The organization is a US $9 billion international consumer products company with operations in 80 countries. Publicly-traded, but predominantly family-owned, the business has two primary divisions, each run by a newly-appointed President who report to the worldwide Chief Executive Officer.

Following the Assessment component of the Diagnostic, our team of experts from Ascentador provided the client with a detailed set of specific recommendations about what changes were needed to optimize business performance in both the medium- and long-term. These insights included detailed recommendations about both Country and Functional leaders, as well as about the division’s structure. Our team highlighted issues that touched, but were not centered in, the division, and that needed addressing if the company as a whole were to achieve its goals.

Our recommendations regarding the individuals who participated in the Assessment covered six basic action bands:

1. Restructure: This individual or team will deliver enhanced performance under a different organizational design.
2. Redeploy: This individual will deliver enhanced performance if assigned to (or at least prepared for) a different role in the company.
3. Reinforce: This individual or team will deliver enhanced performance if paired with different or additional team members or leaders.
4. Reward: This individual or team will deliver enhanced performance if provided with a different set of motivators.
5. Replace: This individual or team lacks the necessary competencies to achieve the Five-Year Business Strategy and should be exited from the company on performance grounds.
6. Retire: This individual or team lacks the necessary motivation to achieve the Five-Year Business Strategy and should be exited from their current roles and perhaps from the company.

Importantly, although our work is always grounded in the data we collect, the real power of this project lay in our team’s ability to reason from the data and to develop a set of concrete, actionable recommendations, including specific timelines and a suggested process for managing change. These recommendations provided a tangible roadmap for talent management and business leadership and allowed the CEO to address the issues in his business proactively and with insight. In fact, he ultimately incorporated our recommendations into the company’s Five Year Strategic Plan.

Two years on from the initial project, the Ascentador recommendations have been followed carefully, resulting in several key changes in leadership, and a markedly different culture in which openness, transparency, and achievement are valued more than politics, internal alliances and tenure.

The company is a US $3 billion global financial services institution with US $2 trillion in assets under management. The organization has a highly complex matrix management structure and is ranked as one of the top three players in each market in which it operates. At the time our engagement was launched, the company’s worldwide CEO had been in situ for 90 days.

While launching an executive recruitment initiative was the solution, our team approached the search process in a tailored and selective fashion with several key differentiating components.

First, our team used a tightly structured and controlled protocol for identifying and developing candidates in order to ensure that all candidates presented would meet the three-fold requirement of being:

1. Experienced and appropriately senior, in order to alleviate concerns about suitability for the role;

2.An ethnic Asian, with operating experience in the West, which would enable him or her to capitalize on the untapped opportunities in the region, while still able to “speak the language” of associates at headquarters; and,

3.A proven innovator and lateral thinker who had previously demonstrated the ability to see what other eyes had missed and to act decisively to capture such opportunities for the benefit of the organization.

Second, our team involved a small group of internal candidates in a parallel process. Doing this ensured these employees would not be disappointed, consider the search process unfair, or be concerned about a lack of due process should the finalist candidate prove to be an external hire. Although our team had not anticipated finding a viable internal candidate at the outset of this process, we actually gathered insights into internal competencies that may in fact be instrumental now in supporting the case to promote one of these employees to a new role.

Third, once the finalist candidate had been identified and accepted the role, the candidate went through an effective on-boarding and transition plan that was developed by Ascentador in collaboration with the client. Perhaps the single most important factor in the success of this appointment was to ensure that the incoming executive was totally prepared to receive the baton before the incumbent took up his next assignment. The development of an on-boarding and transition plan that fit the needs of the executive and the internal stakeholders across the region and the broader firm was highly complex work. The on-boarding and transition plan allowed the incoming executive to fill in knowledge gaps regarding the business, to begin adding value as a leader from the onset of his or her tenure with the firm, to contribute to the strategic and operational plan, to build effective relationships with headquarters and around the region, and to develop a deeply close and trusting relationship with the incumbent.

The company is a leading Private Equity firm with branch operations across multiple Asian markets, a six fund track record of success, and over 50 portfolio companies.

In this case, our assessment focused on four key attributes:

1.Intelligence: measuring raw intelligence, as well as strategic thinking and visionary capability;

2.Reasoning Skills: measuring abstract reasoning (that is, the capacity of the individual to reach correct conclusions in the absence of full data) as well, assessing innovation and change management skills, and decision-making styles/judgment;

3.Team Complementarity: measuring the degree to which an individual is dependent on the presence of external motivational factors or influences (human or otherwise) to make them more effective and to elevate their performance. This also provides a view of the individual’s general interpersonal skills; and,

4.Self-Actualization: measuring the individual's ability to overcome adversity or set-backs, the degree to which he or she may continue to harbor unresolved issues, and overall resilience, energy and drive and, critically, integrity. Our team’s findings were nothing short of astonishing. Not only was our team able to provide significant new data to the PE owner of the company about the strength of the business fundamentals, the abilities and developmental needs of the team, and both the short- and medium-term actions needed to improve business results, but we also uncovered evidence of pre-existing familial connections and relationships between members of the team, which were unknown to the PE owner. In short, following this thread led to further revelations of critical significance to the PE investor.

A privately held business with a 30-year track record of continuous growth, the organization is a leading player in shipping container servicing along the Chinese and Southeast Asian seaboard. With very significant capital and demanding operational requirements, the business is extraordinarily complex.