Board and Management Effectiveness post-merger

Case Study from the Aerospace sector

When private equity funding from a leading UK bank brought together two giants of aerospace precision component manufacture into one world class business, they needed to understand the competence of the senior management cadre. These managers had come from very different cultures and were expected to work together to address the demands of an ambitious business growth plan in the new company.

The Board Evaluation team developed the brief to establish the required competencies from the business plan and a programme of competency based interview and psychometric assessment was established.

Over 120 managers, spread across Europe, Latin America and US, were put through the programme. Each was interviewed face-to-face by one of the consultancy team and an individual report prepared for each manager. The output gave an individual competence report and a personal development plan for each manager, with personal feedback. This data was consolidated by Division and Company to provide a comprehensive management due diligence report.

In feeding back to the client, the ability of each manager to undertake the demands of a new style role was indicated, together with the potential to take on additional duties and change leadership responsibility. As a consequence, the new merged firm was able to appoint highly competent managers to the reduced number of management positions in the new company structure, while providing career development support for the managers who were restructured out of the new business as synergy savings.

An interesting output from the exercise was the redeployment of some very strong commercial, business development managers clustered in one Division. These managers were spread across the Divisions to transfer best practice and cultural change across the new organisation.