NORTH Melbourne coach David Noble expects Jack Ziebell to remain the Roos' captain in 2021 as the club undertakes a new leadership program.

Noble is three months into his role as the Kangaroos' new head coach and the former Brisbane football boss and Adelaide list manager has turned to Performance by Design to help instill the club's values as North Melbourne looks to turn around its horror 2020 campaign.

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Headed by Gerard Murphy, who is credited with building the high performance culture at Geelong ahead of their drought breaking 2007 premiership, Performance by Design is working with the Roos on their leadership process.

Noble said the Roos would look to settle their leadership group in the next three to four weeks ahead of the AAMI Community Series in March.  

"It's a program that's set around values, behaviours and from that side of things the players will be engaged in that. It's a player driven program that underpins that and it's supported by the coaches," Noble told AFL.com.au. 

"We're certainly in all of the leadership meetings and the players will have an input as far as what the leadership group is compiled of and then the coaches will have an additional piece of input in that as well."

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North had an eight-man leadership group in 2020, but faces certain change after vice-captain Shaun Higgins headed to Geelong, while Jasper Pittard and Jamie Macmillan were delisted. 

Noble said it was likely Ziebell, who turns 30 next month, would head into his fifth year as the club's skipper.  

"I probably would have thought so," he said.

"Gerard Murphy is the person who is running our leadership program from Performance by Design so how that shapes out you would probably anticipate that that's the likely outcome. 

"But there's a few players internally, from when you first land and looking at it from fresh eyes, who are aspiring to be in the leadership group, aspiring to be captains of the football club. It's a long proud history of captains at our football club so from that side of things I think our program is going to be really robust."

Noble nominated Jy Simpkin, Jed Anderson and Luke Davies-Uniacke as future leaders of the club, whilst praising youngsters Jack Mahony, Nick Larkey and Curtis Taylor for their application as well.