Partner – Organisation and Leadership — Premium-Brands Portfolio

The mandate

Premium-brand organisations often change their routes to market faster than they change the authority behind them. A country manager may still own a result while a global digital team controls the consumer journey, a brand president directs assortment, and a regional function negotiates key accounts. New clienteling or e-commerce roles are added around the legacy structure, yet store, wholesale and digital teams continue to optimise separate targets. When performance weakens, leaders debate capability when the underlying problem is that no one can make the complete decision.

The partnership is seeking a Partner – Organisation and Leadership to help clients resolve that problem. The appointee will work with boards, chief executives and people leaders on organisation choices created by regional route-to-market redesign. Their work will span operating model, governance, role design, leadership assessment, succession, incentives and implementation. They must connect those elements to the actual commercial choices a premium portfolio faces; a generic delayering exercise or collection of workshops will not be considered transformation.

This is a planned replacement in the London partnership. The incoming Partner will inherit valuable relationships and capable colleagues but must establish an independent voice. The firm expects them to preserve trust while challenging organisation conventions that no longer fit direct commerce, omnichannel service or selective distribution. They will also help ensure the partnership's own client leadership and succession remain strong through the transition.

Scope and operating context

The role operates on a hybrid basis from London and reports to the Global Managing Partner and regional partner council. It can mobilise an ecosystem of approximately 925 employees and material partners across organisation, strategy, consumer, digital, analytics, rewards and implementation. Direct line responsibility will be narrower; influence will come through distinctive expertise, client confidence and the ability to assemble colleagues around one executive question.

Clients include multi-brand groups, standalone houses and investor-owned portfolios in luxury, beauty, apparel, lifestyle and adjacent premium categories. Their structures vary by history: some privilege brand autonomy, others country scale, and others a global channel. None is automatically superior. The Partner must identify where differentiation creates consumer value and where it is simply duplicated work, slow approval or blurred accountability.

Organisation advice in this sector has unusual human consequences. Founders and creative leaders may carry symbolic authority beyond formal position. Country executives often hold critical retailer and cultural knowledge. Store and client-facing roles preserve relationships that cannot be recreated quickly after a blunt restructure. The appointee must respect that value without allowing individual stature to prevent necessary clarity.

First-year agenda

The Partner's opening phase will assess the active client portfolio, relevant credentials, senior talent and the commercial questions emerging from route-to-market shifts. They will study which prior organisation designs changed decisions and performance, and which remained diagrams disconnected from budgets, incentives or people. This review will produce a focused proposition and a short list of relationships where the firm's advice can be materially distinctive.

On an engagement, the Partner will begin with decision episodes rather than boxes. Examples include who determines a market assortment, resolves cross-channel price conflict, funds a boutique with regional value, owns a client moving between store and digital, or decides that a distributor no longer fits the brand. Mapping how those decisions actually occur reveals the missing information, forums, authority and behaviours that a future model must address.

Design work will make trade-offs explicit. Greater brand control may protect coherence but weaken local responsiveness; country scale may reduce cost but fragment the client experience; central digital ownership may accelerate platforms while distancing product teams from adoption. The Partner will help executives choose deliberately, define reserved and delegated decisions, and test the model against realistic commercial scenarios before announcing it.

Leadership and reward consequences will be addressed before implementation. Pivotal roles need outcomes, interfaces and selection criteria precise enough for fair assessment. Incentives should reduce channel conflict without pretending every outcome can be shared equally. Where positions change or disappear, the Partner will insist on lawful, dignified process led by client management and qualified advisers in each jurisdiction.

During the first year, the appointee should lead at least one significant client redesign through mobilisation, build a stronger pipeline of organisation and leadership work, and develop a senior team able to deliver without constant Partner intervention. The practice should also create reusable decision-testing tools, but each client's history, strategy and talent evidence must continue to shape the answer.

Leadership responsibilities

The Partner will own senior client dialogue, problem definition, engagement quality and responsible commercial management. They will ensure organisation recommendations include implementation cost, management capacity, transition risk and measurable performance hypotheses. When a chief executive seeks structural validation for a predetermined people decision, the Partner must protect process integrity and be prepared to decline the work.

Assessment work demands particular discipline. Conclusions must be based on role-relevant evidence, multiple inputs and clearly separated observation and inference. The appointee will not use advisory access to conduct covert selection, nor allow cultural similarity to substitute for capability. Candidates and client executives should receive an honest account of the process and use of their information.

Within the partnership, the leader will mentor directors and emerging partners, share client ownership and contribute to quality and risk governance. They will also maintain relationships across executive search, legal and reward specialists where client needs require them, with conflicts and responsibilities agreed in advance.

Measures of success

Client outcomes will include faster and better-defined decisions, reduced duplication, clearer accountability for channel economics, successful placement of pivotal leaders and evidence that new forums or roles are used as intended. Financial improvement may follow, but attribution will be stated carefully. Headcount removal alone will not demonstrate that an operating model works.

The firm will assess the Partner through trusted executive relationships, quality of engagements, contribution, repeat work, collaboration, talent progression and the durability of client changes after project closure. Risk indicators include disputed assessments, implementation harm, scope ambiguity, confidentiality failures and work sold without the senior capacity to deliver it.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring 22–28 years of experience in organisation and leadership advisory, with sustained work for premium consumer, luxury, beauty, retail or similarly brand-sensitive businesses. A senior industry people executive may be considered if they have advised multiple boards, built external client relationships and demonstrated independent problem solving beyond their own organisation.

The board seeks evidence of redesigning a matrix where brand, market and channel authority genuinely conflicted. Candidates should explain how decision mapping changed the proposed structure, how pivotal roles were assessed, and how incentives and governance supported the design after launch. Experience across several labour and cultural contexts is essential.

The successful Partner will be commercially confident without turning every conversation into a sale. They need the presence to challenge a celebrated founder or chief executive, the empathy to handle identity and career consequences, and the analytical precision to distinguish a role problem from an individual performance problem. They must be comfortable staying close to implementation after the conceptual work is complete.

Compensation and appointment terms

Expected base compensation is GBP 250,000–340,000, supported by annual incentive and long-term participation consistent with advisory partnership contribution. Final entry terms will reflect verified client impact, commercial responsibility and the scope of leadership offered. Mobility requirements, deferred remuneration and any progression into broader partnership economics will be agreed through the appointment process.

Confidentiality

This direct mandate is being managed without naming the advisory partnership or affected clients. Successor context, economics and active opportunities will be disclosed to shortlisted candidates only after identity, conflict and confidentiality checks. Applications must not contain identifiable assessment reports, client organisation charts or private details concerning executives advised elsewhere.