My Services

The turning points I’m brought in for

The plan has changed but the objectives and the pecking order were built for the old one, and every meeting runs on yesterday’s logic until someone resets the table.

This is the most common reason I’m called in, and the least dramatic. Nobody has left and nothing has gone wrong. The strategy day happened and six months later the team is still organised around the business it used to be: the same people hold the same budgets, the new priorities get the last ten minutes of the agenda. The work is getting the team to run on the new logic, which means deciding together what each of them gives up.

A group of capable department heads becoming a unit that leads the whole organisation. Until that happens they are five functions that meet monthly and report upwards in turn.

It usually shows up as a chief executive who is still the only person holding the whole picture, and a team that brings problems to be solved rather than decisions already made. The shift is from reporting to each other to deciding with each other, and it changes what the chief executive has to stop doing as much as what the team has to start.

Turning the page on purpose, so the incoming team is not quietly governed by the outgoing team’s assumptions about who defers to whom.

Succession is handled as an appointment and experienced as a change of weather. The new leader inherits a team that formed around someone else, with loyalties, rivalries and a pecking order nobody wrote down. The work is making those visible early, while there is still goodwill to spend, rather than discovering them in the first difficult decision.

An incoming leader inherits a set of habits nobody chose deliberately, and the window for changing them is shorter than most people think.

The first six months decide whether the team forms around the new chapter or waits to see whether the old patterns can be kept. This work uses that window: what the team needs to hear from the new leader, what the leader needs to understand about how this team actually works, and which habits are worth keeping.

A buyer is paying for the group of people who have to keep delivering the numbers for three years after completion, usually without the founder. Every corporate finance adviser will tell you that owner dependency and a thin leadership team damage a valuation. My job is the team underneath that.

The work starts eighteen months to three years out, which is when it can still change anything, and covers the conversations that get postponed while everyone concentrates on the numbers: who is running what after the founder steps back, which relationships sit with one person, and what this team will and won’t accept from a new owner. To be clear about scope: I am not a corporate finance adviser and take no part in the transaction. I provide no due diligence, valuation, investment or tax advice. That is what lets me work alongside the advisers who do.

Most deals fail in the first year or two after completion, when two legacy leadership teams become one and nobody says out loud whose way of working has actually won. I work with the people side of that: forming one team from two, surfacing the loyalties each side brought with them, and getting the unspoken version of the deal into the open early enough to do something about it.

I have lived this from the inside, as HR director of a 200-person business across twelve countries in the year after it was acquired, and the only member of its senior team appointed by the new owner. That year included a change of chief executive, a rebuilt global bonus scheme and a restructured sales team. Twelve months after completion, employee turnover was 15%. It had been 15% before the deal.

Which kind of help does your team need?

People ask me for team coaching when they mean one of four things, and the difference matters for what you’ll get and what it costs.

I do the first three when they’re the right answer, and I’ll say when they’re not. At a turning point it’s almost always the fourth.