tml Partners has launched Leadership Intelligence – a new executive intelligence and advisory service designed to help CEOs, CHROs, Boards and Executive Committees make better leadership decisions before a hiring process begins.
Built on more than a decade of specialist executive search, proprietary leadership data and real-time market insight, Leadership Intelligence uses emerging AI capabilities to help organisations define what great leadership looks like, benchmark themselves against the external market and answer increasingly complex questions around leadership, capability and organisational structure.
It represents an important evolution in tml Partners’ ambition to be more than a recruitment provider.
Our aim is to become a trusted Talent Strategist – helping clients determine not simply who they need to hire, but what leadership they need, how they should access it and ultimately how talent can best support their strategy.
The principle behind the new service is simple: Intelligence first. Search second.
The questions before the search are often the most important
Executive search traditionally starts once an organisation has decided what it wants. The strategy has been set. The structure has been agreed. The reporting line determined. The role defined. The job description written.
Then the search begins.
But increasingly, the pace of change means those assumptions need testing first.
AI, data, digital products, revenue operations, customer experience, pricing, brand and growth are converging and reshaping commercial leadership. Roles that appeared relatively settled five years ago are changing rapidly, while entirely new leadership mandates are emerging.
The challenge for Boards is therefore no longer simply finding the best available person.
It is knowing what they should be looking for in the first place.
- Is this the right role?
- What does world-class look like today?
- How are the best-performing organisations in our sector structured?
- What capabilities are emerging?
- Should this responsibility sit on the Executive Committee?
- Should we appoint internally or externally?
- Are we paying at the right level?
- Do we have sufficient diversity of thought?
- How will AI change this role – or potentially remove the need for it – over the next five years?
These are leadership strategy questions before they are recruitment questions.
Leadership Intelligence has been created to help answer them.
Turning more than a decade of search into intelligence
The foundations of the service have been built over tml Partners’ first decade.
Every executive search we have delivered, every appointment made, every client brief, remuneration conversation, talent map and confidential discussion with a senior leader has contributed to our understanding of the commercial leadership market.
Over time, that has created a significant proprietary intelligence asset spanning Board, ExCo and senior functional leadership across Sales, Marketing, Product, Corporate Affairs and wider commercial functions.
AI now gives us the opportunity to do something fundamentally different with that knowledge.
Rather than simply searching records individually, emerging AI capabilities allow us to connect and interrogate millions of proprietary data points across talent, organisations, capability, compensation, succession and market movement.
That can reveal patterns that would be difficult to identify through conventional research alone.
The important distinction is that the technology is not the intelligence.
The intelligence is the combination of proprietary data, trusted relationships, specialist market expertise and the context accumulated through years of working inside these leadership markets.
AI makes that asset more powerful.
From search partner to Talent Strategist
For tml Partners, Leadership Intelligence is also part of a much wider evolution in how we work with clients.
We believe the future of talent advisory should be solution-first rather than product-first.
A client should not have to decide whether they need an executive search firm, interim provider, consultant or outsourced solution before speaking to us.
They should be able to bring us the business problem. Our job is to understand it, challenge it where appropriate and recommend the best talent solution.
As Simon Bassett, CEO and Founder of tml Partners, explains:
Clients don’t wake up wanting to buy recruitment. They have a business problem they need to solve. Our ambition is to be the trusted Talent Strategist they call first – to understand the challenge, bring the market intelligence and then advise on the best solution.
Leadership Intelligence takes us further upstream. Before we talk about who to hire, we can help clients understand what great looks like, how their competitors are structured, what capabilities are emerging and whether permanent recruitment is even the right answer. Intelligence first. Search second.”
That shift is important because the range of ways organisations can access leadership capability has expanded significantly.
One leadership question. Multiple ways to solve it.
Permanent appointments remain critical, particularly when organisations are building long-term leadership capability.
But permanent hiring is no longer the only answer.
- A business entering a new market may need an experienced executive immediately but only for a defined period.
- A PE-backed company preparing for exit may require specialist commercial expertise to accelerate a particular value-creation programme.
- A CEO may need a fractional CMO, CRO or CPO rather than another permanent executive.
- A transformation programme may require an independent consultant with very specific experience.
- An organisation facing an unexpected leadership gap may need an interim executive.
- And some businesses may be better served by an outsourced team or on-demand capability rather than adding permanent headcount.
The leadership question therefore comes first.
The resourcing model comes second.
This is where Leadership Intelligence dovetails with tml Partners’ broader Talent Solutions.
Alongside permanent Professional and Executive Search, our capabilities include interim management, fixed-term appointments, on-demand and outsourced talent solutions.
Through Growth Partners, organisations can also access carefully selected independent consultants and fractional Board-level commercial leaders, bringing proven expertise into a business flexibly and off payroll.
The objective is not to push clients towards one solution.
It is to provide the intelligence and specialist advice to determine which solution is right.
Strategy. Structure. People.
This is ultimately the territory in which we believe a modern talent strategist should operate.
Strategy determines what an organisation is trying to achieve.
That strategy informs the structure and capabilities required to deliver it.
Only then should the organisation determine the people and talent solutions needed.
Leadership Intelligence enables tml to work with clients earlier in that journey.
- We can help a Board understand how leading competitors structure Sales, Marketing, Product and GTM.
- We can identify emerging leadership capabilities.
- We can benchmark internal succession candidates against the external market.
- We can provide remuneration intelligence.
- We can examine Board and ExCo structures and governance requirements.
- We can identify leadership archetypes and challenge assumptions around what the role should look like.
- We can bring independent external evidence to Nomination Committees considering significant appointments.
- And we can use broader market intelligence to challenge whether the organisation is looking widely enough to create genuine diversity of thought.
Only after answering those questions do we need to determine how the capability should be accessed.
Sometimes that will lead naturally to Executive Search.Sometimes it will point towards an interim executive, independent consultant or fractional leader.
Sometimes it may lead to an outsourced solution.
And sometimes the evidence will demonstrate that the right person is already inside the organisation.
Why now?
There is a broader change taking place across leadership advisory.
Technology is making public information easier to access and analyse. At the same time, the strategic value of genuinely proprietary market intelligence is increasing.
Leading global executive search firms are already broadening beyond traditional search into leadership strategy, assessment, organisational advisory and flexible talent models.
But there is an important opportunity for specialist firms.
Deep specialism creates depth of data. It creates trusted communities. It creates knowledge of how particular functions are evolving. And it creates context around talent that does not exist in public databases.
For tml, that specialism sits within the commercial leadership markets we have spent more than a decade building our business around.
Leadership Intelligence allows us to turn that accumulated knowledge into something clients can use independently of a search.
The next chapter for tml Partners
tml Partners was founded with a belief that deep specialism could deliver better outcomes than generalist recruitment.
That principle hasn’t changed. What is changing is how far we can take it.
The combination of specialist human expertise, proprietary market intelligence and AI creates an opportunity to advise clients much earlier and much more broadly around their leadership challenges.
Leadership Intelligence is an important part of that evolution.
So too is our continued investment in Executive Search, our expansion of interim and flexible talent solutions, the development of Growth Partners and our growing international capability.
Together, these services support a simple ambition:
To be the trusted talent strategist our clients turn to when a critical commercial leadership challenge emerges – not simply when they have a vacancy to fill.
Simon Bassett adds:
The next decade of tml will be about taking everything we’ve learned from our first decade and making that intelligence work harder for our clients.
We have exceptional networks, specialist knowledge, proprietary data and an increasingly broad range of ways to access world-class talent. AI gives us the opportunity to connect those assets in ways that simply weren’t possible when we started tml.
For me, Leadership Intelligence is a natural next step. It means we can get involved at the point where the most important questions are still being asked – and help clients make better decisions before the hiring process has even begun.”
Intelligence first. Search second.
Leadership Intelligence is available now as part of tml Partners’ wider Talent Solutions.
Organisations can engage tml to define leadership requirements, benchmark talent and remuneration, map competitors, assess succession options, examine organisational and ExCo structures, or undertake bespoke Leadership Intelligence around more complex strategic questions.
Whether the eventual answer is permanent search, interim leadership, independent consulting, fractional expertise, outsourcing – or no external hire at all – our starting point remains the same:
Understand the problem. Interrogate the market. Bring the evidence. Then find the right solution.
Intelligence first. Search second.
