Building a single leadership team post merger

In July 2021, Drax was engaged by a leading European Investor to help assess the leadership structure of two recently merged portfolio companies. The two businesses each had functional leadership teams independent of one another and also operated  across different geographical footprints; specifically the UK & Ire as well as Central and Eastern Europe (Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Luxembourg).

The key questions the client was looking to answer included:

• How to build the optimal leadership structure for the newly merged business, taking into consideration;

• Presence across multiple international markets

• Incumbent leaders and leadership teams who had been successful to date running each independent business

• The value creation ambitions for the business

• What is the most complementary experience and behavioural profile for a new leader for the merger business

• How to secure a CEO capable of driving the business forward and creating value through a period of change

In order to properly understand and mitigate these risks to the search, Drax undertook a 2 week Leadership Dynamics project with the leadership team in order to understand fully the structure, experience and behavioural fit of the incumbent team, and properly define the search. 

This process involved engagement with senior stakeholders to define the value creation plan, benchmarking of the organisation against a set of peers, psychometric PACE profiling of some members of the team, and remote profiling of those from whom the search was confidential. At the end of the 2 week process, a full Leadership Dynamics technical report on the team was delivered, alongside a role definition for the ideal CEO profile to join the business. The business was subsequently able to undertake a restructuring of the leadership team across the merger business quickly and with confidence.

This Leadership Dynamics report also enabled investor confidence in a search process. It focussed in on the critical experiences and behaviours a successful candidate for the search should possess, whilst providing scope for the flexibility that a search in a difficult location necessitates. Ultimately, this enabled a richer, more effective search to be undertaken which was set up to succeed from the very beginning.