Rowan Executive Search has set up a new advisory team to help high-growth firms optimise the value of their leadership team’s performance through leadership design, development and change.
This includes the development of the individual’s and team’s capability and development of both physical and cognitive diversity amongst the leadership team through executive change.
The new service offering reflects the additional capability brought to Rowan as a result of the strategic investment made last year by The LCap Group.
LCap (Leadership Capital) is a professional services and software developer whose digital insights support critical decision-making in developing effective leadership teams by evaluating the value of the current team against their business objective.
In developing its suite of products, LCap worked with experts across data science, psychology and leadership, including Adrian Furnham, one of the world’s leading psychometricians who specialises in the behaviour of leaders.
Adrian, who has worked at University College London and the University of Oxford, has published more than 1,300 academic papers and 95 books.
The software analysed how over 7,000 transactions fared following private equity deals over a 12-year period. The objective, data-driven insights provide a reliable and repeatable method to ensure leadership teams have the capability to achieve their primary, business growth objective.
Paul Waite and Johnathan Massey are heading up Rowan’s newly-created leadership advisory team as the company rolls out the capability across its north west client base.
Rowan has access to The LCap Group’s digital analytics products, enabling it to provide insights as to how the physical experiences and capabilities of a company’s leadership team can support them in their ability to achieve their current performance objective. These insights include both leadership development as well an understanding of the least amount of management change a team could go through to deliver maximum impact.
The Leadership Dynamics digital product shares its data with a proprietary psychometric test called PACE, which identifies the behaviours essential for effectiveness in senior leadership roles. To date, over 2,000 PACE assessments have been taken, building a depth of insight that is science and data-led.
Owner-founders, chief executives, chairs and investors across the UK’s private capital markets are among those using Leadership Dynamics, for performance analytics, alongside PACE for behavioural analytics, on their high growth-focused leadership teams. Over 300 successful searches have been completed using LCap’s proprietary technology.
Rowan has already seen considerable interest across the north west for the new service offering and will continue to expand the leadership advisory team, underpinned by the analytical capability brought to them via The LCap Group.
Rowan has already used this product, to great success, to support family businesses planning for the next generation, and as a management due diligence exercise for private equity. This includes helping an entrepreneur to crystallise his position within an international business and supporting LDC’s latest investment.
Rowan, which has offices in Manchester and Chorley, specialises in securing the right talent to strengthen the boards and leadership teams of privately and family-owned SMEs as well as high growth companies backed by private equity.
Johnathan said: “A report in 2020 by global management consulting firm Bain cited leadership quality as the single most important reason for business success and the second most important reason for why companies were not successful.
“Leadership Dynamics supports an understanding of leaders and leadership teams by providing an additional perspective through its objective, data-driven insights. These insights consider the team’s structure, experience, behaviours and, critically, the team’s overall behavioural complementarity. When these variable factors are aligned and working with each other, performance follows.
“Both Leadership Dynamics and PACE provide incredibly powerful insights, empowering the business owner to use their experience, knowledge and insights on the individual leader, leadership team and business performance, to make critical people decisions. Our insights support critical decision-making on how and where the leadership team can develop and ultimately, improve business performance. The best plan for growth is only as good as the team’s capability to deliver.
“We know that, as businesses develop, the challenges change and so do the demands on the leadership team. In some circumstances the leadership team needs to operate differently with each other, in other instances new skills and experiences are required, but in all instances the leadership team need to operate effectively at all times.
“Our new leadership advisory offering is a logical extension to the services we already offer, and we have received some very positive feedback from clients who have bought Leadership Dynamics and PACE.
“The whole process takes about three weeks from start to finish, so it is quite rapid. The outcomes are objective and robust, as they are based on measurable data.”
Paul said: “We have ambitious plans for Rowan and we are confident, with the investment from LCap and the access we now have to its suite of digital analytics products, that we will continue to offer our clients the support they need to focus on growing their businesses.
“We strongly believe that leadership is the primary lever for value creation and are delighted to have this opportunity to work with the north west’s most ambitious companies.
“We regularly find that successful businesses which are performing well today do so in a way that is unique to their circumstances. But, as those businesses grow and their circumstances change, performance can be impacted, meaning the leadership team needs to adapt and evolve to remain as effective today as they were when they began.
“This prospect for some can be quite daunting, whilst others are happy to readily accept it, but whichever side of the spectrum an owner-founder may stand, they need support to develop the effectiveness of the leadership team without losing the cultural DNA of the company.
“We will continue to work with owner-founders and the investment community to ensure they have access to the leaders their businesses need to continue to grow. Powered with Leadership Dynamics and PACE, we are excited by the support our new offering will be able to provide.
“We read about how we are all living in a digital age, but up until now that has not been reflected in the tools our industry use or the capabilities we collectively have developed. Using data science to evaluate a leadership team’s capability so we can predict their performance is an invaluable insight that opens up a different conversation which up until now was only ever discussed using hindsight. We now can offer our clients foresight.”
