The Serpent Path
Executive Leadership Development
Restricted to 20 Women in Executive Roles or Transition
Twenty minutes with Ina will tell you.
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The Approach
Why women?
Women did not rise to the executive suite simply to inherit the way corporate leadership has always been done. The Serpent Path creates an intellectual and somatic space to deliberately examine what women will carry forward, what they will challenge, and what they will permanently change – before taking their place again in shaping the systemic environments we share.
Why the serpent? (Ecdysis)
A serpent grows by shedding what can no longer contain it – without becoming something else. Success can make established ways of thinking and operating remarkably durable. Serpent Path creates the physical and mental distance needed to decide what remains, what changes, and what is complete. This is not reinvention; it is ecdysis.
The Journey
Timeline
T+0
Complete your anonymous individual profile and HBA Signal/360° to establish exactly how your strengths, identity, somatic patterns, and recurring executive habits currently shape your leadership.
T+1 – T+4 · Intensive
Four days of complete immersion at our private EcoView residence.
Relational range
Practise listening, challenging, disagreeing, and staying constructively engaged under pressure
Embodied intelligence
Use breath, movement, and physical recovery (contrast therapy) to expand your sensory awareness
Personal enquiry
Interrogate the unconscious assumptions and patterns influencing your authority, ambition, and behavioural blind spots
Ways of knowing
Bring analytical intellect into direct dialogue with nature and longstanding wisdom traditions
All Inclusive
Nutrition by a resident chef
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T+14 · 1:1 Executive Coaching
One-on-one executive coaching to extend retreat insights into your specific corporate realities.
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T+21 · remote connection
A facilitated, online cohort circle session to support your transition back into the high-pressure workplace.
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T+42 · Organisational dialogue
HBA facilitates a direct enquiry with you and your organisational stakeholders. We isolate your individual agency from systemic constraints, clarifying ownership and immediate next actions.
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T+77 · immersion
A private, facilitated day on land or at sea. Return to the cohort circle to reckon with what has shifted, settle remaining blocks, and chart your next passage.
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T+84 · Collective Online Exchange
An online collective exchange to review progress against your baseline diagnostics, mobilise cohort influence, and identify remaining resource needs.
Bring the problem you actually have.
Begin a conversationMARKET POSITION & IMPACT
● central · ◐ varies materially by programme · – not ordinarily a primary purpose
↔ Swipe the table sideways to compare all four
Selected 2026 public programmes provide market reference points, not like-for-like equivalents. Audience, purpose, duration, methodology and inclusions vary materially.
Ask what twelve weeks would look like for you.
Begin a conversationBacked by Science, Delivered by Experience.
Leadership relationship quality is associated with people actually leaving, not merely intending to.
ρ = −.24 [−.29, −.19] · 42 samples · 28,637 employees · actual voluntary turnoverSurveying the forest: A meta-analysis of the antecedents of voluntary employee turnover. Personnel Psychology, 71(1), 23–65.
LimitsAssociation, not cause. North American samples.
Challenge sits here because it is what the four days actually do. No meta-analysis links it to attrition, so it is marked as practice rather than evidence.
Psychosocial work conditions predict future sickness absence, measured forward in time rather than at a single moment.
burnout OR 2.34 [1.59–3.45] · low job satisfaction OR 1.92 · low decision authority OR 1.49 · 20 prospective cohortsA meta-analysis of observational studies identifies predictors of sickness absence. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 60(11), 1105–1115.
LimitsJob conditions, not leader behaviour. Prospective, not experimental.
Lost productivity is not listed here. We could not find a meta-analysis linking these levers to a presenteeism outcome, so we do not claim one.
Safety climate is associated with the incident count itself, across the largest study of its kind.
safety climate → accidents and injuries ρ = .24 · leadership → burnout ρ = −.36 · 203 samples · 186,440 workersSafety at work: A meta-analytic investigation of the link between job demands, job resources, burnout, engagement, and safety outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(1), 71–94.
LimitsIndustrial workforces. The read across to psychosocial risk is by analogy.
Where followers see their leader as ethical, self-reported deviance is lower.
workplace deviance ρ = −.34 · 8 samples · 1,807 people · overall review 134 samples, 54,920 peopleA meta-analytic review of ethical leadership outcomes and moderators. Journal of Business Ethics, 139(3), 517–536.
LimitsPerceptions of ethical leadership, not audited conduct.
Role ambiguity degrades performance. Role conflict, which is often treated as the same thing, does not.
role ambiguity → performance r = −.21 · role conflict → performance r = −.07, described as negligibleJackson and Schuler (1985) revisited: A meta-analysis of the relationships between role ambiguity, role conflict, and job performance. Journal of Management, 26(1), 155–169.
LimitsGeneral job performance, not cycle time. The literature is twenty years old.
This row rests on the least direct evidence of the eight. Structured discussion is known to improve what a group knows (Mesmer-Magnus and DeChurch, 2009, across 72 studies and 4,795 teams), and the operational indicator is agreed with you rather than assumed.
Trust inside a team predicts team performance, and it holds even after controlling for how the team performed before.
ρ = .30 · 112 studies · 7,763 teamsTrust and team performance: A meta-analysis of main effects, moderators, and covariates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1134–1150.
LimitsAssociation, not cause. The largest in this set.
Business units in the top quartile of engagement differ from those in the bottom quartile on every operational measure the business already tracks.
absenteeism 78% · turnover 51% (low-turnover firms) / 21% (high) · safety incidents 63% · quality defects 32% · productivity 18% · profitability 23%Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition. 736 studies · 347 organisations · 183,806 business units · 3,354,784 employees · 90 countries.
LimitsGallup owns the instrument. A quartile gap, not an intervention effect.
How a manager receives challenge predicts whether people bring the next problem, measured at a later point in time rather than the same one.
managerial openness predicts subsequent employee voice · psychological safety → voice ρ = .31 · leader relations → psychological safety ρ = .44 (30 samples, 10,180 people)Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869–884. With Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165.
LimitsVoice measured as behaviour, not concerns logged in a system.
The only randomised trial showing that training managers changes a hard outcome.
cluster randomised trial · 88 managers · about 4,000 employees · significant reduction in work-related sick leave, p = 0.049 · reported return of £9.98 per £1Workplace mental health training for managers and its effect on sick leave in employees: A cluster randomised controlled trial. The Lancet Psychiatry.
LimitsOne trial. One emergency service. p = .049.
And the finding that runs the other way, which we publish alongside it.
participatory organisational interventions: mental health SMD = −0.04 · work performance SMD = 0.01 · 8 cluster randomised trials · null across all outcomesEffects of participatory organizational interventions on mental health and work performance. Journal of Occupational Health, 68(1).
LimitsParticipatory interventions, not leadership development. Mostly Japanese workplaces.
A meta-analysis of 335 leadership training studies covering 26,573 leaders identified the design features that separate development which transfers into the workplace from development which does not.
Lacerenza, Reyes, Marlow, Joseph & Salas (2017), Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1686–1718. Transfer δ = .82, organisational results δ = .72, no evidence of publication bias.
Five factors · 67.4% of the variance
Five things coaching changed in these executives. The one involving their own manager came last.
And half reported no change at all in how that manager communicated back.
Executive coaching: It works! Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 60(1), 78–90. 114 executives and 42 coaches in one global pharmaceutical company. Principal component analysis, α = .95, isolated five factors accounting for 67.4% of cumulative variance. 98% gained insight into how their actions are perceived and 91% reported better results with direct reports, but only about 50% saw improvement in how their supervisor communicated back.
LimitsSelf-reported. One company. No control group. Variance in a questionnaire, not in outcomes.
HBA works on the system, not only the leader
Self-motivated managers still stall
The most intrinsically driven managers in the unsupported group did no better, and on some measures worse.
Wanting to grow is not the same as being able to do it alone.
Do I need coaching to achieve a learning goal? Coaching, goal orientation, and goal framing: A randomized control trial study. Current Psychology, 44(16), 13574–13590. Randomised controlled trial, 202 managers across 13 organisations, 43 external coaches.
LimitsThe mastery finding sits just outside significance (p = .087). One country. Self-rated at a single point.
HBA builds the scaffold they are missing
686 executives · 300+ organisations
Asked in their own words what coaching changed, senior executives did not describe insight. They described running a team.
Executive leaders' perspectives on the impact of executive coaching on their leadership development. European Journal of Training and Development, 50(10), 127–145. 1,130 open-ended responses from 686 executives and 158 coaches across more than 300 organisations, predominantly Fortune 500, spanning North America, EMEA, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.
LimitsCoded descriptions, not measured outcomes. Lead author runs the firm studied.
INTEGRITY STATEMENT
Serpent Path is an inaugural programme. We do not yet claim a quantified economic return. Our design is evidence-informed, and our evaluation applies strict implementation-science principles. We examine behavioural change, real-world application, and the organisational conditions that enable or constrain it. We recognise the contribution our inaugural cohort makes through active feedback.
Private by design.
A 70-acre sanctuary opening to sweeping hinterland and coastal views, just 25 minutes from Gold Coast Airport. Fifteen private luxury eco-villas with dedicated spaces for somatic movement, physical recovery, and gathering.
Former Gwinganna Executive Chef Darryn Bonhomme is in residence, crafting seasonal, wholefood cuisine specifically designed around the four-day physical and emotional journey.
We gather on Country with respect for its Traditional Custodians and local cultural protocols.
Why nature is the venue
120 min
A week with at least two hours in nature was associated with significantly higher likelihood of good health and wellbeing — in a study of nearly 20,000 adults.
White et al., Scientific Reports, 13 June 2019. United Kingdom.
