What happens when you leave an acquisition alone for too long? 

​

Working with senior leaders and a small, cross-functional design team from both parent and acquired companies, the challenge was to explore how to improve team and financial performance.

​

After a few shorts weeks of discovery and stakeholder interviews, it became clear that structure wasn't the culprit for underperformance. Talented employees with a knack for digitally native brands (DNBs) were being asked to play outside their expertise, but wanting to say "yes" and show goodwill diluted any ability to continue exploiting the 'secret sauce' in the market. 

​

It's impossible to appreciate anyone's unique strengths and talents if you don't know what they are! A two-day, in-person workshop revealed that not only was there little understanding (let alone appreciation) between the two teams, there was no trust! And while people saw one another virtually on a near-daily basis, there were no interpersonal connections - only internal competition. Face-to-face interactions matter, especially when trying to build trust.

​

By the end, some roles were reconstructed and the leadership team was modestly redesigned to protect and expand differentiating capabilities, but designing new ways of working across organizational units and providing opportunities to see and learn how one another worked was the lowest hanging fruit first picked.

The client, organized by major product divisions, was receiving complaints from B2B customers about inconsistent experiences across their shared manufacturing footprint.

​

A new division President was named to take over not one but two units in hopes of elevating the customer experience while also unifying ways of working and reducing work duplication - a classic organization design puzzle.

​

Always beginning with strategy, time was taken early on with key executives to clarify strategic goals and answer unanswered questions while a full organizational diagnosis was conducted. A significant undertaking, multiple workstreams were created to design the structures, work requirements, ways of working, metrics, and key talent requirements across: a) full Operating Model, b) Sales and Customer, c) R&D, and d) Site Leadership/ Manufacturing Operations.

​

Over three months, carefully curated in-person and virtual, follow-up workshops moved teams through the design process. Taking a top-down approach, a new leadership layer was designed, though not announced, with subsequent design teams 'creating and debating' by following sets of design parameters (rules) and design criteria - all grounded in a clear, unified vision for the future.

Think what got you to $1B in contracts will get you to $3B? - it might... but probably won't.

​

Founders are essential but before long, it might feel like they are detracting more than they are enabling the growth and scale of a company that all started with a great idea. It's incredibly difficult to convince ambitious, results-driven leaders that the current organizational 'recipe' might not be the long-term answer - after all, it's worked so well often for many years, right?

​

Making the pivot from a start-up doesn't mean you can't still design yourself to be proudly agile and even 'scrappy' as one bio-pharma client realized. Unfamiliar to any formal organization design methods, processes, or frameworks, the Founder and original direct report leadership team of 11 embarked on a fully remote, agile learning and design journey during the height of the pandemic.

​

By rethinking the major building blocks of work and clarifying key accountabilities for the top two layers of senior leadership, the Founder and design team was able to right-size the senior-most layer while still preserving strong interpersonal relationships with key talent who had been part of the company for years.

As a lifelong consultant, it pains me to admit that you're probably paying too much for external expertise - unless you are doing it with intention.

​

A non-profit found themselves asking not only "is it safe to have over half our function's workforce non-FTEs" but also "couldn't we be saving money by moving work in-house?" Sometimes the cost, efficiency, and risk is absolutely worth not doing it yourself, much like everyday chores or nominal house projects, but how do you make the decision to build, borrow, buy, or automate work?

​

After a thorough organizational diagnostic revealed the basic and differentiating capabilities for the function, the next step was to spend multiple weeks fully accounting for the breadth of essential work activities following a 'center-led' framework. Using a template commonly referred to as a "work sort," future work activities were grouped across four major categories: 1) governance and oversight, 2) specialized expertise, 3) high-volume transactional work and solutions, and 4) embedded (within a/ the business unit). In addition to identifying work activities, identifying work to start, stop, move, and/ or automate was also captured. This allowed for thoughtful role 'reconstruction' prior to making decisions about staffing.

​

Finally, a comprehensive yet simple framework was custom built, allowing the client to streamline staffing decision-making for reconstructed roles. Six risk dimensions of 1) accountability, 2) oversight, 3) coverage, 4) differentiation, 5) connectivity, and 6) skillset - not of equal weight - provided for consistent application of process and governance.