Case Study · The INKEY List · Beauty & consumer · Developing the leadership team together
The INKEY List developed its entire senior leadership team together as the beauty brand scaled, and came out of it leading as one team, closer and learning from each other.
The INKEY List developed its entire senior leadership team together as the beauty brand scaled fast, and came out of it leading as one team, closer and learning from each other.Senior leaders developed together
0
from the COO and CFO to the heads of marketing, product, operations and people, developed as one leadership team
The room
- Operations
- Finance
- Marketing
- Sales
- Product
- Procurement
- People & HR
- Technology
- Strategy
- Creative
10
functions in one room, from finance and operations to marketing, product and people
5 + 5
Prime workshops, each paired with a live Elevate troubleshoot session across the year
COO to heads of function
the span of the leadership team that learned together
Executive Summary
- Sector
- Beauty & consumer (skincare)
- Buyer
- Head of Global HR
The Brief
The INKEY List had scaled fast, from a founder-built start-up into one of the most recognised names in affordable, ingredient-led skincare. Its senior leadership team had grown into a group of brilliant functional experts, from operations and finance to marketing, product and people, who had rarely been developed as one leadership team. The brief was to develop them together, with something built around The INKEY List rather than borrowed from a textbook, so a fast-growing brand could be led by a team that leads in the same way.
The Outcome
The INKEY List developed its senior leadership team as one community of leaders. Twenty-one leaders across ten functions worked through the core skills of leading at scale and brought their live problems into the same room to solve together, and by the final session the team's own reflection was that the programme had brought them closer together and changed how they lead alongside each other.
From the leadership
The sessions on communication were standout and well needed. The breakouts with my peers were useful through the programme and it has brought us closer together as a leadership team. It has been really valuable learning from each other. LeadersLab has been a really good tool to complement the programme and help us turn conversations into practice.
The more you put in, the more you get out.”
Emma Croft
Head of Global HR, The INKEY List
01 / Developing the team together
The INKEY List had built a team of brilliant functional leaders. It chose, deliberately, to develop them as one leadership team.
The INKEY List grew at the pace of beauty, scaling from a handful of founders into a team of more than a hundred and one of the category's most recognised brands. That growth was built by exceptional functional leaders, in marketing, operations, finance, product, sales and beyond, who had each earned their seat at the top table. What the company recognised early is that a group of strong individual leaders is not yet a leadership team, and as it kept scaling it wanted the people running it to lead in a consistent, shared way.
Like many of its leaders, The INKEY List had seen plenty of leadership training before. Between them the team had been through the big corporate programmes, and the recurring experience was that the insight rarely survived contact with the day job: sessions that were interesting in the room but had no follow-up, content that was long on theory and short on their actual world. They wanted something different, development that was specific to their roles, grounded in real problems, and built to create genuine accountability rather than attendance.
They also wanted it to feel like The INKEY List. The brand is built on a simple promise: clear, honest, ingredient-led products with no marketing fluff. The leadership team wanted their own development to work the same way, practical, transparent and useful, with the same no-nonsense clarity they put on a product label.
02 / Built around The INKEY List
Not an off-the-shelf course. A leadership programme built around The INKEY List, and the pace it moves at.
10X did not arrive with a fixed programme to install. The work was shaped around The INKEY List: grounded in the team's own Manager Strength Index diagnostic and in the company's own values, and designed for leaders who might be deep in a product launch one week and a retail negotiation the next.
How it worked
An embedded Performance Partner, and a rhythm of learning paired with live problem-solving.
Rather than a trainer who turns up, delivers and leaves, The INKEY List had a 10X Performance Partner embedded across the engagement, reachable between sessions and working on the real problems already on the leadership team's plate. Each session was co-designed with the business and tuned to what the team was actually grappling with, rather than delivered from a script.
The programme ran as a deliberate rhythm. Five Prime workshops built the core skills of leading at scale, and each was paired with an Elevate session where leaders brought a live problem to troubleshoot together. The skill was taught, then immediately put to work on something real, so the leadership team practised on its own challenges rather than on case studies from someone else's business.
Prime 01
Leadership & Communication
Elevate
Cascading a decision so it lands
Prime 02
Performance Management & Difficult Conversations
Elevate
A conversation that kept getting deferred
Prime 03
Coaching & Developing Talent
Elevate
Coaching a team to its own answers
Prime 04
Delegation & Goal Setting
Elevate
Delegating across to another team
Prime 05
Change Management & Culture
Elevate
Leading through constant change
Five times across the year: a skill in a Prime workshop, then the room putting it straight to work on a live problem in the paired Elevate session.
03 / The room was the teacher
The most valuable thing in the room was the room. Ten functions, one leadership team, learning from each other.
The point of bringing the whole leadership team together was that leaders learn fastest from each other. A head of operations and a marketing leader, a finance lead and a product head, sat in the same breakouts and saw how differently the same challenge looks from each seat, and how often another leader had already solved the thing they were wrestling with.
That came alive in the Elevate sessions, where leaders brought their real, live problems into the room and the group worked them together. More than once a leader left with a problem solved by a peer who had faced exactly the same thing, and the Performance Partner's job was to draw the answer out of the room rather than hand it down.
The most interactive sessions we've had. Engaging everyone through a combination of chat, group discussion, and breakout groups. Excellent questioning that harnesses experience, with clearly a lot of pre-work in understanding what's been covered before.
Suzanne Coulton, Chief Operations Officer, The INKEY List
The language they now share
- Clarity is kindness
- Slow down to go fast
- Assume positive intent
- What good looks like for you, not just for us
- Radical candour
By the end the leadership team had built a shared language it actually uses, the kind of common reference points that only form when a team learns something together.
04 / What they worked on
Five core skills of leading at scale, worked through the way The INKEY List works through an ingredient: clearly, and with a purpose.
Leadership & Communication
Getting clear on who owns a decision and how fast it cascades, and adapting the message so it lands the same way for a finance lead as for a head of social, in a culture with a lot of meetings and a lot to say.
Performance Management & Difficult Conversations
Having the conversation earlier and following through on it, and treating clarity as kindness, so a difficult conversation becomes an impactful one rather than one that gets deferred because everything feels urgent.
Coaching & Developing Talent
Moving from the expert who has the answer to the leader who builds the capability to find it, asking better questions instead of jumping in to solve, so the team grows rather than waits.
Delegation & Goal Setting
Letting go of the work that made them valuable, and treating delegation as a deliberate design choice rather than offloading tasks, so leaders can do the work only they can do.
Change Management & Culture
Leading a fast-growing brand through constant change, and treating people and performance as a cycle to balance rather than a trade-off, knowing when to push and when to invest.
Each was paired with a live Elevate session, so the skill was practised on a real problem the same month it was learned.
05 / What changed
The clearest proof is in the work. The INKEY List's leaders started leading differently.
Because every skill workshop was paired with an Elevate session where leaders brought their real problems back, the programme could see what actually changed once people returned to the job. The proof at The INKEY List is not a single number. It is the specific things its leaders started doing differently, and reported back to the room.
What changed in the work
Delegating for ownership, not output
One leader started handing work over with explicit success criteria for the first time, framing it as what good looks like for the person rather than for the business, and watched it land with real ownership.
Coaching instead of solving
Another stopped diving straight into solution mode and began guiding their team to their own answers in development planning, finding the patience to sit back and let them get there.
Stepping back on purpose
A third leader, recognising they had become their team's comfort blanket, began deliberately stepping back, letting a direct report try, stretch and occasionally get it wrong.
Staying with the silence
Another practised holding silence in coaching conversations rather than filling it with their own answer, so the person in front of them did the thinking.
Naming the safety out loud
And one told their team plainly that whatever happened they would face it together and no one would be thrown under the bus, putting words to the psychological safety the programme had been building.
And how the team changed
Underneath the individual shifts was a change in how the leadership team works as a team: talking to each other more, comfortable admitting when they do not have the answer, and reaching for a peer rather than working alone.
By the final session, the team's own reflection was that the programme had brought them closer together, and that the senior team was visibly collaborating better than it had a year earlier: reaching for each other sooner, and treating people and performance as a balance to strike rather than a trade-off to make.
And the team kept using what it had been given, returning to LeadersLab and its sessions between workshops rather than treating the programme as a one-off.
06 / Start here
If you are scaling a consumer or beauty brand and you want your senior leadership team to lead in one consistent way, developed together rather than one course at a time, that is the work we do. The same is true if you have a group of brilliant functional experts who have never been built into a single leadership team.
Every partnership between 10X and a client is entirely bespoke and unique. Book a no-obligation call with one of our Development Experts to scope how we could support you and your situation.