Three moments bring leaders to the Academy.
The promotion
A leader steps into a Director or VP role, and the decisions arrive before the experience to match them. The company that wants this leader to succeed equips them with a structure for deciding from the first week. The decisions that define the role are made with it.
The founder moment
Founders in growth phases, or when scaling, can no longer be in every decision. Decisions have to travel downstream and arrive intact.
The standard
A leadership team in a high-velocity company notices the signals before it can name the cause. Decisions leave the room agreed and come back as open questions. Something is off, and it has a shape: everybody is solving for a different problem.
It often starts with
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A larger scope, P&L, or organization taken on overnight
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The first 90 to 180 days, when every decision sets precedent
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A team inherited, not built, and not yet trusted
It often starts with
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A large round closed, and capital and headcount to deploy fast
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A team past fifty people, where the founder no longer knows everyone
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Revenue growing faster than the operating system beneath it
It often starts with
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A reorg or layoff, and the people who stayed are watching
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A bet that is not working, and the call to double down or stop is overdue
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A key executive gone, and the question of who scales with the company
THE COSTS
It shows up in the first two years of a bigger role.
27– 46%
of executive transitions are judged a failure or a disappointment after two years.
15%
lower performance from the direct reports of a new leader who struggles.
61%
of managers say most of their decision-making time is used ineffectively.
Published research, not Bole results. McKinsey, 2018, citing CEB and IED/Alexcel; McKinsey, 2019.
THE SIGNALS
What it sounds like inside the company.
“We had to switch strategy again.”
“Decisions get pushed forward and go nowhere.”
“The goals are not cascading down.”
Leadership Under Pressure
WHAT SEASONED LEADERS SAID IN THE LEADERSHIP UNDER PRESSURE INTERVIEWS
"All the metrics showed that we were doing a good job, but the clients weren’t coming back."
"It felt like there were no options. Just grow at all costs."
"We were each running on different information and did not know it."
Laura Schaeffer
VP, Hulu, Strategic Planning and Operations
Ashwin Madgavkar
Founder and Former CEO Ceres Imaging
Chad Rogers
Managing Partner, CRO
Your decision holds after you leave the room. In front of the team, in front of the board, and six months into execution.
The team
It is closed once. No second deck, no third version by Friday.
The board
It can be defended without being re-argued, with the trade-off named before anyone asks.
Six months in
It still describes what the company is doing, when everything around it has shifted.
THE OUTCOME
THE PILOT
See the method before you commit a team.
Module 1 with three to five of your leaders from different teams. Enough to know whether Bole is the standard you want, and what it would take to make it one. For the Head of People or the investor sponsoring a leader, the pilot is the evidence before the commitment.
FOUNDED BY
Nicole Pavelka
Twenty years in design strategy and executive environments, for the BMW Group as a client and as VP Global Brand and Marketing at a software company through a period of scaling. Over the past two years she turned what she saw into Bole, built on interviews with seventy-five executives and established research into how leaders decide under pressure. The Academy is the platform she founded to hold it, and the programs that follow.