Leadership needs don't arrive on a program schedule. Your organization holds Intensives on call, and allocates one the moment a leader needs it.
A newly promoted director struggles to let go of their old responsibilities. A senior hire needs to build influence quickly. A capable manager keeps avoiding a conversation that is beginning to affect the team. These needs arise one leader at a time, and usually need attention now.
On-Call Intensives give your organization a ready supply of focused, one-to-one leadership development. You purchase a block of Intensives for the year. When a need appears, HR or a manager assigns one. There is nothing to approve or purchase.
Each Intensive gives one leader six sessions with a member of the KS Insight faculty, focused on one real challenge over three to four months. Your organization is ready to act, with no faculty member to find, no budget to approve, and no separate engagement to negotiate.
Ready when needed · Consistent faculty · Confidential for the leader · Visible to the sponsor
Coaching is usually bought one leader at a time, after the moment has passed. Holding Intensives on call means the organization can respond when the moment arrives.
A block of Intensives, held on call for twelve months. A manager or HR allocates one by nomination as the need arises, and KS Insight assigns the faculty member.
For a head of talent or a business-unit leader with a group of managers to develop.
An annual agreement with a named trigger: every newly appointed director, every new lab head, every senior hire. Each leader who meets it receives an Intensive without a new decision. A quarterly report to the sponsor, and renewal at year end on what the report shows.
For a CHRO or L&D director building leadership development into how the organization runs.
Six to twelve leaders working the same area of focus together: group sessions on the frameworks, individual sessions alongside, assessments before and after, and one report to the sponsor.
For first-line managers and annual cohorts.
Session content is never shared. Per leader, the sponsor sees attendance. Themes and pre/post change are reported only in aggregate, at group sizes of five or more.
A manager or HR names the leader and the moment: a promotion, a larger team, a situation that has become hard.
KS Insight matches a faculty member to the leader and the area of focus. If the fit is wrong, one change.
The leader, their manager and the faculty member agree what the Intensive works on and what will and will not be shared.
Over three to four months, with the assessments and the work between sessions that make the learning hold.
The leader, their manager and the faculty member review what changed and what the leader carries forward.
Aggregated across the organization's leaders, so the sponsor sees the program working.
A Leadership Intensive is designed for a leader who can identify an area of leadership that has become especially important. It may have emerged because of a promotion, a larger team, a new level of authority, a difficult relationship, a major change effort, or a recurring pattern that is limiting the leader's effectiveness. The leader may know exactly what they want to develop, or they may simply know that their current way of approaching the situation is no longer enough.
A Leadership Intensive includes six individual sessions, relevant assessments, structured exercises, and work between sessions. The value lies in the concentration of the work and the degree to which the learning is designed around the leader's actual challenge.
Once the developmental focus is clear, the Intensive becomes a structured learning process. It is demanding, and much of the work happens between the sessions, in reading, reflection, and experimentation.
The leader works with relevant frameworks and cases. They practice new approaches. They prepare for real conversations and decisions. They apply the learning in their work and return with evidence of what happened. The faculty member provides challenge, feedback, interpretation, and additional practice as the work develops.
A leader may believe they need to delegate more. Closer examination may show that the deeper issue involves trust, identity, standards, control, or uncertainty about what leadership at the next level requires.
Every engagement is led by a member of the KS Insight faculty - senior leaders who teach as well as coach. We work from one method: the Insight 4D framework, the Decision Authority Spectrum, and our own leadership assessments. Each program opens and closes with an assessment, so the growth is visible and the leader can see how far they have moved. It is a deeper alternative to conventional coaching, built to keep working after the sessions end.
Meet the faculty →The sponsor cannot see inside the sessions, and should not. What the sponsor does see, each quarter, is one report across their leaders: sessions completed against those contracted, the areas of focus chosen as themes, the change between the opening and closing assessments, and what to adjust next quarter.
Example figures for layout only.
The evidence for executive coaching now extends well beyond testimonials. Randomized controlled studies show measurable gains in leadership behavior, goal attainment and resilience.
KS Insight's Leadership Intensives are built on that evidence and refined in practice: one leadership challenge, a three-way goal-setting conversation, practice in the leader's real work, and assessment of change. Kirsti Samuels has coached more than 300 executive leaders one to one, and the KS Insight coaching team has coached thousands.
A 2023 meta-analysis of 37 randomized controlled studies found a significant positive effect of workplace coaching across leadership and personal outcomes, and found that the effect did not depend much on the length of the coaching assignment.
De Haan and Nilsson, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2023A separate analysis of 20 controlled studies found that executive coaching had its greatest impact on behavior, in particular openness to new behavior and goal strategy. It also produced significant gains in self-efficacy, psychological capital and resilience.
Nicolau, Candel, Constantin and Kleingeld, Frontiers in Psychology, 2023In a randomized study of 41 executives during an organizational restructuring, four individual coaching sessions over ten weeks improved goal attainment, resilience and workplace wellbeing and reduced stress compared with a control group.
Grant, Curtayne and Burton, Journal of Positive Psychology, 2009Each Intensive is built around clearly identified leadership capabilities. Three Intensives completed within one cluster amount to a Certificate in that area of leadership.
Moving from doing the work yourself to leading the people who do it.
Leading through other managers, and releasing the decisions you used to make yourself.
Stepping into enterprise leadership, where operating skill is no longer enough on its own.
Giving hard feedback and holding people to account, including the conversations that are easy to postpone.
Handling the person who believes they are owed a promotion, a raise, or recognition they have not yet earned.
Diagnosing and repairing a leadership team where roles conflict and trust has broken down.
Reading the system that keeps producing a problem, rather than solving the problem in front of you each time.
Building influence with peers and stakeholders when you cannot rely on formal authority.
Creating the psychological safety and productive disagreement that innovation depends on.
Leading and deciding when the answer is not known and others are looking to you.
Understanding what pressure does to your judgment, and learning to regulate it.
How your presence is read by others, and how to develop it deliberately.
Communicating with authority when the stakes and the scrutiny are high.
Building the capacity to act before you feel ready, as a deliberate practice.
Fifteen minutes with a member of the faculty, at no cost. Tell us which leaders you have in mind, and we will tell you how to hold Intensives for them.
Every Intensive is led by a member of the KS Insight faculty.
