How JBL High Performance Removes the Friction Holding Leaders Back

Senior leaders were fielding escalations that should have been settled two levels below them, while their managers lost hours of every week to meetings that changed nothing. Decisions sat unmade because nobody could say who owned them. That is the pressure point where JBL High Performance starts work, and it is why the firm challenges an assumption that runs through most corporate development: that the leaders are the problem.

The origin

Jimmy Burroughes reached that view the slow way. Before founding JBL High Performance Limited in 2017 he served as a British Army officer, then as a corporate General Manager. The Army taught him that leadership under pressure runs on clarity and trust, with information that is never complete. Business showed him something else: talented managers absorbing noise until performance became a test of stamina.

Most organisations answer that with more content and more coaching. Burroughes went the other way.

"Most leadership development fails because it adds knowledge to people who already know enough," he says. "Your managers do not lack capability. The system around them creates so much friction that the capability never shows up in results."

That belief became Simplify to Amplify, the methodology his firm now runs with mid-size organisations of 500 to 5,000 employees across manufacturing, FMCG, logistics, construction, energy and financial services. The work spans New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Asia, and has reached more than 3,000 managers in over 30 organisations across 10 or more countries.

What friction removal looks like

The argument underneath the method is uncomfortable for the industry. If a manager spends the day in meetings they did not need, waits days for decisions and receives escalations that should never have reached them, another workshop will not help. They already know what good leadership looks like. What they lack is a system that lets it show up in the work.

Simplify to Amplify runs in three phases. SEE teaches leaders to cut through the noise and find the few levers that move results. SOLVE builds operating rhythms that hold under pressure, so effort lands where it counts. SCALE develops leaders who coach and delegate, so outcomes multiply through other people. Four principles hold it together: Person Before Position, 1% Improvements, Practice Over Content and Story-Driven Learning.

Burroughes avoids calling any of it training, since training implies a knowledge gap.

"We do not train leaders to cope with a broken system. We fix the system," he says. "The results are not engagement scores. They are fewer escalations, fewer meetings, faster decisions."

Proof that comes from somebody else

The insistence on operational proof shapes how the firm reports its work. Managers who go through a programme do not score it. Their own bosses do, 90 days after it ends, once they have watched their teams for a full quarter.

On that measure, JBL reports 40% more decisions being made at the right level, 15% fewer escalations and around four hours a week reclaimed for each manager. Those bosses rate the work 8.75 out of 10 on whether they would sponsor it again. Across participants, 92.5% would recommend the firm, and its Net Promoter Score sits at 67, against a B2B average closer to 25.

Rebecca Grover, GM Talent and Organisational Development at SkyCity, put the change in her own terms: "JBL High Performance transformed how our leadership team operates. Within six weeks, we saw a measurable reduction in escalations and around four hours reclaimed weekly per leader."

A general manager in financial services described something similar: "Within three weeks, my managers stopped pulling me into decisions they could make themselves."

Start with one cohort

The firm also begins differently. Large leadership platforms tend to sell an enterprise rollout. JBL asks for a pilot.

"We never ask an organisation to bet the budget on a theory," Burroughes says. "Take twelve leaders, give us six weeks, and we will show you the numbers."

The Six Week Reset is built for a single cohort facing execution bottlenecks and escalation overload, combining live facilitation with individual coaching. AMPLIFY runs as a 90-day engagement with continued support for organisations going after lasting change, and adds an organisational diagnostic, peer accountability and tracking of the return. Both won the firm Global Recognition Awards in 2025 and 2026.

Clients include SkyCity, Fonterra, Fletcher Building, Genesis Energy, Vector, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, Westpac, HSBC, Samsung Heavy Industries and the British Army.

Friction is not only procedural, which is part of why the work lands. Leaders living in escalation cycles feel caught between responsibility and exhaustion, and teams stuck in bloated meeting cultures lose both pace and confidence. JBL addresses those patterns without shaming the people inside them.

Burroughes has carried the same argument into his writing and speaking. He is the author of Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance and Escape the Multitasking Trap, hosts the High Performance Leader podcast, and speaks on leadership friction. JBL moved to virtual-first delivery in 2018, well before distributed teams became normal, and built the model for that format from the start.

The market will keep selling more content. JBL High Performance is offering fewer escalations, fewer meetings and faster decisions. For organisations that have good people and cannot work out why execution feels slow, that is the difference worth testing on twelve of them.

Connect with JBL High Performance or with Jimmy Burroughes on LinkedIn. Managers who want to know whether they are the constraint can start with a short self-assessment.