What's at stake

The first ninety days set the tone for everything that follows. Retention decisions, culture decisions, structural decisions — all of them benefit from the same evidence base, applied identically to every leader in scope.

Where traditional integration relies on inherited evaluations and the politics of who-knows-whom, this turns the combined team into a single live data set — every leader visible against the same metrics, every relativity quantified, every scenario modellable on the fly. The Board sees the team as a system, not a stack of CVs.

Where this gets called in

• A fresh evaluation of existing leadership team — a capability and cultural assessment of an existing team, potentially going through transformation.
• M&A — calibrate the combined ELT before naming it. Defensible at the board table; fair across both prior teams.
• Multi-entity consolidation — bringing a portfolio of operating companies under a single leadership model. One framework, applied across all entities and geographies.
• Post-acquisition integration — talent retention decisions in the first ninety days. Who to invest in, who to exit, where to bring outside hires — on evidence, not impression.
• JV consolidation — when joint-venture leadership has to integrate into the parent without losing the people who made it work.

What's at stake

Most organisations know their top team well and the layer beneath it poorly. Successors are named in a review and then left untracked; flight risk surfaces when a resignation lands; capable leaders in one business unit are invisible to the next. The cost shows up as an external search that need not have happened, or an internal move that came a year too late.

Where this gets called in

• Internal mobility — leaders who could move across business units or portfolio companies, surfaced before an external search is opened.
• Capability gaps — the distance between each successor and the seat they are named for, competency by competency.
• Executive flight risk — a runway score for every incumbent: how far through their typical job cycle they are, blended with market norms.
• Readiness versus potential — every named successor placed by performance and potential, with a readiness date that moves as reviews come in.
• Functional succession cover — seat by seat: covered, partial or exposed, and how deep the external bench runs if nobody inside is ready.
• Risk alerts — a weekly feed of what changed in the leadership team and in its markets, so the Board hears it first.

Images are from a pseudonymised demonstration build. Every company, name, headshot, score and event shown is fictional.

What the dashboards show

Functional succession cover

Cover is read seat by seat rather than as a single bench count. A business can carry fifteen named successors and still have its CFO seat exposed.

• Board and executive views — the same data at two levels: the Board sees exposure and cover; the executive team sees the individual development plans behind them.
• Live weights — the Board can change how much tenure risk, succession gaps and market depth count, and watch the priority seats re-order.
• Regenerated, not rebuilt — each week from public market sources and your own reviews, with a person checking every judgement before it reaches the page.

Images are from a pseudonymised demonstration build. Every company, name, headshot, score and event shown is fictional.

What's at stake

The quality of a search shows in its documents, and so do its gaps. When each one is drafted separately, the brief drifts between the position description and the interview, ratings are hard to trace back to evidence, and the reasoning behind a shortlist lives in someone's inbox. The visible cost is time; the larger risk is an appointment decision nobody can reconstruct.

Where this gets called in

• Engagement set-up — the client briefing, from a position description, a transcript or notes, becomes a validated engagement record whose search fields drive longlist scoring from day one.
• Position description and assessment scales — drafted from the briefing; the scales set out threshold experiences and defining competencies on a five-level matrix the consultant confirms.
• Longlist ranking — every mapped executive scored against the brief on five weighted dimensions: functional experience, industry relevance, company calibre, leadership scale and cultural fit.
• Status updates and fit to brief — client-ready decks with commentary drafted from the record, led by a heatmap of the cohort against the client's own scales.
• Interview packs and candidate reports — interview guides aimed at what the scales have not yet evidenced; candidate reports drafted from resume, interview transcript and rubric.
• Comparative assessment and references — the shortlist scored side by side with every gap named; reference reports pre-filled with verbatim quotes from recorded conversations.

Images are from pseudonymised example documents. Every client, candidate, referee and figure shown is fictional.

How the process holds together

The scales come first

The assessment scales are the spine of the process. Written at the brief, they score the longlist, lead the status update, shape the interview questions and anchor the comparative assessment — so every candidate is judged against the same definition from the first call to the final report.

• Interview packs aimed at the gaps — probes target what the scales left unevidenced, with listening criteria that separate level four from level five; later rounds read earlier transcripts so no question is asked twice.
• Comparative assessment — the shortlist scored side by side against the written anchors, capped by documented evidence, with every gap named.
• In the consultant's voice — candidate reports can be drafted in a consultant's own writing-style profile, then edited in the browser before they are sent.
• Mason Wilhelm format — branded, client-ready documents, with internal working papers kept unbranded.

Images are from pseudonymised example documents. Every client, candidate, referee and figure shown is fictional.

What's at stake

The Board's biggest people questions sit upstream of search. Before the role is open, the answer to "where will they come from?" shapes strategy. Before a competitor moves, the signal that an executive is "gettable" changes the conversation. This is the layer above the appointment — the leadership market understood as a system.

This is not generic sector intelligence — that's a Gartner conversation. This is leadership intelligence: the people, the movements, the benchmarks, the structural patterns.

Where this gets called in

• Competitive ELT benchmarking — how the leadership team compares to peers, structurally and stylistically. The evidence behind board-level talent reviews. How that aligns to strategy.
• Sector leadership mapping — who's who, who's where, who came from where, who's overdue a move. Before the role exists.
• Talent-flow analysis — the pipelines and pathways into a sector or function. Whose pool you can fish in; whose pool you're being fished from. Shapes how, and where you might go for future hires.
• Board talent-strategy reviews — the people-shaped evidence behind structural and strategic decisions.