CASE STUDIES
Strengthening the top team at a €1.3bn portfolio company
A private owner-led portfolio company on its PE journey had a problem at the top. The CEO recognised his leadership team lacked alignment on purpose and direction. Senior leaders were pursuing their own agendas. Collaboration had broken down. The team was reacting to the CEO rather than executing alongside him.
People Edge ran an eight-week programme. It started with structured team diagnostics across all key stakeholder groups, removing subjective opinion and replacing it with evidence. The team then worked through stakeholder alignment workshops to bring the CEO’s vision into sharp focus and give the wider leadership group a shared direction to execute against. Tailored team sessions followed, addressing the dynamics driving poor communication and fractured decision-making.
The outcomes were measurable and fast. The leadership team rebuilt accountability structures, sharpened meeting discipline, and moved from individual positioning to collective execution. The CEO’s own words: “We have absolute clarity on where we are heading, which I created with my team.”
Insight to impact in under eight weeks.
From Series A to acquisition: a sustained critical friend
A UK information services business took external funding and recognised early that what had made the founding team successful would not sustain the growth ahead. The CEO brought in People Edge at Series A. The relationship lasted through to successful acquisition by a leading utilities provider.
The work began as team coaching, helping the leadership group define what effective leadership meant for the business and how the executive team should function. Sessions focused on strategic priorities, not process. Every quarter the team revisited progress and set direction. As the relationship deepened, People Edge became the CEO’s individual coach and took on the Board relationship, managing the tension between CEO and Chairman that was threatening to destabilise the business.
The business was acquired. The CEO credited the coaching relationship directly: “Without the external stimulus and support, it would have been impossible to get the team to think and act in the way they had and ultimately move the business to a point of successful acquisition.”
People Edge then continued with the CEO into the acquiring organisation.
Returning a major comparison platform to profit
A new CEO joined a fast-growing digital services company with a clear mandate: return it to profitability. The business had strong individual talent, recruited from top universities, but operated inside a structure that was creating the opposite of what it needed. Hierarchical decision-making was creating bottlenecks. Turnover was high. The organisation’s pace of execution did not match its ambition.
The CEO’s diagnosis was that the culture needed to change before the numbers would.
People Edge worked with the CEO to run a structured team development programme, starting with a diagnostic to establish an evidence base. The work focused on three areas: team norms and ways of working to build collective accountability, communications and constructive challenge to accelerate decision-making, and delegation and strategic alignment so every person in the team understood their role in delivering the plan.
The results followed within ten months. The leadership team became more cohesive. Ownership of results sharpened. Turnover fell. The business returned to profit with strong growth forecasts. The CEO cited the coaching-led approach as a direct contributor to the turnaround.
Improving collaboration and performance at a leading global PE firm
A global PE firm with strong individual talent had a team performance problem. Collaboration was fragmented. Progress was slower than it needed to be. A consensual culture was suppressing honest feedback and slowing decisions. The aggregate strength of the team was not being realised.
People Edge applied its diagnostic platform across all stakeholder groups, surfacing the hidden dynamics holding the team back. Structured alignment workshops clarified objectives and identified the cultural patterns creating resistance. Targeted leadership coaching for senior individuals gave them the tools to open dialogue, address friction, and move faster.
The team’s momentum shifted within weeks. Early wins built confidence. Engagement deepened. The standard the team set for itself changed. As one team lead put it: “This experience has not only improved our team’s performance but has also set a new standard for how we approach leadership and collaboration.”