Growth is the retention strategy.
Your best people don’t leave because of salary. They leave because they stop growing. The organisations that keep their top talent are the ones that give them a genuine journey, a clear sense of where they’re headed, and a real investment in their development as a whole person.
The Problem
Your best people are carrying the most and receiving the least. By the time the gap becomes visible, the decision is usually already made.
Your top talent carries the load
Talented people absorb the pressure and deliver consistently. For a while, that’s sustainable, but at some point, a better opportunity arrives.
Or the energy just slowly runs out. And by the time it’s visible, the decision has already been made.
Replacement is very expensive
Replacing a leader costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary.
And that’s even before you account for institutional knowledge walking out the door, team disruption, and the months before a replacement reaches full effectiveness.
Being reactive is not enough
Most organisations respond with the tools they have. A counter-offer. A title change. A one-off development opportunity. These buy time.
They don’t address the real issue, which is that the person has stopped feeling like they’re going somewhere.
Most organisations treat retention as the problem to solve. The Pillars treats development as the answer. Here's how it works.
The Outcomes
Every participant is tracked from day one. Progress is measured at month three and month six across 25 dimensions, against a baseline established at the start. What follows are the outcomes that data consistently shows.
Participants
Clarity about identity and direction doesn't just make leaders feel better. It makes them better leaders. They move faster, make sharper decisions, and show up in ways that get noticed.
Most leaders don't notice burnout arriving. They notice it when they're already in it. The program builds the awareness and ongoing practices that reduce burnout and strengthen resilience, not the kind that means pushing through, but the kind that means bouncing back faster and protecting what matters.
The program is built across five life domains, not just work. Participants leave with a framework they can apply to every part of their life, not just a set of professional goals that don't survive contact with reality.
Performance is personal. When leaders understand what drives and depletes them, the improvements show up everywhere. Better physical habits, stronger relationships, and a renewed sense of dedication to the people and work that matter most.
A visual snapshot of where you're strong, where capacity is leaking, and where the highest-leverage changes are. A working tool across the full seven months, not a one-time report.
Execs and team leads
Not a team that attended a program. A team that has been genuinely developed, held accountable, and is ready for what comes next.
Who is committed and growing. Where the gaps are. The program surfaces what observation alone rarely does.
The organisations people want to work for are the ones that invest in them properly. The Pillars gives you something tangible to point to.
The shared patterns and pressures quietly limiting collective performance, made visible. Not individuals called out. The team's blind spots, as a whole, laid out clearly.
Restructures, market shifts, leadership transitions. The leaders who navigate those well aren't the ones who react fastest. They're the ones who were already prepared. The Pillars builds that preparation before you need it.
HR and the org
Not teams that cope with disruption. Teams that navigate it with intent and move on opportunity faster than the organisations still recovering.
Three diagnostic assessments, stakeholder reports at every milestone, and longitudinal data across the full cohort. Under Australian WHS legislation, documented investment in psychosocial safety is no longer optional.
Participants who complete the program show a 50% reduction in intent to resign. In a leadership team, that number has a direct dollar value.
Boards and executive teams increasingly want evidence that people and culture spending produces results. The Pillars gives you the data to make that case clearly and confidently.
When people understand what they're building toward, they bring more to the work. That shift in individual purpose compounds at a team level in ways that are hard to manufacture and easy to measure.
Why it works
This program serves three groups at once, and what each gets is distinct.
What sets The Pillars apart
Most performance programs live entirely inside work. They optimise the professional and leave everything else untouched, which is a problem, because performance at work is shaped by conditions across all five domains of a person's life. The Pillars is built on that reality. When you address the whole person, the results hold in a way that work-only programs simply can't produce.
94% of participants show measurable improvement within three months. Not self-reported. Tracked against a baseline established at the start of the program. Three diagnostics, longitudinal data, and stakeholder reports at every milestone mean you always know where the program stands and what it's producing.
The Pillars framework is built on Self-Determination Theory, one of the most robust and widely researched theories of human motivation. It draws on identity-based goal-setting and a structured resistor framework that identifies the specific patterns holding each person back. This isn't intuition dressed up as methodology. It's a program with genuine academic foundations, applied in a way that works in the real world.
Most programs hand people tools and send them back to the same environment. The Pillars starts with identity. Each participant's archetype reflects how they rank the five domains of their life, which tells us what drives them, what depletes them, and where their blind spots live. Change built on that foundation doesn't evaporate when the program ends.
Insight without accountability is just a good conversation. The fortnightly guide sessions, the three diagnostic checkpoints, and the stakeholder reporting create a structure that keeps participants honest and keeps progress visible. Seven months is long enough to build habits that hold.
Go Deeper
The thinking and the evidence behind the program.
Modoras Case Study: Taking their people on a journey in a rapidly growing organisation
Jonathan Rudman didn’t bring The Pillars into Modoras because he had a retention problem.
He brought it in because his people needed a clear development journey in a rapidly growing organisation that relies on key talent.
Three months later, the data showed it was working, and The Pillars is rolled out across the organization as a key part of Modoras people strategy.
Growth is the retention strategy: lessons from the world's best talent development model White paper
Borussia Dortmund cannot outspend Real Madrid. They don’t try to.
Instead they built the best development environment in world football, and the best talent keeps choosing them anyway.
The lesson for every organisation competing for top talent is the same: development is not a benefit that sits alongside a retention strategy. It is the strategy.
If you've read this far, you're probably asking the right questions.
Let’s find out if The Pillars is the right answer for your team.
Frequently asked questions
Seven months. That's deliberate. It's long enough to build disciplines that hold, track meaningful change across three diagnostic assessments, and give each participant enough time with their guide to do real work, not just scratch the surface.
Leadership teams in high-pressure, high-volatility organisations. Financial services, energy and utilities, professional services, technology, retail, and corporate enterprise.
It works best when the stakes are high and the conditions are demanding. If you're looking for a half-day workshop or a team-building activity, this isn't the right fit.
The program is designed for leadership teams, typically between 8 and 25 participants.
We keep cohorts intentional in size because the guide relationship is central to how the program works.
If your team is larger, we can discuss how to structure the program across multiple cohorts.
We work with clients of all sizes, from scale-up to enterprise.
A guide is a trained Pillars practitioner assigned to each participant for the duration of the program. They meet one-on-one with their participant every two weeks, hold accountability, work through resistors, and keep the development grounded in what matters to that person specifically.
They are not a coach in the traditional sense, and they are not a group facilitator. They are the constant in a program that is otherwise highly individual.
Three diagnostic assessments across the seven months. The first establishes a baseline. The second tracks movement at the midpoint. The third captures the full picture at the end. Each assessment measures 25 dimensions of performance.
The gap between where a participant starts and where they finish is the measure.
94% of participants show improvement within the first three months. Not self-reported. Tracked against their own baseline.
No. The Pillars is a performance program, not a therapeutic intervention.
Guide sessions are structured around goals, disciplines, and accountability, not mental health treatment.
That said, the program does address the whole person, which means it touches on things that matter beyond work.
Participants often report feeling clearer, less depleted, and more grounded. That's a byproduct of building genuine capacity, not the goal of the program.
If a participant needs clinical support, their guide will encourage them to seek it. The Pillars is not a substitute for that.
At each diagnostic milestone, your HR and executive leadership receive a stakeholder report with team-level data. This is not a summary of individual sessions, which remain confidential between participant and guide. It is a team-level picture of movement, engagement, and the shared resistors showing up across the cohort.
You always know where the program stands and what it is producing.
Yes. What happens in guide sessions stays between the participant and their guide. The stakeholder reports your leadership and HR teams receive are aggregated at a team level.
No individual's data is shared without their consent. That confidentiality is part of what makes the guide relationship work.
An EAP program is reactive. It exists for people who are already struggling.
The Pillars is proactive. It builds capacity before the pressure arrives, which is when it's most effective. The two are not in competition. But if your organisation is relying on EAP as its primary investment in leadership wellbeing, it is managing problems rather than preventing them.
Pricing is structured around cohort size and organisational tier. We don't publish a fixed price because the right structure depends on your team, your industry, and what you're trying to solve.
The best starting point is a conversation. We'll give you a clear proposal from there.
A fifteen-minute conversation with Toby is usually enough to know whether we're the right fit and what the program would look like for your team. No pitch, no pressure. Just a straight conversation about where your team is and whether The Pillars makes sense.