Thornhill has been helping to develop effective leaders and improve their performance through feedback for 20 years. Originally established as a management consulting company in 2003 by Jonathan Cook, Thornhill has grown from a family business to a full-service 360 feedback and survey solution provider for over 140 clients.
Thornhill has an excellent track record. Our clients compliment us for providing a service that is professional, ethical, prompt, efficient, and courteous, and this has not changed in 20 years.
We provide customisable online multi-rater feedback, surveys and screening systems with expert guidance and dedicated support, as well as accompanying consulting and coaching services for leadership development. We combine experienced professional organisational psychology insight with innovative software systems and attentive end-to-end feedback services. Thornhill offers both standard and bespoke solutions to organisations, business schools, consultants and executive coaches, using our questionnaire or yours. And if you run repeated 360s or surveys, we can also offer a self-administration system.
Thornhill is proud to have successfully administered over 853 000 questionnaires, helping thousands of leaders receive feedback resulting in personal insight, powerful transformation and more effective performance.
We developed our software internally and our internal development team is capable of customising processes, questionnaires and reports to client specification. Having software development and psychology professionals in one team gives us a competitive advantage in being able to anticipate and respond quickly and expertly to client needs.
We are committed to making a difference through strengthening leadership because this not only benefits individuals, but their organisations and the country too. This inspires Thornhill in the work we do every day.
Jonathan Cook (founder, chairman and chief consultant of Thornhill) explains how it all began:
Thornhill is my second name and Thornhill Associates (Pty) Ltd was originally registered in 1995 as a consulting company with colleagues at the Wits Business School. When members left and the company was no longer needed, I took it over as the vehicle for what was beginning to emerge as the multi-rater feedback venture we now know as Thornhill.
At that time I was teaching at Wits Business School and wanted to use multi-rater feedback as a class exercise. I ran a questionnaire on paper and analysed the results in Excel. My son Paul helped me, and then suggested that this could be run more efficiently online. When some students wanted to run it in their companies, Paul developed software to enable us to do this. At that stage there was no suitable off-the-shelf software for the kind of user interface we wanted, so Paul wrote his own and called it Argon.
Paul would add new features as customers wanted them, and that has been the Thornhill way ever since. We have evolved in response to customer requests. This was a hobby for Paul, but it grew and he handed it over first to his brother Martin and others, until Frances arrived years later and continued the theme of software creativity.
The administration soon exceeded my ability to manage it in my spare time, and Thornhill moved from being a family only business into a new gear when Daphne joined, first as an administrator, then administration manager, and then as CEO. Wendy brought her great administrative skills into the company, and a team of amazing work-from-home stars emerged. Thornhill was ahead of its time as a virtual venture, in that we have never had an office.
A feature of Thornhill from the beginning has been the close link between professional psychology, technology and administrative functions. At first they were literally in the same family, but as we have grown, we have retained this close understanding. It is a major advantage in ensuring that our customers get exactly what they need. It has enabled us also to move smoothly in applying our core strength in multi-rater feedback systems to related but unexpected areas. We can innovate relatively easily because the development team has deep insight into what is required professionally and administratively.
This teamwork also enables us to offer a highly customisable service – our admin team knows enough about the professional and software aspects to be able to respond sensibly to client requests; and our consultants and development team work together to devise solutions to new requests.
In designing manager and leader feedback questionnaires we evolved a framework describing practical behaviours managers need to demonstrate, under the three headings of Head (knowledge, analysis and decision-making), Heart (covering personal, interpersonal and organisational competence) and Hands (implementation and performance). This has proved an enduring model. Where possible we add questions designed to elicit the leader’s impact on others – an innovative approach that recognises that while it is clear what impact good leadership should have, it can be achieved in different ways by different leaders.
We consider ourselves a company with a conscience, so we serve customers with integrity, create processes that both protect and enable individuals to grow, and give 10% of profits before tax for tithe to community organisations.
We are excited about where we are on our 20th anniversary and look forward to what the future holds.
For information on Thornhill’s various leadership development products and services, please contact us on admin@thornhill.co.za.