If the world can see your leadership,
why can’t your organisation?

The Spark

In June 2025, our founder Edwin Danso was made redundant. Before the decision was finalised, he was given the opportunity to apply for internal roles at his level and below. He applied for three. He interviewed for two.

HR informed him he had been unsuccessful. He didn’t have the experience to manage a Microsoft SharePoint site and, even with appropriate training, wouldn’t be able to fulfil the role.

Around the same time, Edwin received news of a different kind: a nomination for the Empower Future Leaders award, powered by YouTube. A top-100 list recognising global future leaders.

How can a global platform recognise leadership potential that an internal HR process completely fails to see?

Within twelve months of that conversation with HR, Edwin had designed and built the Leadership Index. A psychometric platform, from architecture to assessment engine. Without a team, without funding, and without the SharePoint experience he was told he lacked.

But the question that started it wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t just personal. It pointed to something systemic. If this could happen to someone with a public track record, what was happening to thousands of others with no platform at all?

The Journey

Edwin had already spent years building the infrastructure to answer that question. He just hadn’t seen it yet.

In 2021, he founded Off The Agenda, an audio-visual platform for mentoring and leadership conversations. Over six years, hosted by Sir Charles Bowman, former Lord Mayor of London, the platform featured over 20 national leaders, many with titles and global recognition. From Dame Elizabeth Anionwu and Sir Kenneth Olisa to Baroness Valerie Amos, Afua Kyei and Gina Miller.

Those conversations revealed patterns. What makes someone effective in a crisis isn’t what makes them effective in a boardroom. The leaders who moved markets weren’t always the ones with the biggest titles. Influence looked different depending on context: capital, policy, culture, enterprise.

In 2026, that research became The Fifty. The inaugural ranking of the 50 leaders most influential in shaping UK economic growth. Not based on revenue or headcount, but on a proprietary methodology combining public data analysis with a structured assessment of leadership impact across capital markets, financial services, fintech, policy and enterprise.

The Fifty gave us the benchmark. The next step was to give everyone access to it.

The Leadership Index

The OTA Media Leadership Index is a psychometric assessment that measures leadership across six evidence-based dimensions:

Your responses map to one of 15 leadership archetypes, from the Architect and the Catalyst to the Diplomat and the Visionary. Each archetype reflects a distinct leadership signature, not a ranking. There is no “best” type, only clarity about where you lead from.

What makes the Leadership Index different is the benchmark. Your scores aren’t compared to a generic population average or an academic model. They’re measured against The Fifty. Real leaders, in real roles, shaping real outcomes in the UK economy.

The Mission

Leadership is too important to be measured by proximity, politics or assumptions about who “looks the part.”

We built the Leadership Index because organisations deserve better tools. Tools that surface potential based on evidence, not intuition. Tools that help CHROs and L&D teams see what internal processes miss. Tools that give every individual a fair, data-driven picture of their leadership strengths.

If a global platform can recognise someone’s leadership potential while their own employer cannot, the system isn’t working. We’re here to fix that.

The Leadership Index. Measure what matters.