Excellence in leadership development

We deliver leadership development and coaching services, for better leadership in successful organisations with fulfilled, effective, people.

We research, design, run and evaluate leadership development programmes for better leadership.  We develop high-potential people, emerging talent, managers and senior leaders, and accredited coach training programmes for better-quality leadership coaching.

We create leadership and coaching cultures for whole organisations: for managers, individuals and teams; so people are more engaged and organisations are more productive

Our focus is leadership and leadership coaching.

Forton Group Programmes deliver lasting benefits to

• The bottom line: Increased sales, cost improvements/ avoidance
• People: Increased engagement, better buy-in to change
• HR: Cost reductions e.g. recruitment expenses; superior retention rates; fewer talented people leaving; higher quality succession
• Operational issues including: Health & safety; regulation and conduct compliance; performance and productivity

The Forton Group delivers excellence in leadership development through training courses, coaching services, consulting and research.  We offer leadership training courses and coaching services - for tangibly better leaders.  Forton develops tangibly better leaders; for successful organisations with more fulfilled, effective, people. 

We deliver leadership development programmes - courses that deliver tangibly better leadership for emerging talent, managers and senior leaders, and accredited coach training programmes for better quality leadership coaching.

We work to international standards to deliver more engaging leadership.  We work to global standards for international organisations with our people around the world, chosen carefully for their expertise, and partner with expert organisations internationally, too. 

We create leadership and coaching cultures for whole organisations: for managers, individuals and teams; so people are more engaged and organisations are more productive.

Contact us:

We deliver tangibly-better leadership to your organisation

Forton Group Consultants deliver the tools that equip leaders to deliver effectively, and raise standards of leadership in organisations.  We care about the quality of what we do and the results that our services generate; we partner with client organisations to enable them to -

• Stimulate a leadership environment
• Generate culture change on individual and organisational levels
• Create coach-like leadership cultures
• Identify, Assess and Develop people with high potential
• Support effective transformation and sustainable change initiatives
• Raise, and maintain, employee engagement
• Support business partnering in enabling functions, e.g. HR, financial and shared services
• Measure the success and return on investment (ROI) of development activities

Download information

• Leadership Development Services
• Leadership Coaching Services
• Case Study Evidence

Our Services

The 4D Method - preparing for better leadership

Our services include consulting, research, diagnostic and psychometric tools, assessment and development centres, facilitation and training services.  The 4D method is a systematic process to ensure that, when you develop your leaders, you're using your resources systematically and effectively.  

We offer a method for you to measure your ROI, to demonstrate the lasting results and benefits from your investment, set out below.

Leadership Development Services

1. Define your leadership needs

If you need to define what 'good' looks like, use our research and consulting services.  You will better identify your organisation's high-level and strategic leadership needs, and design programmes to meet those needs. You can more easily pinpoint the return on investment (ROI) and impacts of your investment too.

Forton Group Consultants are experts in both Leadership Development and coaching.

• We create value for our customers through the experience we bring in leadership
• We deliver world class leadership coaching, for first time managers right through to board level
• We develop leaders’ own coaching ability, sometimes known as ‘manager as coach’ training; towards a more effective leadership style
• We support clients’ internal coaching capacity to enable culture change
• Our coaches and trainers are ICF accredited professionals and have substantial business and corporate backgrounds

We strongly believe in measurable standards and quality in everything we do.

Our Approach

The 4D Model for Developing Leaders

The Forton Leadership Development Model

Our services equip clients to achieve their goals through leadership development. 

We deliver from a platform of consistent, measurable standards and our clients can rely on dependable quality and current thinking.  We specialise in working with scientific and engineering, health, IT, logistics, and other technical/professional leaders and managers, and professionals working in these areas within international organisations.  

International client case studies:

• Sustainable Impacts of Forton’s Leadership Development Programme, Queensland, Australia
• Developing Leadership, City of Mississauga, Canada,
• Coaching Business Case, UK National Health Service Institute

Put simply: people are at their most productive when they are able to deliver to their aspirations and strengths. 

Whatever their professional and technical skills background, when people fulfil their highest potential employers benefit from that discretionary effort on the bottom line.  Our clients include well-known organisations in the corporate, health, education and government sectors, across the world. 

Case Study:

Our work contributed to great success in one of our clients: a well known engineering company (32,000 employees), who recently won a prestigious national award for their people development. 

• We coach individual leaders from their Talent Pool and have evidence of  significant return on investment, including improved productivity, significant cost savings, enhanced employee engagement scores and better business decisions
• We trained over 1500 people in leadership coaching programmes, creating a culture of responsibility and accountability in the overall business
• More than 100 people have been trained to a higher level of the professional coach training programme; equipping them to coach a further 1000 individuals throughout the business– to world-class coaching standards
• A further 13 people have been trained to deliver Ignite Leadership Coaching: the foundation coaching skills course under licence. 800 people will learn these skills, building an organisation strength in coaching.
• Forty senior managers received one-to-one coaching around their communications skills, building new teams, achieving challenging cost-reduction targets and maintaining high employee engagement scores at the same time
• We measured the ROI for the client, benchmarked it against control groups and the client themselves undertook research to measure the business impacts

The culture change has resulted in a domino effect, positively impacting the overall culture and has clearly worked, hence the award.

The Professional Leadership Coach Training is founded on a unique coaching model built for organisations by leadership and coach training experts; it forms part of the International Coach Federation ‘Accredited Coach Training Programme’.

• A second generation coaching tool, encompassing far more than earlier models
• It appreciate the complexity of working and succeeding inside organisations
• It looks at the need for leadership cultures and how coaching can deliver
• It encourages resourcefulness, using a strengths based approach to maximise peoples’ potential
• It is proven in achieving real buy-in and generating significant results

• Our model is underpinned by academic evidence
• We have a demonstrable track record
• We prove your programme’s ROI

The model is predicated on two definitions:

“Coaching supports you to get what you want, without telling you what to do, or doing it for you.”

“Leadership is about being personally successful and enabling success in others.”

The coaching model itself has four dimensions:

1. The skills of the coach
2. The steps of the coaching conversation
3. The principles on which coaching is founded
4. The field, or the world, of the client

You can see the Professional Leadership Coaching Model presented online at www.thefortongroup.com

1. TAKE: Evidence-based, agile, leadership behaviours
2. BLEND WITH: Engaging leadership styles:
   emotionally-intelligent, consultative and coach-like
3. THIS CREATES: Situational success in complex contexts: whether it's the leader themselves, their team, the organisation, or in the wider society
4. WHICH YIELDS: Demonstrable, measurable results

We reduce your time, money and effort by prioritising concrete results to deliver tangibly better leadership

The Forton Group is committed to delivering results and passionate about clients getting a return on their investment.  To this end, we offer a number of ways of measuring the impact of the work we do, or providing customers with the tools to evaluate the impacts in-house:

• We measure the impact of all coaching, training and facilitation services at the point of delivery
• We provide an online tool, which can be tailored to your organisation’s development objectives, leadership competences, or other behavioural frameworks and measured using the ‘Kirkpatrick’ methodology against -
• Skills learned
• Skills applied
• Business application
• Business benefits and ROI
• We can provide an interview service to explore the detail of business results, particularly useful when actual case examples are required to demonstrate the results from developmental activities

The Forton Group started with a global accreditation, with the International Coach Federation (ICF), and anyone attending our programmes can use the training to obtain an internationally recognised coaching qualification. 

• Our commitment is that we will support our students in practical ways to achieve this.
• The ICF meets recognised, international, standards
• The programmes and model have been independently reviewed by professional peers
• We work to a very high standard of ethics and delivery

The Forton Group aims to achieve UK Academic accreditation in 2010, to demonstrate the unique combination of academic rigour and professional coaching skills embodied in the programme.

The International Coach Federation measures the Coach Training School against its code of ethics and eleven coaching competences – a global standard for professional coaching.  Other countries and accrediting bodies have borrowed this approach; to date none match their standards of professionalism and coaching competencies.  The International Coach Federation has four expectations of Accredited Coach Training Schools:

1. The quality of delivery and coaching experience of the faculty
2. The delivery of all eleven ICF competences through the training programmes
3. The number of hours coaching experience achieved by the participants
4. The fact that participants are observed in real coaching sessions and given feedback on their coaching as part of their professional coach development

At the time of writing anyone can call themselves a ‘coach’; we believe that for professional coaches their training and experience should at least match those of the ICF.

Our Level 7 Post-Graduate Certificate in Leadership Coaching and Mentoring is accredited by the Chartered Management Institute and externally verified by the National Centre for Strategic Leadership.

There is no single global standard of leadership education.  Each country has its own national standards.  It is the Forton Group’s aim to show how our development programmes are equivalent in each country.

For example: our Level 7 Post-Graduate Certificate Leadership Coaching and Mentoring Programme, and our Level 7 Post-Graduate Certificate in Strategic Leadership are equivalent to most countries’ ‘Post-Graduate Level Education’; it’s the title that’s different.

In Australia and New Zealand, these programmes equate to ‘Level 8’ Post-graduate education.

For details about how the leadership programmes offered by the Forton Group equate to post-graduate training in your country, contact

Chartered Management Institute (CMI)

“CMI qualifications at QCF Level 7 portray practical skills and competences that are rated in academic terms as being comparable to Master’s Degrees, Integrated Master’s Degrees, Postgraduate Diplomas, Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) and Postgraduate Certificates.”

For more details go to www.managers.org.uk

International Coach Federation (ICF)

ICF credentials are globally recognised as meeting professional standards of applied coaching skills at three levels:

• Associate Certified Coach achieved through 60+ hours training; 10 hours coach-mentoring; 100 logged coaching hours
• Professional Certified Coach achieved through 120+ hours training; 10 hours coach-mentoring; 500 logged coaching hours; plus assessment of coaching
• Master Certified Coach achieved through 200+ hours training; 10 hours coach-mentoring; 2500 logged coaching hours

Coaches are also expected to pass a Coach Knowledge Assessment

For more details go to https://coachfederation.org

We respect the full range of coaching qualifications available to people looking to build their coaching skills and notice that there are key differences in approach. 

Different coach training institutions are working towards different goals for their students, which may include:

• Academic theories of coaching, management or leadership
• Life coaching models
• Re-branding other developmental/talking methodologies as ‘coaching’

Some institutions put a higher focus on coaching theory and models and less time spent on coaching practices; we recommend that potential students consider whether you are looking for:

• Purely personal development
• The opportunity to spend time exploring theories and models;
• The level of professionalism to which they aspire;
• The context within which they intend to apply their knowledge or skills.

The leadership and business focus of the Forton Group coach training programme may not suit every potential coach.  We are happy to recommend other ICF accredited programmes. 

Similarly, we welcome graduates from other coaching schools who wish to develop their professional skills in the areas of organisation and leadership coaching.

Sign up for leadership development and coaching insights HERE

The Forton Group accepts prior learning from other accrediting schools and bodies.  To apply using your prior learning as course credits, we will arrange a 1-1 conversation with a senior Faculty member and organise a tailored bridging programme.