Colligent Leadership
A values-based approach to leadership.
LEADERSHIP TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT
Train leaders for the responsibility their role now carries.
Created for leaders at mission driven organizations. Built on a proprietary framework: Operate, Navigate, & Communicate — a three-part approach to leadership developed from military aviation and refined through doctoral research.
90% +
of talent development professionals report a leadership skills gap in their organization
ATD press release, 2024
77%
of Chief Human Resources Officers lack confidence in their organization’s ability to fill senior leadership roles
DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025
50%
of newly promoted executives fail within their first 18 months in the role
Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner), 2013 · based on 30,000 leaders
01 | Who Experiences the Problem?
Two people are looking at the same problem — from opposite sides of the desk.
First: the senior leader whose next role calls for skills their promotion never developed. Second: the head of Human Resources, the head of talent, or the head of leadership development inside their organization — the person responsible for making sure that leader succeeds. Both are looking at the same pipeline data. Neither is finding the answer in a standard training catalog.
20%
of senior leaders have a prepared successor.
Only 49% of critical roles can be filled by promoting someone from inside the company.
DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025
The gap isn’t concentrated in one industry, one function, or one seniority level. It shows up across the modern organizational chart as a matter of course. And the HR leader who tries to fix it with a generic program from a training catalog often finds themselves running the same numbers again a year later.
02 | What is The Problem?
A gap between the skills they trained for and the role they now hold.
Leaders are promoted for excelling at the work in front of them — the very habits that no longer serve them at the level of decision-making their new role requires. The training that got them here is not the training that will keep them here.
11%
of executives strongly agree their organization’s leadership development programs actually achieve and sustain the intended results.
McKinsey · “What’s Missing in Leadership Development” · about 500 executives surveyed
#1
cause of new leaders failing in their role, per decades of Center for Creative Leadership research: interpersonal skills. Not intelligence, and not job-specific expertise.
McKinsey · “What’s Missing in Leadership Development” · about 500 executives surveyed
The leader who was promoted for personally hitting their numbers is now expected to build trust across functions and departments they’ve never worked in. The leader who was rewarded for personal execution is now measured on the performance of teams that don’t report directly to them. The training they received didn’t create this gap — but it wasn’t designed to close it either.
03 | When Does The Problem Manifest?
Inside the first 18 months of any transition — nearly every time.
Leaders who don’t establish themselves in a new role tend to fail within the first 18 months. It doesn’t matter whether the transition is a promotion inside the same company, a move to a new organization, or a change in the environment around them. That first year and a half is the window when support has the highest impact. Miss it, and the failure becomes a permanent part of the leader’s career record.
11%
of newly appointed Chief Executive Officers leave their post within the first year; 34% are gone by the end of year three.
Korn Ferry · “The Three-Year Itch”
71%
of leaders report increased stress at work. 40% are actively considering leaving their current jobs.
DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025
A senior leader gets one real chance at each transition. Artificial intelligence disruption, changes in the workforce, and faster reorganization cycles are all making that window shorter than it was five years ago. Organizations that treat leadership development as a once-a-year training event tend to miss the actual moment when their leader needs support.
04 | Where Does the Problem Manifest?
In three places at once — the finances, the organizational chart, and the team's engagement report.
When a senior leader fails to grow into their new role, the failure does not stay quiet. The dollar cost lands on the Human Resources budget: severance, executive search fees, and the cost of onboarding a replacement. The productivity cost lands on the team the leader was supposed to grow: disengagement, resignations, and missed goals. The strategic cost lands on the whole organization: missed market opportunities, ceded competitive ground, and drift in the culture. It isn’t one bill. It’s several bills, spread across multiple years and multiple parts of the business.
1/2 to 2X
the annual salary is the estimated cost of replacing an employee — with senior-leader replacements typically at the top of that range or beyond.
Gallup · “This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion”
70%
of the difference between a highly engaged team and a disengaged team
is explained by the quality of the manager alone.
Gallup · State of the American Manager · analysis of 2.5 million work units
15% / 20%
lower team performance and lower team engagement, respectively, in the year following an unsuccessful executive transition.
Gartner (formerly the Corporate Executive Board) · executive transition research
One under-developed senior leader is not a single expense on a balance sheet. They are the multiplier. Team engagement, employee retention, and team performance all rise and fall with the person at the top of the reporting line.
05 | Why Does the Problem Manifest?
Because most leadership development wasn’t designed for this kind of responsibility.
Generic training programs are not built for any individual leader’s specific situation. Annual training events don’t survive contact with real work the following Monday. Self-assessments don’t reveal blind spots — that is precisely what makes those blind spots blind. And the leaders who most need direct, honest feedback are typically the ones least likely to get it from the people around them.
7%
of Chief Executive Officers believe their companies are actually building effective global leaders.
McKinsey · “Developing Global Leaders”
29%
of employees trust their immediate manager — a 37-percentage-point drop since 2022.
DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025
50%
of executives don’t fully understand their own role as sponsor when the organization is trying to lead a major change.
Prosci · Best Practices in Change Management (public blog)
3.7x
more likely to quit: high potential employees — the ones being groomed for future leadership — when the organization stops actively investing in their development.
DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025
The root cause isn’t effort. It’s design. Fixing it requires a different approach: one that combines cohort learning (a small group working through the material together, holding each other accountable), formal assessment (getting a calibrated read on where the leader actually stands, from the people who see them work), and coaching inside a proven framework (individually applying what the cohort works on to each leader’s real situation).
06 | How Can You Mitigate the Problem?
"A few different ways."
Not, "the way."
Self-paced study online.
Fiction & non-fiction books.
Cohort learning.
In-person & virtual training.
Structured assessments.
Coaching inside a proven framework.
The research on what actually develops senior leaders is now clear enough to design around. Three components consistently produce the strongest return on investment: peer-based cohort learning, formal assessment of where the leader stands today, and individual coaching applied inside a proven framework. AZMTH’s Operate–Navigate–Communicate framework is the approach that brings all three together.
27%-69%
Reported effectiveness of cohort-based learning rose from 27% in 2020 to 69% in 2024 — making it one of the fastest growing learning approaches of the last five years.
Brandon Hall Group · 2024
86%
of companies report they made back the money they invested in coaching — and often more.
International Coaching Federation · 2023 Global Coaching Study, Executive Summary
79% vs 27%
of major change initiatives meet their goals when executive sponsors are
effective, compared to only 27% when sponsors are ineffective.
Prosci · Best Practices in Change Management
ABOUT AZMTH
AZMTH is the work of Michael Harms — a soon-to-be retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 4, AH-64 Apache pilot, and a Doctoral Candidate in Strategic Leadership. Two decades operating where decisions have consequences. A practitioner of how leaders make those decisions when the stakes are real.
Every engagement is grounded in the proprietary Operate–Navigate–Communicate framework — leadership architecture forged in aviation, refined through doctoral research, and proven with the senior leaders we serve. Defense contractors. Alaska Native Corporations. Strategic organizations where the cost of poor leadership is measured in more than quarterly numbers.
AZMTH is deliberately small. I measure results, not testimonials. And I do not take every client.