Fractional CLO

A Chief Learning Officer’s judgement, without the full-time chair.

Capability architecture, leadership pipelines and coaching governance — on a fractional cadence. A standing role inside the organisation, held part-time, for companies that need the function decided properly before they need it staffed permanently.

01 · The role

What the seat actually holds.

Capability architecture

What this organisation must be able to do in two years that it cannot do today, and what has to be built, bought or borrowed to get there.

Leadership pipeline

Who is genuinely next, what stands between them and the role, and whether the pipeline is a plan or a list of names someone likes.

Coaching governance

Who gets coached, on what basis, by whom, at what standard, and how anyone would know it worked. Most organisations buy coaching long before they govern it.

Learning spend

Where the budget goes, what it returns, and which long-standing programmes are running on momentum rather than evidence.

02 · Distinctions

Three offers that are routinely confused.

This is the reason the page exists. A fractional CLO is not a longer workshop and not a bigger coaching contract. It is a different seat, with different obligations.

 What it isWho it serves
Fractional CLOA standing part-time role inside the organisation, holding the learning and capability functionThe organisation, through its leadership
Corporate programmeA designed intervention delivered to a cohort, scoped from a stated problemA cohort, and the sponsor who commissioned it
Executive coachingA twelve-month one-to-one engagement in a confidential roomOne leader
Where they cannot overlap

Holding the CLO seat means advising the organisation on who should be coached and to what standard. Coaching those same leaders one-to-one would put both obligations in one pair of hands. Where an organisation wants both, the coaching goes to someone else — the same reason a directorship and coaching a director are never run into the same company at once.

03 · Fit

When this is the right call.

Cadence, duration and fee are set per engagement against the scope above. They are agreed in the first conversation rather than published, because the shape of the seat differs by organisation.

04 · What is brought to it

Operating years, not only coaching years.

Twenty-two and a half years running operations and delivery across pharma, knowledge services and global IT before the practice began — P&L ownership, an account rebuilt from the edge of client pullback, a team scaled from fifteen to a hundred and twenty-five. Then nine years inside coaching rooms watching where leadership pipelines actually break.

The published corpus sits behind the judgement rather than decorating it: six books and fifteen DOI-deposited papers, set out at Insights and Books. The fuller career record is at About.

Say what the function is failing to do.

A fractional CLO enquiry starts with what the organisation cannot currently decide or deliver, and a thirty-minute conversation. Choose Fractional CLO on the enquiry form so it is not read as a programme request.