Beyond the Individual: The Case for Leadership Ecosystems
The evidence for peer networks, coaching and leadership ecosystems
When I first encountered peer advisory groups and coaching, I remember thinking that the idea seemed almost too simple. Bring a small group of leaders together. Create enough trust for them to talk honestly about what they are facing. Give them space to test decisions, challenge one another's assumptions, share what they have learned and hold each other accountable.
Of course that should be valuable. What I hadn't fully appreciated then was how much research sits behind that seemingly simple idea—or how far the potential impact extends beyond having a supportive group of people around you. We still tend to think about leadership development primarily as an individual pursuit. We develop competencies, attend leadership programmes, work with coaches and seek mentors. All of these things can matter. But a growing body of research points to something broader: who surrounds us matters too.
The research does not study all of these relationships under one label. What we commonly call peer advisory sits at the intersection of several established fields of research, including peer effects, peer coaching, developmental networks, mentoring and sponsorship. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the relationships around a leader can influence the information she has access to, the assumptions she questions, the opportunities she sees, and ultimately the trajectory of her career.
For organisations, the implications may be equally important. Better leadership decisions, stronger collaboration, more effective teams and the movement of talented people into bigger roles all have value beyond the individual leader.
This is why I believe we need to think less about isolated leadership interventions and more about leadership infrastructure.
The power of the right peers
One of the most compelling recent studies comes from Menaka Hampole, Francesca Truffa and Ashley Wong, published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2026.[1]
The researchers studied graduates of a top US MBA programme. Because students were assigned to sections in a way that created exogenous variation in the proportion of women among their peers, the researchers had an unusually strong opportunity to examine whether exposure to female peers affected women's subsequent career trajectories.
The starting point was striking: female MBA graduates were 24% less likely than male graduates to enter senior management within 15 years.
But the peer environment made a difference. A four-percentage-point increase in the share of female peers—approximately one standard deviation in the study—was associated with an 8.4% increase relative to the baseline probability of women reaching senior management. In absolute terms, this represents roughly a 3.3-percentage-point increase from a 39.1% baseline. The authors estimate that the effect could close approximately 26% of the gender gap in senior management.[1]
The same effect was not found for men.
The mechanisms are perhaps even more interesting than the headline number. The researchers identify information sharing, particularly gender-specific career advice; greater ambition and self-confidence; and increased support from male MBA peers. Women exposed to more female peers were also more likely to move towards organisations offering environments in which women had greater opportunities to progress.[1]
This was not a study of facilitated peer advisory groups, so we should not claim that putting women into a peer circle automatically produces an 8.4% increase in senior-management attainment. What it provides is unusually strong evidence for a broader proposition: our peer environment can influence where our careers take us.
It is not about having a bigger network
This is an important distinction because what I am describing is not networking in the traditional sense. More than two decades ago, Monica Higgins and Kathy Kram challenged the conventional model of career development centred on one senior mentor. They introduced the idea of a developmental network: a constellation of relationships that can provide different kinds of developmental support throughout a person's career.[2]
That idea feels even more relevant today. One person may challenge our thinking. Another may have already faced the problem we are trying to solve. Someone else may give us feedback we are not receiving inside our organisation. Another may introduce us to an opportunity. A sponsor may advocate for us when we are not in the room.
No single relationship needs to do everything.
Research involving 427 professional women reinforces the importance of the quality and composition of these networks. Network size and the intimacy of developmental relationships were positively associated with career satisfaction, while simply having more frequent contact or a wider-ranging network was not automatically associated with better outcomes. Relationships with higher-status developers also contributed through role modelling.[3]
Other research describes developmental networks as potential sources of knowledge, feedback, motivation and career opportunity.[4] The evidence therefore suggests something more nuanced than “build a bigger network”. It is about building the right network around you. The value lies not in the number of names in a contact list, but in what becomes possible through the relationships: perspectives we would not otherwise encounter, information we did not possess, assumptions we had not questioned and opportunities we might never have seen.
Peer learning can create value beyond the individual
There is also evidence that the effects of peer development can extend into the organisation. A study involving 58 teams, 58 leaders and 397 employees examined the relationship between leader coaching, peer coaching and team performance. It found that peer coaching helped transmit the relationship between leader coaching and team performance, with the relationship between peer coaching and performance particularly strong in highly interdependent teams.[5] This begins to explain why peer advisory can potentially create value beyond the person sitting in the room. A leader who sees a problem differently may make a better decision. A leader who learns how another executive has handled a similar challenge can avoid repeating the same mistakes. A leader who changes how she delegates, influences or engages her team can affect the performance of many more people. The learning travels back into the organisation.
Coaching adds something different
Peer advisory is powerful partly because of the experience and perspectives around the table. Coaching provides something different: dedicated space to step outside the day-to-day, examine how we are leading, challenge assumptions and patterns, and translate insight into action. The evidence that coaching can make a meaningful difference has become increasingly robust.
A 2023 meta-analysis by Erik de Haan and Viktor Nilsson brought together 37 randomized controlled studies, 39 coaching samples and 2,528 participants. By restricting their analysis to randomized controlled trials, the researchers applied a particularly rigorous test of coaching effectiveness. Across the studies, workplace and executive coaching produced a statistically significant positive effect across leadership and personal outcomes, with the authors' best estimate falling in the moderate range.[6]
A separate 2023 meta-analysis examining newer workplace-coaching research reached a similar conclusion. Coaching was associated with positive organisationally relevant outcomes, with particularly strong results for the development of skills. Importantly, positive effects were also found in studies where outcomes were assessed by managers, although the number of studies using manager ratings was relatively small.[7]
Earlier research helps us understand what some of those changes can look like. A meta-analysis of psychologically informed workplace coaching found particularly strong effects for goal attainment, alongside positive effects for general perceived efficacy and smaller positive effects for performance assessed by others and workplace psychological well-being.[8]
More recently, a 2024 European meta-analysis brought together 24 studies, 52 effects and 1,405 participants and found medium-to-strong overall effects for professional systemic coaching across emotional, cognitive and behavioural outcomes.[9] The studies were heterogeneous, however, so the size of the effect should not be treated as a universal prediction of what any particular coaching intervention will achieve.
The coaching evidence is not perfect. Researchers continue to identify limitations in the size and consistency of the evidence base, differences between coaching approaches and unanswered questions about precisely what works best, for whom and under what conditions.[7] We should therefore be cautious of simplistic claims that coaching produces a guaranteed financial return.
But the overall picture across multiple meta-analyses is increasingly persuasive. Coaching is associated with meaningful improvements in areas that matter to leadership, including skills, goal attainment, efficacy, behaviour and performance.
For organisations, that is where the potential value lies. The return is not simply that an executive has had a valuable conversation. It is what that executive subsequently does differently as a leader.
For women, support is important—but support alone may not be enough
There is another important dimension to this research, particularly when we think about women's leadership. A 2023 cross-sectional study of 159 faculty members at several US institutions found that women reported receiving more psychosocial support from individual members of their developmental networks than men. Yet women's developers were more frequently characterised as friends and less frequently as sponsors and allies.[10] Because this was a relatively small study of US university faculty, we should be careful about extrapolating the finding directly to women executives in Europe. But the distinction it raises is important.
Women can have strong support networks and still lack access to some of the relationships that create career leverage. Recent European research makes the point from another angle. A 2025 study based on interviews with women leaders in multinational organisations in France and Spain found that career progression was supported through combinations of relationships with superiors and informal networks inside and outside the organisation. The researchers argue for moving beyond dependence on a single sponsor towards a constellation of sponsors capable of providing different forms of support and opportunity at different career stages.[11]
This suggests that a serious leadership ecosystem needs to provide more than community. It needs to create access to different forms of developmental capital.
I think about these as five interconnected forms.
Support gives us people with whom we can be honest, including about challenges that can be difficult to discuss inside our own organisations.
Challenge gives us people willing to question our assumptions and tell us what we may not want to hear.
Insight gives us access to experiences and perspectives beyond our own.
Access connects us to information, relationships and opportunities that we might not otherwise encounter.
Sponsorship goes further still: someone is willing to use their own credibility and influence to advocate for us and create opportunities.
These are different things, and leaders need different combinations of them at different moments in their careers.
From individual interventions to leadership ecosystems
This is where the idea of an ecosystem becomes particularly interesting.
If coaching can help leaders turn reflection into behavioural change; if peers can provide information, challenge and collective intelligence; if developmental networks can influence career experiences and access to opportunity; if peer coaching can contribute to team performance; and if sponsorship helps translate capability into career opportunity, then perhaps our model of leadership development is too narrow.
We tend to deliver these things separately: a leadership programme over here, a coaching engagement over there, a mentoring scheme somewhere else, an alumni network, a women's network, an annual conference, perhaps a sponsorship initiative.
But leaders do not experience their careers in neat programme modules. They encounter difficult decisions, transitions, opportunities, setbacks and inflection points over many years.
What would happen if the infrastructure around them was equally continuous?
A trusted peer advisory circle could provide a consistent place for challenge and collective problem-solving. One-to-one coaching could create deeper space for individual reflection and behavioural change. A wider ecosystem could expose leaders to people outside their immediate company, sector or country. Over time, those relationships could generate introductions, collaboration, role modelling, sponsorship and access to opportunities.
The individual elements are not new. The opportunity lies in connecting them.
This is one of the ideas behind Titan. We are building a pan-European leadership ecosystem for women not because women need another network, and certainly not because women need to be “fixed” in order to lead. Women already have capability.
What is not always distributed equally is the infrastructure around that capability: access to trusted peers, challenge, information, influential relationships, sponsorship and opportunity.
That changes the question we should be asking about leadership development. Instead of asking only, What capabilities does this leader need to develop?, perhaps we should also ask: What relationships, perspectives, access and opportunities need to exist around her for that capability to translate into impact?
Because leadership does not develop in isolation. It develops through the interaction of capability, relationships, access and opportunity.
And if we want more women not simply entering leadership but progressing, influencing and thriving there, building that infrastructure may be one of the most important places to start.
References
[1] Hampole, M., Truffa, F. & Wong, A. (2026). Peer Effects and the Gender Gap in Corporate Leadership: Evidence from MBA Students. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 141(3), 2499–2554. DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjag015.
[2] Higgins, M. C. & Kram, K. E. (2001). Reconceptualizing Mentoring at Work: A Developmental Network Perspective. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 264–288. DOI: 10.5465/amr.2001.4378023.
[3] Chang, J., Baek, P. & Kim, T. (2021). Women's Developmental Networks and Career Satisfaction: Developmental Functions as a Mediator. Journal of Career Development, 48(5), 733–750. DOI: 10.1177/0894845319900005.
[4] Chollet, B., Islam, G. & Ventolini, S. (2021). Everybody's looking for something: Developmental networks as subjective career relationships. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 124, 103517. DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2020.103517.
[5] Dong, Y., Dong, H., Yuan, Y. & Jiang, J. (2022). Role of Peer Coaching in Transmitting the Benefits of Leader Coaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 679370. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.679370.
[6] de Haan, E. & Nilsson, V. O. (2023). What Can We Know about the Effectiveness of Coaching? A Meta-Analysis Based Only on Randomized Controlled Trials. Academy of Management Learning & Education. DOI: 10.5465/amle.2022.0107.
[7] Cannon-Bowers, J. A., Bowers, C. A., Carlson, C. E., Doherty, S. L., Evans, J. & Hall, J. (2023). Workplace coaching: a meta-analysis and recommendations for advancing the science of coaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1204166. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1204166.
[8] Wang, Q., Lai, Y.-L., Xu, X. & McDowall, A. (2022). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: a meta-analysis of contemporary psychologically informed coaching approaches. Journal of Work-Applied Management, 14(1), 77–101. DOI: 10.1108/JWAM-04-2021-0030.
[9] Bachmann, T. & Willermann, L. (2024). Zur Wirksamkeit von systemischem Coaching im Arbeits- und Organisationskontext – Eine Metaanalyse. Organisationsberatung, Supervision, Coaching, 31, 563–583. DOI: 10.1007/s11613-024-00910-1.
[10] Shore, X., Soller, B., Mickel, N., Wiskur, B., Morales, D., Dominguez, N., Tigges, B., Helitzer, D., Myers, O. & Sood, A. (2023). Gender Differences in Self-reported Faculty Developmental Networks. The Chronicle of Mentoring & Coaching, 7(SI16), 445–452.
[11] Gröschl, S., Gabaldon, P., Hahn, T. & Kelan, E. K. (2025). The Emergence and Effects of Sponsors for Women Leaders. Gender, Work & Organization, 32(5), 1786–1796. DOI: 10.1111/gwao.13217.
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