Twenty-seven years in leadership and organisational development, twenty-two of them in senior corporate HR leadership.
I spent two decades inside competency-based leadership development, building it, buying it, and running it across multinational organisations. Roles included Country HR Director and HR Leader CEE, together with interim executive assignments in several sectors.
What I watched, repeatedly, was this: a capable senior leader would complete an excellent programme, demonstrate every behaviour it taught, and then — at the precise moment it mattered, under real pressure, with something genuinely at stake — do exactly what they had always done.
Not because the programme was poor. Because it had worked on the behaviour, and behaviour is not what pressure finds. Pressure finds what is underneath.
I have hired senior leaders, developed them, promoted them and — where it came to it — exited them. The exits taught me the most, and none of them were failures of competence.
The Alchemy of Leadership is what I built in response: a developmental architecture for the part of a leader that competency models cannot reach and that pressure invariably finds. It draws on Jungian depth psychology, Adlerian individual psychology, complexity science and affective neuroscience, and it is being written up in an eleven-volume series, a monograph and a set of working papers.
British-Hungarian, based in Budapest, working in English and Hungarian.
Vantaris Leader is the private, self-funded side of the work: individuals paying for their own development, with no employer in the room. Vantaris Consulting is the organisational side — executive teams, contracted by the organisation, under a different confidentiality architecture.
Which one applies to you is decided by a single question: who is paying. Not by preference, and not by which you would rather it were.
Thirty minutes. We establish what you are actually carrying, and whether this work is right for it. If it is not — and sometimes it is not — I will say so and point you elsewhere.