equally significant also took hold. Managers across StoneX — from Warsaw to São Paulo, from Bangalore to New York — began to see themselves as part of a single global leadership community. A shared identity, a shared language, a shared standard. That is the foundation of any genuine leadership transformation.

What this could mean for your organisation

StoneX’s journey is not unique in its ambition. It is unusual in its approach.

Most organisations invest in leadership development after the gaps become visible — when decisions are slowing, when teams are misaligned, when the business has outgrown the leadership layer holding it together. StoneX invested before that point, and invested with diagnostic rigour rather than good intentions.

For organisations navigating growth, post-merger integration, or the challenge of building leadership capability across distributed teams, the same principle applies. The question is not whether your leaders are capable today. It is whether they have been deliberately prepared for what the business is about to demand of them.

Organisational performance improves when companies invest in developing their leaders at the same pace as the business — through structured leadership development programmes, rigorous leadership assessment, and the kind of sustained executive coaching that turns programme insight into daily leadership behaviour.

That is what TransforMe builds. Get in touch to start a conversation.

12 months ago, she was one of the best managers in the business. Her team delivered consistently. Her instincts were sharp. Things kept moving.

Then the company doubled in size.

She now leads four teams through three other managers, sits in rooms where decisions carry significantly more weight, and is expected to influence functions she has never worked in. The skills that made her exceptional are still there. But the role has changed faster than anyone prepared her for.

As the company expanded, it created a leadership capability gap. This is one of the most common and least examined costs of rapid growth. The leadership gap shows up later in decisions that take weeks instead of days, in senior leaders who become bottlenecks, in managers working hard but that effort doesn’t reflect in the results.

Why rapid growth creates leadership gaps

Growth changes what leaders need to do — and it changes faster than most organisations anticipate.

A manager responsible for a small team may suddenly be leading multiple teams through other managers. Decisions that were once made through informal conversations now involve competing priorities, cross-functional accountability, and greater complexity. The leadership development approach that worked at thirty people requires a different approach and can rarely scale to three hundred without deliberate adjustment.

Australia is losing 500 experienced managers per day to retirement, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). At the same time, only 4% of the workforce currently have leadership aspirations. The pipeline is thinning at precisely the moment organisations need it to widen.

The transition required is a shift from solving problems personally to creating the conditions for others to solve them — from doing to enabling, from directing to influencing. Meaningful leadership capability is demonstrated through what leaders can do in practice, not whether they have completed development activities. Having enough managers is not the same as having enough capable leaders. An organisation can add management layers and still struggle with organisational growth decision-making and alignment if the capability underneath those titles has not been built deliberately.

The warning signs of leadership gap in your organisation

Leadership gaps appear first as operational symptoms — decisions slowing, senior leaders pulled into conversations they should not need to be in, managers firefighting rather than leading, teams receiving inconsistent messages about what matters most.

Over time, teams become dependent on individual leaders rather than shared leadership effectiveness across the function. Strategic priorities fail to translate consistently into team actions. Employee engagement declines steadily but gets noticed only in hindsight.

Why promoting high performers is not always enough

Promoting a strong individual contributor into leadership is often the most natural next step. They know the business, they have delivered results, and people trust their expertise.

A new manager may be technically brilliant but high performance in an individual role does not automatically transfer into leadership development readiness. A leadership role often requires coaching others through difficulty, managing performance with fairness, making decisions that carry team-wide consequences, and influencing people who do not report to them.

Leadership assessment helps organisations make this transition deliberately. It identifies where a leader is already strong, where the demands of a new role exceed current capability, and where development would make the greatest difference soonest. Organisations cannot assume that promotion itself creates leadership capability.

Building leadership capability before the gap becomes a problem

82% of new managers have never been trained or coached to lead, according to the Chartered Management Institute. That figure sits alongside another from AHRI’s own benchmarking survey: 96% of experienced leaders are actively seeking targeted, experience-appropriate development. The investment gap and the demand gap exist simultaneously — which is why leadership effectiveness problems are so often misread as operational ones.

The most expensive time to invest in leadership development is after the gaps are already visible. By then the organisation is already paying the price in the form of slower decisions, disengaged teams, and senior leaders stretched across problems they should not need to personally solve.

A stronger approach treats leadership development as part of the growth strategy. TransforMe’s work with growing organisations begins with diagnosis — understanding where trust breaks down, where communication distorts, and where accountability diffuses before designing anything. A leadership development programme is then built around real situations leaders are already navigating, not theoretical frameworks.

For senior leaders, executive coaching in Australia reinforces the behavioural shifts that programmes surface — the leader who holds a decision differently, communicates with greater clarity, or delegates in a team that has been waiting for direction. Coaching is not a supplement to development. It is how development becomes durable.

Growth requires leadership to grow with it

The organisations that scale successfully treat leadership capability as a strategic investment. They assess where leaders are, build deliberately towards where the business is going, and sustain that development through coaching and reinforcement rather than one-off interventions. Organisational performance and leadership effectiveness improve together — or they do not improve at all.

TransforMe helps organisations assess, develop, and strengthen leadership capability through structured leadership development programmes and executive coaching designed around their specific growth context. Because growth is only sustainable when leadership grows with it.