Restructuring a leadership team for growth

In February 2021, Drax was engaged by a large (£40M+ EBITDA) private capital backed multi-channel retail business to assess the suitability of the leadership team structure against the company’s value creation plan. The company had added a new CEO in recent years who increased cost in the business while simultaneously failing to achieve growth. The Vice Chair was mandated to step in and review the business with a view to optimising the leadership team structure for growth.

In order to properly evaluate the existing set up, Drax undertook a 3 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 3 week process, a full Leadership Dynamics technical report on the team was delivered, alongside an optimisation report, outlining a clear sequence of actions to take in order to optimise the team for success.

These steps were developed while remaining sensitive to the current leadership team in the organisation and sought to maximise their value while also prioritising changes that could be substantively achieved, acknowledging that there is a finite capacity for leadership change within any organisation.

The key recommendations included:

1. Rationalise the Revenue Function Leadership

2. Rationalise the MD leadership

3. Replace the leadership in the Marketing Function appointing a stronger situational and functional leader

4. Appoint a leader within the Technology function with functional and situational leadership

5. Rationalise the Operations Leadership to enable a functional balance across the team that reflects the company’s strategic priorities

Following the completion of the Leadership Dynamics process, the business successfully completed Sales, Revenue and Finance leader search processes.