Strategic advisory services supporting leadership alignment, executive workforce planning, and organizational design. We work with boards, chairs, and CEOs on the leadership questions that sit beneath specific search engagements.
Many of the leadership questions boards and CEOs face are not search questions. They are questions of organizational design, team composition, succession architecture, and capability planning. Our leadership advisory practice exists to support these engagements directly, rather than treating them as preliminaries to a search.
Advisory work is built on the same disciplines that underpin our search practice — disciplined diagnosis, structured frameworks, deep market knowledge, and discreet engagement with senior individuals. The work product is different. Where a search engagement produces an appointment, an advisory engagement produces a documented assessment, a recommended plan, and the support to implement it.
We undertake advisory engagements with chairs, CEOs, nomination committees, and senior HR leaders on a defined-scope, defined-timeline basis. The work is confidential, conducted by senior consultants, and structured to produce decisions, not just analysis.
Each advisory engagement is scoped specifically to the question being addressed. The phases below describe our general operating model across most engagements.
We work with the engagement sponsor to define the specific question, the stakeholders involved, the timeline, and the form of the eventual recommendation.
We conduct structured conversations with relevant stakeholders, benchmark against market practice, and apply the frameworks appropriate to the question.
We develop and document a recommendation — typically including a primary path forward, secondary options, and the rationale for each.
We support the implementation of the agreed recommendation, including any consequent search, organizational, or governance actions.
Structured review of the current executive team against the capability requirements of the next stage of the business.
Design or review of the organization's senior succession planning approach, including pipeline mapping and development planning.
Skills matrix development, gap analysis, and recommendations for board refreshment and committee staffing.
Cross-market benchmarking of senior compensation, including structural design recommendations beyond headline quantum.
Senior leadership structure recommendations as part of broader organizational redesign or transformation initiatives.
Leadership and talent diligence in advance of acquisitions, divestitures, or significant capital events.
Advisory engagements are scoped and priced on a fixed-fee basis, with the scope, timeline, deliverables, and engagement team documented before work begins. Most engagements run between four and twelve weeks, depending on the question.
Engagements are led by senior consultants and conducted under appropriate confidentiality protocols. The output is typically a documented assessment and recommendation; where implementation support is required, the engagement scope can include that work explicitly.
We undertake advisory engagements both as standalone work and as precursors to subsequent search activity. The two are governed separately — advisory work does not obligate subsequent search engagement, and our advice is structured to be useful regardless of what follows.