LeaderCoreAIAI leadership role-play and post-workshop practice
Leonardo UK case study.
18 VPs and Senior Directors completed 135 practice sessions voluntarily as part of a five-month Executive Leadership Development Programme designed and delivered by CTG Group.
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Read the article- 135Practice sessions
- 34 minAvg. session length
- 75 hrsSelf-directed practice
Leadership practice that continues after the workshop
Leonardo UK needed something most leadership programs struggle to deliver: practice that continues after the in-person workshops end.
Their VPs and Senior Directors already had decades of experience. What they lacked were opportunities to rehearse high-stakes and difficult conversations safely, test different approaches, and get honest feedback on how they actually handled pressure. The kind of feedback that doesn't come with political correctness.
AI role-play scenarios embedded into the program
CTG Group, a leadership and coaching consultancy with its headquarters in the UK, designed a custom Executive Leadership Development Programme for Leonardo UK, with LeaderCoreAI embedded as the AI role-play and practice layer alongside facilitated workshops. Senior leaders could keep practicing what they learned in the room - structured post-workshop reinforcement, between sessions, at their own pace.
The scenarios were built for the realities these leaders face daily:
- Conflict resolution involving millions in project spend
- Coaching underperforming direct reports
- Navigating public stakeholder crises
- Managing resistance during enterprise-wide change
- Aligning cross-functional teams around competing priorities
13 scenarios in total, each available at five difficulty levels ranging from Simple to Extreme. The AI adapts its responses based on the difficulty selected, creating increasingly complex and unpredictable conversations as leaders push further.
Self-directed spaced practice without a mandate
Nobody was required to use the platform outside of workshop sessions. Usage was entirely voluntary.
18 senior leaders completed 135 practice sessions over the course of the program, averaging 34 minutes per session. That is not clicking through slides. The average session involved 28 back-and-forth exchanges with the AI, closer in depth to a real coaching conversation than to any training module.
12 of the 18 participants returned voluntarily for additional sessions - a pattern of self-directed spaced practice that most programs struggle to achieve. They came back between workshops to test different approaches to the same scenario, push themselves into harder difficulty levels, and explore situations they hadn't yet encountered.
The most practiced scenario was “Conflict Resolution: The Three Million Dollar War” with 24 attempts across the group. The data shows leaders progressing from Moderate difficulty into High, Ultra, and even Extreme settings on their own initiative.
Over 4,500 minutes of self-directed leadership practice.
Roughly 75 hours of rehearsal that happened entirely outside the classroom, without being mandated.
Beating the forgetting curve with measurable behavior change
The problem with most leadership development is not the training itself. The problem is what happens in the weeks after. Research on the forgetting curve shows that without reinforcement, leadership training fades, with 70%+ of impact lost within months. Most organizations accept this as unavoidable.
This deployment tells a different story. When leaders have a way to practice that feels realistic, relevant, private, and genuinely challenging, they use it. Not because someone told them to, but because it is useful to them.
The behavioral data from LeaderCoreAI's HR Analytics Dashboard gave Leonardo's L&D team the kind of behavior change measurement most leadership programs cannot provide: aggregate visibility into practice patterns, which scenarios the cohort gravitated toward, where performance was improving, and where gaps remained.
For L&D teams building a business case for leadership development ROI, this is the kind of evidence that moves the conversation from satisfaction scores to measurable practice and behavior change.
"Based on what we've seen from this cohort, we're looking at how to extend this approach to future leadership development programmes. The combination of facilitated workshops and self-directed learning and practice is a model that makes sense for us."
"Our VPs and Senior Directors bring decades of leadership experience, but even at that level, you don't get many chances to rehearse high-stakes conversations without consequences. That's exactly what LeaderCoreAI gave them inside our five-month executive training programme, run by CTG. What I didn't expect was how much they'd use it voluntarily. They kept going back to test different approaches between workshops. At that level, people simply don't do that with tools they don't find valuable."
Leaders on practicing difficult conversations with AI
From program participants, delivery partners, and leadership.
“My initial reaction was that I didn't see the value. But then the scenarios became relatable to real life situations, and I found them genuinely useful.”
Senior Leader - Leonardo UK “What surprised me most was the insight the AI gave into my style and where I could improve. I mostly enjoyed the challenge and the scenarios. It felt like a safe space.”
Vice President - Leonardo UK “We've always believed that what happens between sessions matters as much as what happens in the room. For the client's executive development programme, we built in a structured practice layer using LeaderCoreAI so participants could keep working on the skills we were developing together. The engagement data validated that design choice - and it's shaped how we're thinking about programme architecture going forward.”
Brad Solomon - General Manager, CTG Group (Delivery Partner) “When a VP returns 25 times without being asked, that's practice winning against every other demand on their time. That tells you more than any satisfaction score.”
Frank Basinski - Founder, Blue Horizon Training & LeaderCoreAI
Program summary
- Organization
- Leonardo UK
- Program
- Executive Leadership Development Programme (ELDP)
- Delivered by
- CTG Group
- Practice platform
- LeaderCoreAI
- Duration
- 5 months (2025)
- Participants
- 18 VPs and Senior Directors (12 repeat users)
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LeaderCoreAI works alongside your existing workshops, coaching, and L&D programs. Give your leaders a way to practice between sessions that they'll actually use.
Custom scenarios available - HR analytics included