Vision, proven by science,
delivered in the room.
Signalead™ was built on a simple conviction: the next competitive advantage isn't better AI — it's the leadership signal underneath it. We pair an executive talent strategist's framework with academic psychometric rigor and senior advisory delivery.
The people decoding the signal.
Leslie Coyne
Founded and serves as Principal Advisor of Signalead™ after two decades helping some of the world's largest organizations identify, develop, and prepare leaders for transformation. Throughout her career she saw the same gap: leadership assessment and development evolved slowly while the nature of leadership changed rapidly.
Working with organizations including GE, United Technologies, Honeywell, Jabil, and LivaNova, she designed enterprise leadership, succession, and assessment systems supporting workforces of up to 240,000 across more than 100 countries.
Graduate degrees in Human Resources (University of South Carolina) and Communication (University of Georgia), where her thesis was defended under I/O Psychology professor Dr. Lillian T. Eby. Certified in Hogan, Korn Ferry, and the Leadership Versatility Index.
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Dr. Mustafa Akben
Director of AI Integration and Assistant Professor of Management at Elon University (NC), Mustafa leads the psychometric validation of the Signalead™ instrument.
He holds a PhD in Business Administration from Temple University's Fox School of Business and an MS in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania. His research pairs organizational science with applied AI: he builds transformer- and deep-learning models to identify leadership skills, analyze institutional AI readiness, and detect careless or insincere survey responses — the methodological core of a trustworthy assessment. He is a published organizational-behavior researcher (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022) and winner of the 2022–2023 SIOP Machine Learning Competition, the leading contest bridging I/O psychology and AI. His award-winning work has also been recognized by the Academy of Management. Beyond deep learning, he is fluent across advanced psychometric methods — structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, and meta-analysis — and is a member of SIOP, the APA, and the Academy of Management.
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Jack Ryan
Founder and Principal of Jack Ryan Advisory, through which Signalead™ is licensed and delivered. Jack co-delivers Signalead's™ Executive Tier and brings 35+ years in operations and human capital, working with C-suite executives across public and private-equity portfolio companies.
He spent 29 years at GE, culminating as Chief Learning Officer — leading the firm's executive and leadership development and its renowned Crotonville Leadership Institute — after serving as CHRO of both GE Capital and GE Aviation. He then helped build Rockefeller Capital Management as CHRO and later COO/CAO, through a period in which the firm grew from $17B to over $160B in assets and from 180 to more than 1,500 people.
Jack chairs the Board of Advisors for the Love School of Business at Elon University — also the academic home of Dr. Mustafa Akben, who leads Signalead's™ validation research.
Visit Jack Ryan Advisory →Tested with working leaders.
199 doctoral-level expert judges evaluated the content. 1,191 working leaders across six independent samples developed and tested the instrument.
174 of 180 candidate items (97%) met all three content criteria.
21 of 21 models added explained variance in AI-related outcomes beyond established leadership measures — 19 of 21 statistically significant.
All 36 behavior scales show strong internal consistency (alpha .75–.94), confirmed in independent samples.
Next: studies that add observer ratings and track change over time. The research is published as a preprint (arXiv:2609.17965); the white paper "The 95% Problem" is forthcoming.
Decode the signal. Develop the leader.
Start with a read, or talk with us about measuring the leadership signals across your organization.