Evaluating the leadership of acquisitions  

In Q1 2022, LCap was engaged by a leading vacant property services business to help assess the Managing Director level leadership structure of the organisation. As a result of three acquisitions, the client had three Managing Directors on the senior leadership team. The CEO intended to leave post exit by a European Investor and wanted to know what the potential capabilities of the directors were in a succession scenario and the right structure to integrate them into the leadership teams. LCap was able to facilitate in the development of a centrally integrated leadership structure via the analysis, understanding and mapping out of the leadership capabilities of the entire group including the acquisitions. The key questions the client was looking to answer included:

• What is optimal leadership structure given the multiple shifts within the leadership team?

• What experience and balance should the ideal CEO successor bring to the incumbent senior leadership team in order to effectively achieve the value creation plan?

• What are the different profiles, strength of capabilities of the Managing Directors, and how was best to integrate them into the suite?

In order to properly evaluate the impact and suitability of the Managing Directors, LCap 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.

This process involved engagement with senior stakeholders to define the value creation plan, benchmarking of the organisation against a set of peers, and psychometric PACE profiling of key team members. At the end of the 2-week process, a full Leadership Dynamics technical report on the team was delivered.

At the end of the process, LCap produced an Optimisation report which was capable of creating a holistic solution to maximise the incumbent team's leadership capital and value creation capability and brought in key leadership skills to drive the leadership process. 

Our recommendations was the organisation should hire an external CEO successor and the incumbents would create the most impact at a divisional or direct report level.

This clear route to optimisation for the leadership team provides them with the structure which provides the highest propensity to succeed in their private equity journey into the future.