About the founder: Tijs Besieux, PhD

I’m Tijs Besieux. For over sixteen years, I have worked on a single topic: leadership development. I do so through two lenses. As a former researcher at Harvard Business School and Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and as a visiting professor at KU Leuven and IÉSEG School of Management in Paris. And as an advisor, first at Deloitte and later at &samhoud, a Dutch leadership development boutique. Today my academic home is Antwerp Management School. I’m a research fellow there, studying customer-centric leadership. My work has appeared in Harvard Business Review and Journal of Change Management, among other journals.

I founded Cleo Felix on one conviction: customer value is the result of leadership.

The biggest payoff of leadership development is therefore not better leaders in the abstract. It is a top team that becomes the company's North Star for customer-centricity, so customer-first behavior cascades across the organization. That requires two things most programs avoid. Feedback sharp enough that each leader knows exactly where they stand, and what to stop, start, and continue to create more customer value. And the willingness to change the environment leaders operate in, because behavior that meets friction every day eventually slides back into the way we have always done things around here.

In addition to my commitment to Cleo Felix and scientific research, I’m a regular keynote speaker at leadership events. My talks bring a behavioral focus to leadership, always at the intersection of strategy and customer value.