About TJA
Imagine a world in which leaders value teamwork over turf, empowering people instead of having power over them.
A world where leaders care about humanity and health, more than just profit and wealth.
A world where leaders see and act on their responsibility to design the systems we participate in, so everyone can thrive.
Our purpose at TJA is to help bring about this world through transformational leadership—where people learn to lead with love, not fear.
A collective
Clients either work with Tom or one of the coaches he selects in the TJA network. When the work calls for something outside of our scope, we will refer you within a network of experts that we’ve benefited from knowing. They include purpose-driven strategy consultants, project managers, social scientists and designers.
Founder bio
Tom founded TJALeadership in 2018 to help leaders lead with less fear and more passion. Tom has been consulting with CEOs and executive teams since he came to the US in 1995 from the UK. He helped grow and ultimately led the management consulting business at SYPartners after founding its New York office. He came to see that too often, leadership teams wanted to change their companies without addressing their own fears and limitations. So he founded TJALeadership with the intent to help executives become the source of inspired change for their companies—to embody what is possible for others.
Through his experience coaching CEOs and management teams and being coached as a business leader, Tom has created an approach that is deeper and more effective than traditional executive coaching. The work challenges convention and benefits a leader’s life overall, including their colleagues and family members.
Tom has taught leadership at Columbia's School for International and Public Affairs. He has also taught leadership and designed curricula for GE’s Management Development Institute at Crotonville and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When he isn’t coaching, he may be swinging a kettlebell. Or hanging out with his family at the kitchen table (his favorite part of the house). He writes a monthly blog which you can find on substack here.
The future of leadership
The pandemic has accelerated trends that were already causing change—the move to more team-oriented work, the digital transformation of businesses, the effort to make our current economic and cultural system more equitable and sustainable.
The leaders who have risen to this moment are transformational, not transactional. They have seen their role as being to build teamwork, unite people, and lead with love—not fear—into the unknown.
Any institution that wants to thrive in the future will need to cultivate more transformational leadership, not just as a behavior but as an act of design.
Our approach to transformational leadership and teamwork
Our approach, based on decades of work with top executives and their teams, is based on three skillsets, all informed by a set of transformational principles. The governing principle of all of them is the transformative power of leading with love, not fear—a way to embrace uncertainty and the discomfort of leading into the unknown.
1 | Mutual accountability. This is the skillset of committing to a shared purpose and goals and includes designing a path forward, translating bold ideas to action, and seeing them through to completion.
2 | Inclusive communication. This is about the emotional intelligence of building trust and powerful teamwork, harnessing diverse talents to unlock the potential of the people around you.
3 | Learning and improving. This is about adopting an athletic growth mindset to learn from setbacks and successes, and pursue truth. It’s about a team that implements learning strategies to become progressively stronger and more effective.