Our partnership with a $14B decentralized holding company began in 2021 with a pressing opportunity: the company believed they had significant growth prospects in the future and recognized that leadership and talent were going to be the key drivers to capturing that growth. At the same time, they had few credible successors identified for senior leadership roles, and no enterprise-wide talent management system to address the gap. The CEO and CHRO asked us to design an enterprise-wide talent and succession planning process that would work across their highly varied businesses — not by enforcing top-down alignment, but by building trust and adoption from the ground up.
From Talent to Transformation
Starting with executive succession, we worked closely with each business and function to understand their unique needs. We co-created a talent framework and succession process that gave leaders visibility into enterprise talent while solving real challenges at the local level — enabling adoption and ownership across the portfolio.
Over time, the CEO set a bold vision: to move from a historically siloed, highly decentralized model toward a more agile enterprise, unified by a core set of strategic capabilities. We partnered across the organization to support this transformation in a multi-year journey— shifting from business-level autonomy toward greater enterprise alignment and collaboration in areas like strategy, innovation, automation, and data/AI. These new enterprise capabilities were designed to accelerate shared learning, reduce duplication, and build a more resilient, future-focused organization.
Integrated, Systemic Impact
As we built credibility, our work with the client expanded. Multiple additional opportunities to tailor our services to meet the unique organizational needs emerged, resulting in a highly collaborative, long-term strategic partnership.
We supported the CEO’s shift in vision and resulting needs through work spanning organizational, team and individual levels:
Organization: A redesigned operating model, consolidated enterprise capabilities, new leadership expectations, talent management routines, and dashboards that now track performance, potential, and pipeline across the system.
Team: High-performing team interventions across businesses and functions to align leaders on priorities and unlock collaboration.
Individual: In-depth assessments that include a biographical experience assessment, executive coaching, and leadership selection to deepen talent insight and readiness for scale.
Results That Matter
Since 2021, the company has outperformed on its growth plans and has a credible plan to double revenue and profitability in the next several years.
Talent mobility increased and leader time in role reduced, enabling them to build depth and breadth of capabilities which would further qualify them for more responsibilities in the future.
Qualified succession pipelines have increased by over 30% at both the business-unit and enterprise levels.
Senior leadership regularly monitors and leverages key metrics to make more informed and calibrated talent decisions (e.g., ready now succession, retention risk, common definition of high-potential talent).
The organization has captured meaningful cost savings, and is now operating with far greater integration, agility, and strategic clarity — all anchored in the CEO’s transformation agenda.