Pre-merger leadership evaluation

In Q3 2021, LCap was engaged by a leading private equity fund to help assess the leadership structure of a proposed merger between two Financial Services portfolio companies. The two businesses each had functional leadership teams independent of one another with potential to integrate the strongest individuals into a senior leadership team. The portfolio company specifically wanted to evaluate and analyse the two incumbent leadership teams to determine where the potential to drive value creation growth lay.

The key challenges the client was looking to solve included:

• How to effectively evaluate two leadership teams, understand and identify the optimal structure in order to successfully merge the two businesses teams.

• Successfully appointing a new CEO to lead the new joint venture, having identified the most complementary experience and behavioural profile for a new leader for the merger business, and ensuring they were able to drive the most effective integration of the two teams.

• How to compare and contrast two incumbent candidates within the same functional role and decide who is the best fit against the back drop of the new VCP.

In order to properly understand what type of CRO would have the greatest impact on the value creation growth, LCap undertook an evaluation and assessment process. 

This process involved engagement with senior stakeholders to define the post merger integration aims for the NewCo and how these would shape the role requirement for the CRO. We benchmarked the CRO candidates against our archetypal benchmark for the role and undertook psychometric PACE profiling to determine who had the best complementarity with the wider leadership team.

At the end of the process, a full Evaluation report on the incumbent CROs, alongside a development plan for the ideal CRO profile was compiled. The business subsequently used our recommendation to hire the engage one CRO and integrate them into their senior leadership team.

This report enabled the incoming CEO of the portfolio company to realise how Leadership Dynamics can be utilised to ensure two disparate leadership teams and any new inbound leaders are a complementarity fit to the rest of the team. It focussed in on the critical experiences and behaviours a successful candidate for the search should possess.