“A world where human capability compounds as fast as technology.”
Every organization on earth now needs its people to improve at the speed of technology.
About Leaderwired Institute
Built by a coach and an operator.
Leaderwired Institute was founded by Anna and Justin Barnhill: a Master Certified Coach who has spent sixteen years inside the rooms where leaders are made, and an engineer turned operator who has run the P&Ls where leadership pays off or costs millions. Anna owns the human side of change: psychology, applied neuroscience, emotional intelligence. Justin owns the systems side: technology, process, operational excellence. Leaderwired Institute is what happens when the two converge.
Why we built it
Knowledge was never the problem. Skill and behavior transfer is.
Every leader we work with already knows what good leadership looks like. They have the books, the frameworks, the 360 feedback. Yet under pressure, behavior snaps back to old wiring.
Growth reveals the gap. The skills that got you here will not carry what comes next, whether you run a Fortune 500 division or a fifty-person company about to scale. Your culture becomes a competitive advantage or a silent liability, and the difference is leadership.
Leaderwired Institute exists to close the gap between knowing and doing. Not with more content. With realistic practice, honest evaluation, and support that follows you into the real work.
Organizations bolt
AI onto outdated processes
Pilot after pilot. New technology, old operating model, and the pilots stall.
Leaders bolt
knowledge onto an outdated OS
Book after book, program after program. New frameworks, old wiring, and behavior reverts.
Managers bolt
skill-feedback onto an outdated OS
"Be more strategic. Delegate better. Innovate." Those are not inputs. They are outputs.
Skills, adoption and transformation are not bolt-ons. They emerge from the operating system underneath, or they don't emerge at all.
Our moonshot
“If you gave every human on Earth their own AI tutor, personalized to their learning style, available 24 hours a day in their native language, completely free, it would perhaps be the single greatest equalizer in the history of civilization.”
The tutor for every human is the moonshot. We built it for the people who run organizations.
In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom showed that a student with a personal tutor and mastery-based learning outperforms 98 percent of students taught conventionally. For forty years his finding carried an asterisk: no society could afford a tutor for everyone. The barrier was never the pedagogy. It was the price.
The asterisk is gone. The Leaderwired Institute removes that barrier for leaders: an AI-native engine that evaluates, develops, coaches, and reinforces every leader, and advances them only on demonstrated mastery. It is built on a methodology with measured results, and calibrated against it. Realistic practice instead of passive content. Demonstrated mastery instead of completion certificates. Support that challenges you, then is earned away as you grow.
We started with leadership because it is the highest-leverage human skill. No global challenge, from climate to healthcare to education, is short on knowledge. Every one of them is short on leaders who can turn knowledge into coordinated action.
What comes next is scale: from the enterprises that can pay for it to everyone who needs it. And the engine is not limited to leadership. Any body of knowledge that matters can be delivered this way: practiced, evaluated, mastered.
Close the knowing-doing gap for a billion people. A world where mastery is limited by ambition, not by access.
What pulls us forward
Vision informs purpose. Purpose drives mission.
“Make mastery as accessible as knowledge.”
AI made knowledge nearly free. Mastery is still rationed by cost, geography, and luck. Our moonshot: close the knowing-doing gap for a billion people.
“We build the development engine of the AI era: realistic practice, mastery-based evaluation, and coaching that turns knowing into doing at scale.”
We start with leaders, because leaders multiply everything they learn.
The founders
The future is EI × AI. We built it from both sides.
Most of the leadership industry saw AI as a threat to its model. We saw the unlock we had been waiting for. The next decade belongs to organizations that master the convergence: human judgment amplified by machines, machines directed by grounded humans. Leaderwired Institute was built at that intersection, by two founders who each own one side of it.
Co-founder & CEO · The human side of change
Anna Barnhill, MCC
Anna is an ICF Master Certified Coach, a distinction held by the top 1% of coaches globally, and the author of Leaderwired: The AI-Era Leadership Playbook. Her expertise sits where psychology, applied neuroscience, and human-AI collaboration meet: how leaders actually rewire, and how humans stay decisive and emotionally intelligent while working beside machines.
For sixteen years she has been a strategic partner to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies in technology and healthcare, in government, and at high-growth organizations. That work produced the Leaderwired methodology and the 7-5-3 Human Upgrade Code, the operating system behind everything we build. Her judgment is the standard the engine is calibrated against.
- ICF Master Certified Coach
- Professional Fellow, Institute of Coaching, McLean/Harvard Medical School
- MIT Professional Education
- Forbes Coaches Council
- MSc, Industrial & Organizational Psychology
- Organizational Analysis, Stanford GSB
- Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
- Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coach
Co-founder & COO · The systems side of change
Justin Barnhill, LSSMBB
Justin is an engineer, operator, and innovator. Trained in electrical and mechanical engineering, he sees every outcome as a system, and every system as something that can be redesigned. Previously CEO and COO of private equity-backed companies, he has led the kind of transformations most development programs only describe.
A Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coach, Justin brings P&L discipline to leadership development. At Leaderwired Institute he leads our work with organizations: demos, pilots, and deployments, along with the operational rigor behind the Institute itself.
- Electrical & Mechanical Engineering
- Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Ohio State
- Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coach
- Forbes Business Council
- Executive education: Cornell, Yale, Harvard Business School, Wharton
What we share: Lean Six Sigma runs through both of our careers, so we speak the same language of measurement and rigor. We tend to see patterns before they become consensus. And we operate from abundance: the tools now exist to develop human capability at a scale that used to be impossible, and we intend to use them to leave the world better led than we found it.
Questions investors and partners ask
About the company
Who founded Leaderwired Institute?
Anna Barnhill, an ICF Master Certified Coach, Professional Fellow of the Institute of Coaching at McLean/Harvard Medical School and author of Leaderwired, and Justin Barnhill, a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and former CEO and COO of private equity-backed companies. Anna owns the human side of the engine; Justin owns the systems side and leads enterprise deployments.
What is Leaderwired Institute's mission?
We build the development engine of the AI era: realistic practice, mastery-based evaluation, and coaching that turns knowing into doing at scale. We start with leaders, because leaders multiply everything they learn.
What is the moonshot?
Make mastery as accessible as knowledge. AI made knowledge nearly free; mastery is still rationed by cost, geography and luck. Our moonshot is to close the knowing-doing gap for a billion people, starting with the people who run organizations.
Is Leaderwired Institute an AI company or a coaching company?
An AI software company. LeaderWired Institute Inc. builds and operates the platform: the AI tutor, the mastery-based evaluation, AI Coach Anna and the reinforcement engine. The methodology the engine is calibrated against comes from Anna Barnhill's coaching practice; the book Leaderwired and its frameworks live at leaderwired.com.
How can an organization or partner work with Leaderwired Institute?
Organizations start with an enterprise inquiry and a pilot of one cohort of 25 leaders. Partners, press and investors can write to us through the same form on the Enterprise Inquiries page, and individual leaders can join directly for $99 a month or try one skill free.
The best way to understand Leaderwired Institute is to experience it.
Not another course. A change that lasts.
You have taken the courses. You know what good looks like. Under pressure, the old behavior still comes back. Try one skill free, across three scenarios: a short teaching, a worked example, then a graded role-play with the AI tutor that adapts to you and scores what you actually do. Unlock the full course to keep going. No card required. Pick one to start: