The Lenserf Group 2025 Annual Impact Report

Expanding perspective. Building capacity. Sustaining impact.

What 2025 Revealed About Leadership

By 2025, what many leaders felt privately was confirmed publicly: work is taking more than it is giving back.

Global data reinforced what we were already seeing in rooms with boards, executives, and managers. Employee engagement declined. Life satisfaction declined. Stress became one of the most commonly reported daily emotions. Productivity slowed because capacity was depleted.

The 2025 Gallup Global State of the Workplace Report identified three of the most effective ways to reverse this decline:

1. Ensure managers receive sufficient management training.
2. Teach managers coaching skills.
3. Increase manager wellbeing.

These findings align with our lived experience.

At The Lenserf Group (TLG), our work sits at the intersection of leadership, capacity, and sustainable performance. We help leaders expand perspective so they can make better decisions without burning out.  In 2025, we activated our five core service offerings (assessment and coaching, keynotes and speaking, training and retreats, advisory and facilitation, and project management) to counter what we call productivity parasites: stress, isolation, misalignment, and cognitive overload.

Across industries and roles, we partnered with forward-thinking leaders to dream bigger, engage the right people, and get meaningful work done, more sustainably. What follows reflects not just what we delivered, but what 2025 taught us about leadership in practice.

1. Assessment & Coaching

Building Capacity Through Connection and Reflection

In 2025, we delivered executive, leadership, and group coaching programs for more than 20 client organizations across professional services, technology, healthcare, CPG, nonprofit, education, real estate, and manufacturing.

While many engagements included 1:1 executive coaching, group coaching consistently created the deepest and most durable value. When leaders gather around shared organizational context, culture becomes visible quickly. With psychological safety established, deeper learning follows.

Across groups ranging from 3 to more than 80 participants, one pattern was consistent: leaders want to learn from one another, but lack the time and space to do so during constrained workdays. Coaching created that space.

Programs spanned multiple leadership levels, including board members, CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, global and divisional leaders, VPs, executive directors, and rising leaders. While individual programs often emphasized skill development, participants in group programs consistently reported that the greatest value came from reflection with professional peers.

Recurring themes included:

• Loneliness in leadership
• The need to be heard without judgment
• Supporting direct reports in building independence
• Introducing innovation during high-stress periods

These conversations helped restore perspective and capacity.

Capacity Through Leadership Transition

We supported leadership transition efforts across nonprofit, utilities, and manufacturing organizations. While the reasons for transition varied, the human dynamics did not.

New leaders were often met with skepticism. Long-standing teams were reluctant to release familiar ways of working. In periods of uncertainty, people default to what feels safe, even when it no longer serves.

What we observed repeatedly is that transition challenges are rarely about competence. They are about loss, identity, and resistance to change. Sustainable transition requires neuroplasticity, the ability to rewire established patterns of thinking and behavior.

Our mental fitness and emotional intelligence programs supported leaders in building that flexibility. Leaders learned to recover more quickly from stress responses, regulate emotions under pressure, and respond with intention rather than reflex. As resilience increased, so did trust and forward momentum.

Capacity Through Aligned Values

One of our most meaningful engagements in 2025 was with a growth-stage educational organization that chose to formally define the culture it wanted to create across four sites in two states. That decision impacted employees, client families, and sponsors.

Our role was to translate values into observable behaviors and to equip leaders with the emotional intelligence skills required to embody them. In close partnership with the organization’s HR team, we designed and delivered a multi-week program.

Some leaders initially resisted increased self-awareness. Others embraced the opportunity and began influencing their colleagues more intentionally.

The lesson was that values only shape culture when leaders understand their personal impact and choose to act accordingly.

Capacity Through Mentor Coaching

Senior leaders are frequently positioned as sounding boards for their teams. While valuable, this dynamic can quickly become unsustainable.

Through a mentor coaching program, we introduced a framework that helped leaders shift from directive problem-solving to coaching-oriented conversations. The result was reclaimed time.

Executives reported tangible outcomes:

• Direct reports felt more empowered and less dependent.
• Meetings no longer waited for a single leader to begin.
• In one return-to-work context, a leader walking the floor was no longer perceived as surveillance.

How leaders communicate shapes how organizations function.

2. Speaking & Keynotes

Extending Reach Through Story and Insight

With geopolitical uncertainty shaping business decisions in 2025, many prospective clients delayed investments. Rather than retreat, we expanded our speaking and storytelling efforts to meet leaders where they were.

We were invited to podcasts including Big Meaningful Life and HerStory, extending our reach into nine new countries. We spoke on resilience and capacity building with federal employee resource groups at the USDA, with female leaders through Live Like Blaine and GenHERation, with STEM professionals at ISSNAF, women returning to the workplace through the Montgomery County Chamber and Montgomery County Department of Human Services, and with firsts and onlys through Kepler.

Additional engagements included three performances at The Moth and participation in a speakers’ conference in California. Across formats, storytelling became a powerful accelerator for learning and connection, particularly for organizations navigating financial constraints.

By mid-year we launched The Leaders Lens newsletter and by year-end, we launched our own micro-podcast, The Small Business Success Stack, highlighting the partners every business leader needs to grow sustainably.

Our LinkedIn presence grew by 40% in 2025, reaching audiences in an additional nine new countries. Social platforms became an informal but cost effective and integrated learning ecosystem.

3. Workshops, Retreats, & Training

Leadership COGS: Micro-Learning With Macro Impact

In its first full year, our sponsored micro-learning program, Leadership COGS, released 25 episodes. Offered live and on-demand to tenants in more than 200 commercial real estate buildings, and publicly through event platforms, COGS provided accessible leadership development at scale.

We identified clear areas of interest, including accountability, confidence in difficult conversations, and stakeholder management. Based on demand, we pursued and attained HRCI recertification provider status, further differentiating TLG’s offerings.

Live Workshops & Retreats: Creating Space for Meaningful Work

During Philly Tech Week 2025, we hosted our 12th Anniversary Celebration, Our Resilient Nature, at the Museum for Art in Wood. Guests participated in private exhibit tours and small-group discussions exploring the science of resilience and the journey from challenge to celebration.

In 2025, we also hosted two extended leadership retreats with deeper audience focus.

Female Leadership Moves (FLM) centered on the lived experiences of female leaders navigating micro-aggressions, ambition, and sometimes emotional suppression. We partnered with Movespot as our IRL (in real life) activation app. That day, through reflection, movement, and facilitated dialogue and supported by movement therapist Erin Anderson of Communitas, participants released stored stress and clarified what they wanted next.

Ignite More, held in Henderson, Nevada in partnership with JDK Financial and More Begins Here, invited business owners and leaders to reflect on progress, accelerators, and tradeoffs. Many parents shared the unspoken guilt of balancing growing businesses with family responsibilities. The space created, allowed participants to process past choices with grace and recommit or shift.

Project Management Training: Structure as a Capacity Multiplier

As a PMI Authorized Training Partner, we continued to deliver PMP preparation courses while responding to growing demand for accessible project management training for non-project managers.

We expanded our offerings to include CAPM certification and continued to grow our flagship Project Management Fast Start program. Through live and virtual formats, PM Fast Start reached hundreds of learners and created cross-functional learning communities with access to ongoing coaching support.

We saw rising interest in AI for project management and introduced digital certificates to streamline learning recognition across internal systems and on external platforms like LinkedIn. In 2026, Project Management Fast Start will launch as an asynchronous program for rapid skill development.

4. Advisory & Facilitation

Many leaders shared a common reality: it is lonely to be an “only.”

Our strategic advisory work provided judgment-free environments where leaders could think out loud, explore uncertainty, and hear themselves clearly. Through facilitation, we supported teams in moving from disagreement to understanding, without requiring consensus.

When conversation is structured well, strong leaders become stronger.

5. Project Management

In addition to commercial work, we applied project management best practices in service to community impact. In 2025, our live event and leader program playbooks allowed us to help a healthcare client in implementing a government-sponsored emotional intelligence academy for youth in shelter housing.

 

Looking Ahead

In 2025, while the number of leaders we directly worked with declined, our work deepened. We supported leaders in holding greater complexity. Being named a 2025 Inc. Power Partner in the HR and People Operations category affirmed our work and thinking that sustainable performance requires expanded perspective and capacity building.

We measure our impact by those left with greater vision, clearer mission, deeper consciousness, and increased capability.

As we move into 2026, The Lenserf Group continues to evolve into a capacity-building partner for leaders navigating uncertainty, transition, and growth. We remain grateful to our clients, partners, and collaborators who trust us with their most important work.

Exceed Your Potential.

Farnia @ The Lenserf Group

This was our story. What is yours becoming?