High Performance Starts With The Person Behind The Role
How Ashurst and 2b Limitless are combining strengths, coaching and radical candour to develop more connected, confident leaders.
Client: Ashurst Perkins Cole
Partnership began: 2024
Areas of support: Executive Coaching, Strengths-Based Development, Partner Coaching, 2:1 Leadership Coaching, Team Facilitation, Culture and Alignment Workshops
Developing The People Behind High Performance
Ashurst is a global law firm operating in a demanding professional environment where leaders are expected to deliver for their clients, their teams and the wider business – often simultaneously and at pace.
The relationship between Ashurst and 2b Limitless began personally. Ashurst Partner, Dan Brown, had already experienced coaching with 2b Limitless himself. What stood out was not simply the tools or frameworks but the combination of genuine care and direct challenge.
“They absolutely demonstrated deep care and connection with me from the outset, but they also demonstrated radical candour.”
As Dan experienced the impact on his own leadership he began to consider what the same approach could unlock for the people around him. That personal proof of concept became the starting point for a much broader partnership with Ashurst.
From One Leader To A Room Of Partners
The first significant organisational engagement brought approximately 40 Ashurst partners together in a newly formed practice group. It was an important moment. The partners were coming together as a group for the first time and needed more than a conventional offsite. The opportunity was to create stronger connection, understand the different strengths within the team and establish a clearer sense of how they wanted to work together.
The bespoke programme combined Gallup CliftonStrengths with work around strategy, culture, purpose, rituals and high-performance behaviours. The original programme design focused not only on what the practice wanted to achieve but on who it wanted to be as a business.
Dan describes these sessions not as offsites but as “rumbles”. Borrowing the language of Brené Brown, these rumbles orchestrated the willingness to step into the difficult, sometimes messy conversations required to create genuine connection.
“That strengths-based facilitation really started our team thinking better and differently around how they showed up for each other, for our clients, but also for our world,” comments Dan.
Those early sessions established the foundation for the partnership to grow beyond team facilitation and into structured leadership and executive coaching.
See The Person Behind The Role
A Partner in a global law firm arrives in a coaching conversation with a title, responsibilities, targets and expectations. But 2b Limitless deliberately starts somewhere else. The person.
For Dan, this has been one of the most distinctive elements of the experience.
“They take time and curiosity to deeply understand who we are – the person behind the role.”
Rather than assuming that every Partner has the same development needs the coaches spend time understanding the individual behind the professional identity. Each coach takes the time to understand their coachee’s strengths, motivations, pressures, aspirations and broader world. That deeper understanding creates the foundation where meaningful challenges can take place.
The approach is empathetic, but it is not comfortable coaching for comfort’s sake. Dan repeatedly describes the balance as caring deeply and challenging directly, “There’s a level of radical candour that the 2b Limitless team bring to the interactions that drives accountability, helps us think differently about the way we see and feel things and ultimately allows the best part of us to surface.”
In a high-performance environment with high expectations and high-stakes conversations that combination is imperative. People need to feel safe enough to be honest and challenged enough to grow.
Creating A Common Language Through Strengths
Strengths have become an important part of that work. Through CliftonStrengths Ashurst leaders have developed greater awareness of how they naturally think, lead, communicate and contribute. They understand and have become aware of both the productive expression of their strengths and the potential “basement” when those talents are overplayed.
For Dan, the insight has made him a more conscious leader, “I’ve learnt to be more empathetic. I’ve learnt to stay curious longer. I’ve learnt to ask better and different questions. I’ve learnt to hold space in a much better way for our team, but I’ve also learnt to care deeply and challenge directly.”
The value becomes even more powerful when the language moves beyond the individual. Team conversations now focus on actively identifying the strengths required for a particular challenge and recognising, for example, that a highly strategic piece of work may benefit from involving Partners who naturally bring Strategic Thinking talents.
“People are starting to really lean into that strengths-based piece to understand who can lead and support on different elements of our work.”
What begins as self-awareness therefore becomes a practical way of thinking about team composition, collaboration and performance.
Connecting Individual Coaching To Business Performance
As the relationship developed, Ashurst and 2b Limitless expanded the work into structured 1:1 and 2:1 coaching.
The 2:1 model creates an important bridge between individual development and organisational performance. A leader, their 2b Limitless coach and an Ashurst practice leader come together to align on what success looks like, the expectations of the role and the development priorities ahead all while maintaining the confidentiality of the subsequent individual coaching relationship. The 2025 programme, for example, was designed to include 2:1 conversations followed by individual executive coaching for Partners, connecting personal rituals and commitments directly to the wider culture of high performance.
For Dan, these conversations have created insight even between colleagues who have worked together for years, “The questions the 2b Limitless team were asking of our Partners really helped me have a deeper understanding of who they were as individuals. And I’ve been working with them for a long time.”
This coaching structure changes the development conversation from something transactional – this is your role and this is what we need from you – into a process of co-creating what success can look like. Questions become: Where are we now? Where do we want to get to? What needs to shift? What does the individual want from their future? And how does that connect with what the business needs?
The result is greater clarity around role, expectation and opportunity, all without reducing performance to a single financial measure.
From Individual Development To International Reach
Over two years, what began with one coaching relationship has developed into a multi-country leadership partnership.
Across the 2025 and 2026 programme 57 different Ashurst leaders have been supported, including senior Partners, practice leaders and high-potential talent. The work has included executive coaching, strengths-based leadership development, Partner and team facilitation and regional development activity across Australia, Singapore, Japan and the broader Asia-Pacific region. A global Partner retreat also brought together leaders from Asia-Pacific and the United Kingdom.
The programme expanded further in late 2025 and into 2026 with individual coaching for Partners and pod leads, dedicated work with Ashurst’s Tokyo team and ongoing team sessions designed around leadership presence, communication, empowerment, integration and cross-geography collaboration.
The Tokyo programme, for example, combined strengths mapping and trust-building with cultural alignment, cross-office collaboration, performance rituals and shared commitments. That breadth reflects the scalability of the relationship with the same fundamental philosophy – understand the person, build from strengths, care deeply and challenge directly. This bespoke programme of work can be applied while adapting to different leaders, teams, offices and cultural contexts.
The Shift: Greater Connection, Clarity and Belief
The most significant outcomes are not easily reduced to a single metric. Dan sees the change in the way people show up. Leaders are more aware of their strengths and more deliberate about how they apply them. Teams are better connected. Colleagues have greater confidence in having difficult conversations and in understanding what others need from them.
“The work we’ve done around our rumbles and our one-on-one coaching has really created a common language for us around our strengths.”
There has also been a stronger sense of connection and purpose. Dan describes Partners feeling more confident when engaging with the market and clients because they are better equipped to listen with empathy, stay curious for longer and understand the value a client actually needs.
But underneath many of those changes sits something even more fundamental. Belief. “The biggest transformational impact of the work we do with 2b Limitless is really simple, but it’s not easy. It’s belief.”
For Dan personally, belief has meant developing a stronger understanding of his own strengths and a deeper confidence in the impact he could create. He now sees that same shift in colleagues, “It’s the belief in themselves that they are worthy and that they have the skills and tools to create impact in a way that is unique and relevant for them – in the context of what our business needs them to do, what our clients expect of them, but more importantly what their world needs from them.”
That may be the most important outcome of all. Not turning Ashurst Partners into a particular model of leadership but helping already exceptionally talented people perform with greater confidence and clarity in their own way.
A High-Performance Partnership That Continues To Evolve
The relationship between Ashurst and 2b Limitless continues to expand. What began with personal coaching has developed into Partner retreats, strengths and culture work, individual executive coaching, 2:1 leadership conversations, team development and international delivery.
Further regional workshops and leadership initiatives are already being developed for 2027.
For Dan, the value of the partnership lies not only in individual programmes, but also in the people and community surrounding them, “The entire team that sits behind the scenes at 2b Limitless is absolutely world-class. They make me and our team feel seen, heard and held in every respect.”
That idea – seen, heard and held – captures something important about the relationship. In an environment where expectations are high and performance matters the partnership creates the space for leaders to understand themselves more deeply, confront what needs to change and develop the belief and behaviours required to move forward.
Because ultimately, high performance does not begin with the title on someone’s business card. It starts with the person behind the role.
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