Context
A leading FMCG organisation with a strong portfolio of household brands who were looking to grow locally and internationally, wanted to build their in-house organisational change capability to support this transformation journey. This newly created role would partner with the Executive Team, including the CEO and CPO, and the wider business to help them understand how they might achieve those ambitions through developing a robust and cohesive approach to organisation design and change management.
This role required a commercially minded OD professional with the experience and skills to engage and collaborate with a diverse set of stakeholders, with the capability to develop commercially aligned tools to underpin meaningful change
Challenge
In this case it was about finding someone with not only the technical nous in OD, but equally who had the ability to link their work to business priorities, translating their recommendations into practical tools. We were also looking for an OD practitioner with generalist HR experience, as this role would be expected to proactively contribute to the wider HR agenda.
We needed to find OD leaders that had had proven experience of embedding organisational change within a highly commercial environment. They needed to have the credibility to build trust amongst an audience where there was a limited understanding around what OD really meant – it was not just about changing structure charts! It was critical to find someone who could bring OD to life in a pragmatic way, one that the organisation could buy into and could see value behind.
Solution
When searching for a role of this specialist nature it was important to not only look for experienced candidates with OD expertise, but also to focus on those with a track record of delivering transformation in consumer related environments. We proactively approached and engaged with individuals who already oversaw a similar remit and we also engaged with generalist candidates who had a genuine depth of experience in organisational change and assessed their potential and appetite to ‘grow into’ a COE type role.
For this hire, network referrals and targeted search were especially important. By talking to industry leaders across the organisational change and transformation arena, we were able to gather recommendations of quality candidates with strong professional career records. Our shortlist encompassed leaders that demonstrated both deep and broad OD experience. We were delighted to appoint a leader who not only has the technical skillset to succeed, but who also brings a highly commercial and focused approach to embedding change.