Situation: A UK services business set itself a demanding three-year growth plan, and its leadership team, governance and structure had to be ready to scale with it. The business had momentum and good people, but its ways of working still reflected an earlier stage: roles built around individuals rather than functions, informal governance and limited delegation. The review followed our assessment of the same company’s leadership team.
Intervention: We built on that assessment, interviewed managers in the layer below the team, and reviewed the organisation charts, strategy papers, financial data and headcount. We read the whole operating model in three layers: strategic leadership and governance, commercial and customer functions, and enabling and operational functions. For each layer we separated the issues already hurting performance from the risks that would hold back growth, and we evaluated the long-term structural options against defined design criteria. Every recommendation came with its scope, a plan to deliver it, the resources required, where accountability would sit and the expected benefit, so each was a small project in its own right. Together they ran from quick wins through a portfolio of transformation projects to structural change, with a phased plan the client could own and pace.
Outcome: The leadership team had a substantiated, organisation-wide list of challenges it had not previously been aware of, and the managers interviewed had a route to be heard. The client then improved its governance, streamlined reporting lines and rationalised the commercial function. It also improved communication and the flow of information between functions, and cut its internal projects to a manageable number. The changes were the client’s own.