Leadership Advisory
Purpose
Rousseau works with Chief Executives, senior leaders and Board members as a wholly independent thinking partner. We bring no agenda beyond the success and wellbeing of the individual or team. Our work spans leadership counsel, strategic sounding board, and career stewardship: supporting leaders to navigate complexity and strengthen their influence. We work discreetly, over the long term, with people who expect the highest standards of judgement and care.
Rousseau Partners was founded in 2006 to work at the highest levels of European private equity. For its first ten years, the firm operated as a specialist executive search practice, placing senior leaders into leading private equity firms. We built a deep understanding of what exceptional leadership looks like in that world, and earned the trust of those who lead within it.
Over the past ten years, Rousseau made a deliberate and considered pivot: away from placement, and towards the longer-term work of developing the leaders it had spent years identifying. Today, working one-to-one with clients, and in select team contexts, we serve as a sounding board for critical thinking and decision-making, drawing on coaching, peer reviews and in-depth assessments to deepen self-awareness, sharpen personal brand, and refine leadership in service of lasting performance. The transition reflects a simple conviction: that knowing what great leadership requires is only the beginning - helping leaders achieve it is the more enduring work.
Approach
We work with leaders and leadership teams. One-to-one with clients, we serve as a sounding board for critical thinking and decision-making. With teams, we support groups to work as more than simply the ‘sum of the parts’, build greater collective trust and higher performance. The purpose is to face challenges directly, discuss approaches to meet those challenges and critically assess how personal actions and reputation impact organisations and relationships that are critical to success.
Self-awareness can be enhanced through specific, confidential fact-finding. Rousseau can conduct Hogan Assessments and in-depth referencing to gain detailed data on how individuals and teams are perceived by others. Discussions to address points of feedback are informative and constructive. The complexities of individuals, cultures and leadership can be considered, in detail and in their wider context, in order to identify options for progression and development.
Conversations are confidential and handled with sensitivity, while being appropriately direct. Clients develop tools that lead to more courageous leadership and greater resilience.