What services does Thoroughgood Development offer?

We provide three core services: personalised 1:1 executive coaching, evidence-based training solutions for teams and leaders, and business psychology consultancy covering areas like employee engagement, culture, wellbeing, and organisational development.

Who is Thoroughgood Development for?

We work with growing organisations, senior leaders, HR teams, and individuals who want to develop their people. Our clients range from SMEs to large international organisations across all sectors.

Where is Thoroughgood Development based?

We are based in London (Covent Garden) and deliver services across the UK and internationally. Executive coaching and training are available both in-person and virtually.

How do I book a consultation?

Contact us through our website to schedule a free initial consultation. We will discuss your needs and recommend the most appropriate service, whether that is coaching, training, or psychology consultancy.

What makes your approach different?

Our founder Dale Thoroughgood is a qualified occupational psychologist (MSc, BPS member) with 20+ years of experience. Every solution is evidence-based, personalised, and designed to create measurable, lasting change — nothing is off the shelf.

Executive Coaching & Psychology London

Your newly promoted Partner is exceptional at client work. Six months in, their team is starting to move around them. You need to act before it becomes a retention problem.

This is not a story about a bad leader. It is a story about a transition that most professional services firms handle badly, and a pattern that repeats itself with near-clockwork regularity across law firms, consultancies, and financial services firms in London and beyond. The Partner in question was probably your best senior associate. They won clients, delivered flawlessly, and built a reputation that made their promotion feel obvious. And then something shifted.

The client relationships are still strong. The technical work is still exceptional. But the team beneath them is restless. A high-performing associate has asked for a transfer. Another is quietly updating their profile. A third mentioned in a well-being check-in that they are finding the environment "a bit intense." The Partner is not aware that any of this is happening, or if they are, they do not know what to do with it.

This is the moment that determines whether you retain that Partner's team, whether you protect the client relationships that depend on that team's stability, and whether the Partner themselves continues to grow into the leader your firm needs. It is also, in our experience, the moment most firms wait too long to address.

The Promotion That Changes Everything

The transition from senior fee earner to Partner or Director is one of the most significant leadership transitions in professional services. It is also one of the least supported.

Firms invest years in developing technical excellence. The pathway to partnership is built around billable output, client development, and technical mastery. These are, by definition, the capabilities that make someone a high performer as an individual contributor. They are not, however, the capabilities that make someone effective as a leader of people.

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2025 report found that global manager engagement fell from 30% in 2023 to 27% in 2024, contributing to an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity. The steepest declines were among newly appointed managers: those who had been promoted into people leadership roles without adequate preparation or support. Gallup's research identified that managers influence 70% of team engagement variance. When the manager is struggling, the team follows.

In professional services, this dynamic is amplified. The billable hour creates a structural disincentive to invest time in people leadership. Partners under revenue pressure default to doing rather than leading. The behaviours that made them successful as individuals, precision, high standards, autonomy, and a strong sense of personal accountability, can become liabilities when applied to team leadership without adjustment.

The result is a Partner who genuinely cares about the quality of work, who is technically without peer, and who cannot understand why their team is not performing the way they would themselves. The gap between their self-perception and the experience of those around them is often significant, and rarely visible to them without external support.

What the Research Tells Us About Coaching at This Moment

Executive coaching, commissioned and structured correctly, is the most effective intervention available at this transition point. The evidence for this is substantial.

The International Coaching Federation's Global Coaching Client Study reported a median company return on investment for coaching of 7:1. A separate survey of 100 executives by Manchester Consulting found an average return of 5.7 times the cost of the engagement. These figures are not outliers: a MetrixGlobal case study at a Fortune 500 firm calculated a return of 529%, rising to 788% when staff retention savings were included (ICF, 2025; Manchester Consulting, 2001; MetrixGlobal, 2001).

What drives that return? Not the coaching sessions themselves, but the behavioural change that results from them. The ICF's research consistently finds that the most significant outcomes of coaching engagements are improvements in self-awareness, communication, leadership effectiveness, and the ability to manage relationships under pressure. These are precisely the capabilities that a newly promoted Partner needs to develop.

The CIPD's factsheet on coaching and mentoring notes that coaching is most effective when it addresses specific, current challenges rather than generic development goals. The Partner who is struggling with team engagement does not need a general leadership programme. They need a structured, confidential space to examine their own patterns of behaviour, understand how those patterns land with their team, and develop a more intentional approach to leadership.

Why Most Firms Commission Coaching Too Late

The most common trigger for commissioning coaching in a professional services context is a crisis: a grievance, an exit interview that reveals a pattern, a client complaint connected to team performance, or a direct conversation with the Partner that has not gone well. By this point, the damage is already partially done.

The Partner's team has formed views that are difficult to shift. The most mobile talent has often already left or begun looking. The Partner themselves may have become defensive, interpreting the coaching as a signal that they are failing rather than an investment in their development.

The CIPD recommends that coaching conversations begin before a performance issue becomes visible. Early-stage coaching, commissioned as a normal part of a leadership transition rather than a response to a problem, carries a fundamentally different message. It says: we invest in our Partners. It signals that the firm takes leadership seriously. And it reaches the Partner before behavioural patterns have hardened into habits that are much more difficult to shift.

In our experience of working with Partners and senior leaders in law firms and financial services, the engagements that produce the most sustained change are those commissioned within the first six months of a new role, ideally within the first three. The earlier the intervention, the more the coachee can be genuinely curious rather than defensive.

The Sponsorship Question That Most Firms Do Not Ask

When a firm commissions coaching for a Partner, the conversation typically focuses on the coach: who they are, what their background is, and whether they have sector experience. This is understandable, but it is not where the determinant of outcome lives.

Research from the Harvard Business Review has consistently highlighted the importance of sponsorship in senior development. In a coaching context, sponsorship means the active involvement of the Partner's line manager or senior partner in setting the goals for the engagement, reviewing progress at key points, and creating conditions in the firm that support the behavioural change the coaching is working toward.

An engagement without strong sponsorship is an engagement where the coachee can do excellent reflective work in sessions and then return to an unchanged environment where old patterns are reinforced. The line manager who commissioned the coaching but then has no further involvement has effectively handed the problem to the coach and stepped away. That is not how the return on investment is generated.

Before commissioning coaching for a newly promoted Partner, it is worth asking: who in this firm will actively sponsor this engagement? What are we prepared to do differently to create the conditions for this leader to succeed? These questions are not additional complexity. They are the substance of the investment.

What Coaching at Partner Level Actually Looks Like

A well-structured coaching engagement for a newly promoted Partner or Director in a professional services firm typically runs over six to nine months, with sessions every two to three weeks. The first phase focuses on building the working relationship and establishing a clear picture of the coachee's current leadership context: their team, their relationships, the pressures they are navigating, and the specific situations where their approach is working and where it is not.

Psychometric profiling, conducted by an accredited practitioner, adds significant value at this stage. Not because a personality profile tells you who someone is, but because it creates a shared language for exploring patterns of behaviour, and it gives the coachee an evidence-based framework for understanding how others experience them. The BPS-accredited tools used by experienced practitioners in this context, including Thomas International's Thomas Profiling System and the Clarity4D framework, are designed specifically for use in leadership and coaching contexts and provide a structured foundation for the self-awareness work that drives lasting change.

The middle phase of the engagement focuses on the specific leadership challenges the coachee is navigating. For a newly promoted Partner, this typically means developing the skills and habits of team leadership: how to give feedback that lands well, how to delegate in a way that develops rather than micromanages, how to manage upwards while supporting those beneath them, and how to sustain high standards without creating an environment of anxiety. These are learnable skills. They are not personality traits.

The final phase focuses on embedding the change. Good coaching does not create dependency. It builds the coachee's own capacity to continue developing without ongoing external support. By the end of a well-run engagement, the Partner should have a clearer sense of their own patterns, a more intentional approach to their leadership behaviours, and the tools to continue that reflection themselves.

The Retention Calculation

The retention of a strong associate or senior associate in a professional services firm is not a soft outcome. It is a commercial one. The cost of replacing a senior associate, accounting for recruitment fees, onboarding time, the lost revenue during the gap, and the disruption to client relationships, typically runs to multiples of annual salary. Law firms and financial services firms that have modelled this figure consistently find it sits between 50% and 150% of annual remuneration for mid-to-senior roles.

When a Partner's team begins to move around them, the firm is not facing a people issue. It is facing a commercial risk. The coaching investment, by comparison, is a fraction of that cost. And it addresses the source of the risk rather than simply managing its symptoms.

The firms that treat Partner development as infrastructure rather than an exception are the ones that see the return. Not because they have solved a crisis, but because they have prevented one.

Acting at the Right Moment

The pattern described at the opening of this article, the newly promoted Partner who is brilliant with clients and struggling with people, is not unusual. It is, in fact, the norm. The question is not whether it will happen in your firm. The question is whether you act early enough to matter.

Coaching commissioned in the first three to six months of a new leadership role, with a clearly articulated purpose and strong sponsorship from firm leadership, is the most effective and most cost-efficient investment a professional services firm can make in its senior talent. The return is not theoretical. It shows up in retention rates, in team stability, in the client relationships that depend on both, and in the next generation of leaders who are watching how the firm treats the people it promotes.

Your most technically brilliant Partner deserves the chance to become your most effective leader. So does their team.

When Your Best Technical Leader Is Losing Their Team