Entrepreneur and leadership coach Katy Tuncer has enjoyed a distinguished career in a multitude of diverse roles. Now director at Horizon 37, Katy is championing the Horizon method, helping leadership teams transform their practices and achieve mesmerising scale-up results. Speaking on The Leaders Council Podcast, Katy shares more about her story and what Horizon 37 do best today.
Initially asked by podcast host Joshua Jackson to delve into her own background in the leadership world, Katy explained how a rollercoaster journey around the world, a chain of projects and a passion for nurturing leaders led her to establishing Horizon 37, which she runs today:
“My own leadership journey covers a lot of things, from rather traditional roles being a British Army Officer to being head of performance planning and risk at the Met Police to working at McKinsey the global management consultancy.
“At McKinsey, I worked in energy, consumer goods, and healthcare, and I specialised in organisational performance. It then got a bit more creative, and McKinsey spun out, so I worked as a sports sector specialist including for London 2012 setting the Olympic commercial strategy for our home games. My leadership career has also taken me around the world, working for Oxfam in Senegal, the Ministry of Health in Bahrain, the Ministry of Sport in Saudi Arabia, all sorts of things.
“I’ve also founded some community movements around leadership in motherhood, to help mothers create an identity and empower them as leaders as well as mums. Ready Steady Mums which is all about community connection and physical activity for new mothers is another project of mine to help empower them to fulfil their full potential.
“Much of my career has been about start-ups innovation. There’s been lots of success and some failures that have led me on the journey to where I am today. I’m always going to be a creative inventor and founding Horizon 37 was a way to realise my full passion in supporting those brilliant leaders out there to step up and scale up their innovative businesses.”
Today, Katy heads up Horizon 37’s aims to transform leadership within innovative business, from scale-up ambitions to sustaining success, helping them achieve commercial value and fulfil their potential.
Many of the leaders that Horizon 37 works with are fast-learning executives who want to bring change with their innovations, but for whom perhaps scaling-up their businesses in a sustainable way is proving a challenge. The HorizonMethod programmes are therefore quick-paced, focused and designed to challenge thinking, but fundamentally are results driven and adaptable to the firm and teams that Horizon 37 is working with.
Katy said: “There's no one size fits all. There's no one way of leading and there's no one way of scaling a business and case by case you need to work out what is necessary and what the essential mission critical components are to get it right. A lot of our work at Horizon 37 is around helping companies work that out.
“You can't do it all, if you were in a conventional organisation and you think: ‘Okay, I'm going to go up the career ladder, I'm going to become a comprehensively great well-rounded leader’, well that's maybe realistic in certain scenarios. But if you're leading a scale up, you'll see everything at pace, and there's your unique circumstances which not the same as anybody else's. Every business is different, and every team is different. Of the thousands of things you could do, you have to choose what your way of doing things is, and what are the handful of things that are going to make the difference that achieves the best business outcome. We’re often talking weeks and months of timescales here, companies don’t have years and years to trial and error and get this right. So we help open leaders up to different ways of doing things.
“A definition of leadership we work with is about ‘generating positive results through others’. Every word in that definition is essential. It’s not about working with most of the people who are leading innovation, it’s the ‘generating results through others’ that is the essential part. That’s what leading is, it’s about generating. Generating can be done in many different ways, not just the old-fashioned way of ‘directing’. There also isn’t any particular style or technique to adhere to that always guarantees success, you can choose the right one for you. Our definition of leadership is purposely directed toward the outcome that you achieve and I love to compare that to previous stages of my career.
“We’ve come a long way since the 1990s where a prominent definition of leadership was about ‘he who has the will to dominate over his fellow men’. That isn’t ancient history but we are really getting better at understanding in society now that there is a huge diversity of leadership that is needed specific to certain situations and the circumstances and people involved at the time.”
Horizon 37 programmes can be delivered to a cohort of CEOs of different businesses or a standalone executive team from one firm. As Katy highlighted, each programme is designed to address the unique needs of each business through various sessions and leadership activities with individuals and the collective team.
The HorizonMethod of coaching which is fundamental to each of Horizon 37’s programmes is underpinned by research carried out with highly-respected businesses and organisations. The HorizonMethod today helps determine which interventions will make the most impactful difference for each business to ensure the result is as effective as possible.
Katy elaborated: “Our research identified four mission critical components for transforming leadership, those being setting direction; creating a company culture; managing performance; and then giving and receiving feedback. These rose to the top as the key enablers of outstanding business outcomes in scale-up processes.
“They are not the only ones, there are about 14 more that we also call the ‘tail components’ but those four were the key points of focus. These four components we consistently observed all correlate with business success. Now, why is that? I can speculate that these seem to be essential when your business grows to a headcount of around 40. Things start to happen then which mean you can’t count on bilateral conversations to build alignment across the business. You can't just all be nice to each other anymore; you need to have some more robust and difficult conversations at times. And it's just something about the human dynamic, so when an organisation gets to that size these four things become so essential.
“Beyond those four things, you also have to proliferate the leadership across a set of leaders. So, we talk about creating a business full of leaders, not just the one who gets the four things right. It isn’t just a case of implementing those four steps and it’s ‘job done’, it’s a team effort. One can’t do it alone.”
Horizon 37 delivers its impact through two core leadership programmes and a leadership proliferation programme.
The first of the core programmes is a three-point flagship scale-up leadership initiative, where leadership teams in scale-up businesses work in partnership with their team of Horizon coaches to
optimise, launch or pivot their leadership for growth.
This programme consists of the ‘Discover, Align, Transform’ approach, where teams and coaches work for a nine-month period to challenge thinking, transform leadership performance and achieve real results.
Participants initially set out their ambitions and align with coaches on purpose, approach and timelines and establish needs and preferences through Horizon37’s ‘Leadership Launchpad’ diagnostic tool, before exploring how they want to lead and what needs to be changed within their businesses to achieve the types of leadership they desire.
Participants can expect to choose immediate and high-impact actions and then trial their newfound techniques to implement quick wins. Through reflection, participants come to appreciate the impact of their new actions before building on breakthroughs they have made and committing to longer-term transformation. Support is provided by Horizon 37 to ensure that this short-term progress translates to lasting change.
The second core programme, known as ‘Transform Together’, is targeted toward cohorts of CEOs of different companies. The participating leaders take part in a learning journey together, readying themselves for overseeing the scale-up within their own unique businesses.
The six-month programme sees participants work with expert coaches to align on purpose, approach and timescales, agreeing on an initial five key topics of focus. Using ‘Leadership Launchpad’, those undertaking the programme identify their own learning styles and preferences and are coached to understand their own personal leadership style and how to go about improving it. Through group coaching and one-to-one work, the leaders can develop new mindsets, techniques and leadership habits in the most critical areas for business success, enabling them to devise new ideas to implement in their businesses while the learning process is ongoing.
The leadership proliferation programme meanwhile, aims to assess the readiness of leadership teams and businesses for scale-up before the process of growth begins. It allows for ambitious leaders to plan immediate action and embolden their teams to step-up performance and productivity in readiness for delivering growth sustainably.
Targeted primarily at businesses that are in their first two years of trading and have ambition and potential for growth, the immediate purpose of this programme is to target gaps and enable quick actions to be taken where leaders have the most to gain for their organisations.
To date, Horizon 37 has worked with over 290 scale-up companies across multiple sectors including environment, energy, health and medical, finance, space, venture capital and more, delivering in excess of 185 programmes, all of which have achieved outstanding outcomes.
“They key is that we work with leadership teams to gather insight for them and with them,” Katy said.
“It’s about being in partnership with them and not doing these things ‘at them’. It is very important to get the opinion of the board to get the executive team themselves to understand how they feel their current state is and what their needs of leadership are. It’s also important to talk to the staff.
“From there, we are a bit more structured, and we start looking at the 18 overall components including those four core ones we’ve touched on. We observe them then in action and put all that together to create a picture of what the steps forward will be. That will make the biggest difference to them.
“There is not the luxury here of doing things comprehensively and perfectly. It's got to be fast and dynamic, so based on this we then select the steps that will make the biggest difference, and then prioritise and work on those.
“Each company is going to have a different set of priorities and we’ll never see exactly the same thing. While there are some common themes, we will never have the same set of priorities for two scale-ups. This is what makes the innovation sector so exciting though, that there’s never more of the same. There are leaders where we don’t see a huge number of gaps but in some companies we might see a lot. Not all need to be filled but when they are filled, they’re done quickly. The leaders we work with are brilliant people, they’ve been able to create immense innovation already and my passion and our passion here is working with them and focus to make sure they make the steps forward in the right way and fulfil their great potential.”
Listen to the full interview with Horizon 37's Katy Tuncer on The Leaders Council Podcast below.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
