people edge academy
RAISE THE PEOPLE SKILLS YOUR TEAM USES EVERY DAY
While IQ is stable, EQ can be trained. Investment professionals are typically hired for their sharp mind. What sets them apart are the soft skills required to get things done, collaborate with portfolio leadership, and build relationships that create value. Our Academy strengthens these skills through tailored training and performance coaching specifically designed for PE, facilitated by practitioners who know the context.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Your deal teams are your highest-leverage asset.
PE firms invest carefully in due diligence, in advisors, and in the leadership teams of portfolio companies. Investing in your own investment professionals follows the same logic, though with relatively small investments that compound across your deals and portfolio companies across the investment cycle.
While analysis becomes more automatable, the human work — building trust, reading management, resolving friction — is what increasingly sets one firm apart from another. Our Academy builds exactly that capability, specifically for investment professionals, across the full cycle.
What stronger internal capability gives you
- Investment professionals who deliberately build trust in their relations with management and other stakeholders.
- More impactful communications, whether in 1:1s, team interactions, meetings with management, or presentations.
- Structures and tools to make discussions about management team quality explicit and measurable, through DD, the hold, and exit.
- A firm-wide high performance culture, with shared norms for how teams effectively work together internally and with portfolio management.
- Self-awareness and resilience that sustain performance under pressure.
Tailored Training for Investment Professionals
Five interactive workshops, built around the skills that matter most.
Our workshops are built on deep experience with these topics, tailored to the work context of private equity professionals. They are designed for investment professionals with up to ten years’ tenure, taken as a standalone or sequenced as a development arc across the team, with practical application and meaningful exchange to enable peer learning. Delivered in-house by accredited facilitators with PE sector experience.
Personal Leadership
Thrive in the high-stakes investment context.
Grow self-insight, self-management, and resilience with actionable models to thrive as a relative junior in the high-stakes, high-pressure context of private equity.
Building trust
From investor to trusted advisor.
Build strong relationships with senior stakeholders through practical frameworks for enhancing credibility and alignment, quickly becoming a trusted advisor to portfolio company management.
Impactful Conversations
Create value in every meeting.
Make every interaction count with simple structures to create open, valuable, and goal-oriented exchanges, in 1:1 and group settings, from preparation through to follow-up.
High-Performing Teams
High returns are a team effort.
Explore the foundations of team performance to enhance the impact of investment teams and foster a firm-wide high performance culture across deal teams and portfolio engagement.
Management Assessment
Learn to better read management teams.
Get tools to evaluate and discuss management ability to deliver the investment thesis – individually and as a team, both outside and inside the formal interview setting.
Performance Coaching
Coaching at PE pace for investment professionals and senior leaders across the fund.
Coaching at PE pace requires coaches who know the context: the stakes, the cadence, the language. Available for individuals, investment teams, and groups of professionals, with formats that are actionable and enable peer learning. Engagements are tailored to the individual or team, with clear goals, defined cadence, and visible progress.