Holmes Noble has appointed a group of sitting chief executives from FTSE-listed and major private businesses as founding mentors for The Ascent, a professional development programme designed to prepare senior leaders for future CEO roles.
The executive search and talent advisory company is delivering the programme in partnership with MRA Executive Coaching, a leadership development provider. The founding mentors have been drawn from sectors including industrials, infrastructure, energy and utilities, transport, logistics, aerospace, building materials, and services.
The confirmed participants include James Wroath of Keller Group, Gianfranco Sgro of Arriva, Harld Peters of Renewi, Eric Born of Grafton Group, Lawrence Gosden of Southern Water, Nicola Hindle of Matrix Group, Gavin Wesson of RLC Aerospace, Jim Fairburn of Bodycote, Darren James of Aureos, Peter France of Spirax Group, and Sebastian Desreumaux of Dawsongroup TCS.
The Ascent is designed for senior executives below the top job who are preparing for board level leadership. Holmes Noble says the programme will use CEO lunches, panel discussions, boardroom simulations, podcasts, and facilitated conversations to expose participants to practical lessons on leadership, decision making, governance, stakeholder engagement, and complexity.
The programme also aims to build peer networks and relationships with sitting CEOs, giving participants access to board level thinking and the wider executive community.
Amy Speake, CEO of Holmes Noble, said: “The Ascent reflects our belief that developing exceptional leaders is a shared responsibility. By bringing together experienced CEOs and the next generation of executive leaders, we aim to make a lasting contribution to leadership capability across industry.
“Each of our founding CEOs is generously investing their own time to share their experience and help develop the next generation of executive leaders. That tells you everything you need to know about the calibre of people involved and why they’re doing it. They want to help shape leaders who are ready, capable and confident when their moment comes. In five years, we want boards to be actively looking for Ascent alumni when they hire.”
The launch reflects growing concern inside boardrooms over succession planning. Chief executives are now expected to manage capital allocation, geopolitics, regulation, AI, cyber risk, climate transition, workforce change, activist investors, public trust, and operational resilience, often at the same time.
Traditional leadership development routes do not always prepare candidates for that breadth. A senior functional leader may have deep expertise in finance, operations, technology, commercial strategy, or people leadership, but the CEO role requires integration across all of them. It also requires external credibility with investors, regulators, customers, unions, suppliers, government, and media.
Board exposure is one of the hardest capabilities to build late. Executives may reach the final stages of a succession process without having had enough experience of non-executive challenge, shareholder communication, crisis decision making, or whole-enterprise trade-offs. Programmes that simulate those pressures can help where they are grounded in real boardroom complexity rather than generic leadership content.
UK CEO pipelines have already been narrowing under board pressure, with companies favouring proven chiefs, finance backgrounds, and internationally mobile leaders during uncertain conditions: UK CEO pipeline narrows under board pressure. The same analysis identified a succession blind spot, with UK and Irish organisations recording strong alignment scores while many still did not treat CEO succession as a high priority.
The Ascent appears to respond directly to that problem by widening exposure for high potential executives before a vacancy emerges. If boards wait until a CEO departure is imminent, the candidate pool can quickly narrow towards already proven external leaders. Internal candidates need stretch roles, investor contact, cross functional experience, crisis exposure, and board interaction years before a succession process begins.
The presence of sitting CEOs as mentors gives the programme credibility, while also underlining a broader governance point. Succession cannot sit solely with HR or nomination committees as a periodic review. It has to be treated as a continuous discipline, particularly in sectors facing regulatory, infrastructure, technology, and capital investment challenges.
Industrial and infrastructure sectors are a useful setting for this type of programme because leadership decisions are often long cycle and operationally consequential. Capital projects, safety, supply chains, engineering capability, labour relations, environmental obligations, and public accountability make the CEO role materially different from shorter cycle commercial environments.
Leadership development is also becoming more important as companies weigh internal promotion against external search. Internal candidates bring cultural knowledge, operating context, and continuity, but may lack external breadth or board exposure. External candidates can bring fresh perspective, but carry integration risk. Structured development can improve the odds that internal candidates are genuinely ready when the board needs options.
The programme’s success will depend on whether participants move into broader roles, gain board confidence, and ultimately become credible CEO candidates. Mentoring alone will not solve succession risk. It must be supported by live assignments, accountability, feedback, and deliberate career moves that test judgement under pressure.
Boards under pressure to find leaders who can manage uncertainty need a wider route to the top, not only a smaller pool of already proven candidates. Programmes that connect current CEOs with future candidates may help widen that route, provided exposure turns into readiness before the next leadership transition arrives.
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