We help your emerging leaders reach their full potential — so your entire company can scale faster

We help firms assess and develop critical role players, who have the potential to become firm-wide leaders

Start a conversation

Experts leading experts

Your firm runs on experts — the front-line operators, the clinicians who patients trust, the innovators who look at the world differently, and of course, the rainmakers who actually bring in the work.

But your company’s future depends on something rarer: experts who can lead other experts. That is harder than it looks. It takes different skills and a different mindset.

And wanting to make this leadership transition is not evidence of being able to do it.

Some of your strongest experts think differently from everyone around them. Their leadership potential is real — and the easiest to overlook, because it doesn't arrive in the usual package.

About

Driving Results in 2026

29

senior partners through two successive cohort programs at one Am Law firm

15

leaders in a 12-month leadership lab at a PE-owned healthcare operator

4

professional service firms spanning law, private equity, and family-office investing

23%

compound annual increase in office profitability over two years under a managing partner we coached

How we drive results

Bench Strength analysis — a map of the leadership pipeline for the roles that matter most: who is coming through, who is ready for the next passage, and where the bench runs dry.

Leadership potential assessments — multi-faceted leadership potential assessments: their strengths, the risks that could derail them, and the conditions under which they succeed.

Coaching — confidential 360 feedback and advice to help proven experts become better leaders, and to help them embrace fundamentally new, leadership mindsets.

Cohort programs — a group of leaders at the same transition point, inside one organization, solving a corporate problem — combining individual coaching, confidential 360s, action-learning teams, and case discussion.

Executive search — when the answer is a hire: an August Leadership engagement, through August's global network. Bench Strength does not conduct searches.

Who we serve

Private Equity

Assessment and leadership development for portfolio-company leaders, weighted to healthcare and the years right after acquisition — coaching, 360 feedback, action learning, and case discussion, combined in year-long labs that build the bench the growth plan assumes.

PE Portfolio Companies

Law Firms

Coaching and cohort programs for partners who aspire to become team leaders,  practice leaders, office leaders, and firm-wide leaders. We focus on Am Law 100 organizations that aspire to create a culture of leadership development.

Law Firms

Boards & CEOs

Succession is the board’s most consequential call, and the one most often made without a clear picture of the pipeline. We map the transitions that matter, assess rising leaders against them, and develop them before the appointment — not after the announcement.

Leadership Assessment

The problem

The traits that make experts successful are rarely the traits that make them effective leaders. Precision becomes perfectionism that won't delegate. Skepticism becomes risk aversion. Self-reliance becomes a bottleneck. These patterns are predictable, they are measurable, and they are most expensive at the moment of appointment — a practice chair, a portfolio-company CEO, a successor. We measure them before we coach them.

The method

  1. Assess — We use proprietary assessments to measure leadership potential within the context of your leadership pipeline.

  2. Develop — Coaching and cohort work against a small number of behaviorally anchored goals, in live situations.

  3. Measure — Goals are revisited and progress is evidenced over time. Development you can point to, not just feel.

A hiring toolkit, built by one partner cohort, now used firm-wide for leadership hiring
Practice Leader, Intellectual Property Practice, top-ranked Am Law firm

The principals

Jeffrey Cohn

Jeffrey Cohn

Leadership and succession adviser; Spencer Stuart and Heidrick & Struggles; co-author of many Harvard Business Review features on leadership and innovation. Co-author of the very first HBS case study on Apple. 

LinkedIn
Dr. Carrie Muchow

Dr. Carrie Muchow

Counseling psychologist who applies the science of assessment to leadership; co-developed a leadership assessment profile with DHR International.

LinkedIn

Every engagement is led by a founder. There is no junior bench.

About

The practice is built on 'Why Are We Bad at Picking Good Leaders?', Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran's award-winning book on evaluating leadership potential. — Thought Leadership

RESEARCH IN DEVELOPMENT

Hiring opens the door. What happens next?

Our new interview-based study examines how employers develop and advance neurodivergent talent — and how AI is changing the picture.

Explore the study →

Founder-led here, globally backed

Bench Strength is a founder-led boutique: both principals in the room, hands-on — the people you meet are the people who do the work.

We work in partnership with August Leadership, a global talent management consultancy. Bench Strength delivers assessment and development; any executive search is separately contracted and delivered through August Leadership, whose consultants can assess finalists with the same rigor we bring to our own work.

About — Our partnership with August Leadership

Start with the leadership question you need to resolve.

A confidential conversation about the people, decisions, or development challenges in front of you.

Start a conversation