Do you wish to get better results from the people who work for you - and ideally in a way these people enjoy?

Welcome

H uman

O perating

M odel

E nhancement


Your value creation playbook for achieving superior return on investment in organisations and people.

How does H.O.M.E. work?

H.O.M.E. is a system of four interconnected ‘rooms’ built around a central ‘core’.

People who work for you add value by making decisions about achieving the goals you set while effectively using the resources you entrust them with.

People make these decisions based on their internal ‘maps of the world.’ Each map is unique, but all maps fall into a few distinct types: complexity orientations.

Understanding complexity orientations enables you, as a business founder, CEO or investor, to do a much better job than your competitors in putting the right people in the right roles.

  1. The right roles. You design your organisations so that each organisational layer is aligned with a specific complexity orientation and adds unique value to decision-making. We call these natural levels of work, aligned with human complexity orientations in a DNA-like double helix, Levels of Value-Add (LVA). 

    You end up with a flatter structure, faster decision-making and time to market, and less micromanagement and G&A costs.

  2. The right people. As part of your recruitment, succession planning and leadership development, you first and foremost assess complexity orientation: the most fundamental factor of leadership success, especially in senior roles. 

    For senior-level external recruitment, we can support your decision-making via independent evaluation of shortlisted candidates using best-in-class assessment tools. 

    For a more reliable evaluation of existing team members we can train your team and HR in the methodology of CALM (Capability assessment by line managers). 

    You end up with a higher success rate in key appointments and a vastly improved fit between roles and people across the organisation, leading to an increase in engagement and productivity.

“The structure should enable people to thrive." - Elliott Jaques

Our services:

  • Non-invasive due diligence and risk assessment of existing organisational structure.

  • Collaborative design of new or improved organisational structure. 

  • Value creation profiling of key roles.

  • Transition planning from the existing structure towards the target structure.

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant." - Jim Collins

Our services:

  • Independent evaluation of candidates to senior leadership roles and of team members with high career growth potential, focusing on Complexity orientation and using best-in-class leadership assessment tools.

  • Setting up the company’s internal CALM system (Capability Assessment by Line Managers) to enable better performance management, succession planning and talent development.

"What got you here won’t get you there." - Marshall Goldsmith

Our services:

  • Induction of senior leadership teams into fundamentals of science-based organisation design and talent engineering.

  • Workshop on ‘universal tools of leadership’ for managers at all levels.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” - Peter Drucker

Our services:

  • Diagnostic and risk assessment of existing organisational culture

  • Definition of desired organisational culture.

  • Culture change support through introduction of appropriate narratives, systems, symbols and leadership behaviours.

 

How is H.O.M.E. different?

H.O.M.E.’s underlying principles have been researched for 50+ years, resulting in 2,000+ published studies, including 130+ PhD dissertations.1

With little publicity, hundreds of leading organisations worldwide have been using Levels of value-add as a backbone of their organisational and leadership development.2  Notable examples include Unilever, Tesco, Rio Tinto, ArcelorMittal, Holcim, the International Red Cross and the US Army.

This knowledge has been beyond the reach of most founders, CEOs, and investors of smaller and midcap companies. We at 3A Group are on a mission to change this.

Organisation structure is the most under-utilised tool in a business founder's or CEO's toolbox.

Each founder and CEO has an organisational structure, but virtually no one has been properly trained in how to set it up and use for maximum effect.

In our first room, Organisation design, we rectify this, helping you achieve tangible business outcomes.

Similarly in other rooms, we focus on proven underrated fundamentals rather than on newest overrated fads.

The four rooms are interconnected parts of a holistic, systemic approach

Collectively, they cover all the bases needed, in addition to the typical focus on performance management, to achieve superior return on investment in your organisation and its people. 

From experience, we’ve worked out different recommended H.O.M.E. pathways depending on your role in the organisation.

Equally, you can start your H.O.M.E. journey in any of the ‘rooms’, picking the area which has the biggest need for improvement or the highest potential for a quick win.

 

How can H.O.M.E. help me?

This depends on your role in the organisation:

When working with you as a founder, we aim to help you fully realise your individual potential, using the businesses you build as vehicles for this realisation.

Our engagement often starts with appreciating your own leadership journey. This appreciation is built on a deep study of three personal dynamics: capacity for complexity, value orientation and behavioural preferences. 

You gain unique insights about the scale and complexity of the businesses that you will be best positioned to lead now and in the future. The appreciation may also inform your thinking about the best timing for transitioning out of operational control and starting your next venture. 

You also gain insights about how your value orientations and behavioural preferences may help or hinder the full realisation of your potential, what kind of organisational culture you are likely to create around you and how you can further enhance your effectiveness as a leader.

Subsequent steps of your H.O.M.E. journey are often similar to the pathway taken by a forward-thinking CEO / Managing Director. 

Sophisticated investors know that typical approaches to managing “human capital” are inefficient. This understanding is backed up by research:

  • 40% of newly appointed executives fail. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
  • 67% of roles across organisations generate sub-optimal RoI.9

When working with you as an investor, we aim to help you beat the market via the optimised deployment of human capital across your portfolio companies (portcos). As your “on-demand operating partner” for organisational and leadership capability, we can support you and your portcos at all stages of the investment cycle.

At the due diligence stage, we identify risks for the delivery of your investment thesis and pinpoint potential areas of G&A cost savings via rapid and non-invasive evaluation of the target’s organisation structure. Where required, we also conduct an in-depth assessment of the senior leadership team’s capability to deliver on your investment thesis.

During the first months post-investment, we help you secure the talent that the portco needs to deliver on your investment thesis. This work has two sides:

  • At the top of the organisation, we help you fill any gaps via in-depth assessment of external and internal candidates for senior leadership roles.
  • Across the organisation, we identify team members with high potential for retention and accelerated development. This early identification of high-potential staff has been found to be a feature of many successful PE deals10, 11.

Our talent assessment is different from the typical approaches12 used by PE investors. We focus a lot more on evaluating the candidates’ capacity for complexity, for two reasons:

  • Capacity for complexity is the most critical driver of executive success in a volatile and uncertain environment.
  • PE-centric research13 has shown that portco with an adequate supply of capacity for complexity at the top of the organisation tend to be more reliable at delivering the investment thesis.

Later in the investment lifecycle, our focus shifts to supporting the portco’s CEO and senior leadership team in building a competitive advantage through a systemic approach to managing the company’s ‘human capital’.

When working with you as the company CEO or a divisional business head, we aim to help you implement your strategy and leave a lasting legacy. While supporting yourself, we also help your head of Human Resources transform the company’s system of attracting and developing talent into a major source of competitive advantage.

If you are new in your role, we help you very quickly diagnose the readiness of your senior leadership team, your talent bench and your overall organisational structure to deliver your strategy.

If you need to make leadership changes, we help you avoid costly mistakes via rigorous profiling of senior leadership positions and in-depth assessment of both external and internal candidates, with a uniquely powerful focus on ensuring fit between role complexity and incumbent potential.

Once your senior leadership team is in place, we work together to enhance the company’s organisation design, aligning it with strategic objectives and making it more efficient, resilient and scalable. Alignment with the Levels of value-add helps flatten the structure and gear each organisational layer towards adding unique value.

Once the fundamentals of science-based organisation design are in place, we shift focus to helping you build a leadership pipeline. To this end, we will train your managers and HR in the methodology of CALM, Capability Assessment by Line Managers. An extensive study14 found CALM to be a uniquely robust way of assessing potential of employees at any level within an organisation.

Our next area of focus is on helping you evolve the organisational culture. First we diagnose the culture you actually have and help you determine the culture you want. We then help you define how you can use the key tools of leadership - systems, symbols and leadership behaviours - to evolve the culture in the desired direction.

So what? H.O.M.E. outcomes

Since 2012, we have used H.O.M.E. principles and methods to help over 30 companies in a dozen countries and sectors.  Typical outcomes include:

Increase in productivity

Growth in employee engagement and loyalty

Acceleration in time-to-market

Reduction in G&A costs

Here are the H.O.M.E. stories of some of our clients

About

Andrei Stepanov

H.O.M.E. architect
  • Ex Heidrick & Struggles and L'Oréal.

  • INSEAD MBA with 30 years' experience.

  • Assembles bespoke project teams with a focus on developing the client’s internal capabilities. 

  • As needed, draws upon senior-level specialist expertise from a global network of advisors in strategy, organisation, and leadership alignment.

What next? Get in touch







Retrenchment in adverse market

Sector: Banking

Client: A retail bank specialised in consumer lending with 10,000 employees. 

Context: After a period of strong growth, the bank’s strategy shifted towards defending market share and profitability in toughening market conditions.

What we did:

We started with an organisation structure diagnostic and identified two layers of reporting with limited value added. 

We then designed a streamlined structure, aligning organisational layers with Levels of value-add and reducing the hierarchy from six layers down to four. 

After the restructuring we trained the bank’s management and HR in CALM (Capability Assessment by Line Managers).

Business Outcomes: 

  • Within the first 12 months, the pilot regions became the bank’s leaders in sales, net promoter score, cost/income ratio, and staff retention.
  • Flattening the reporting structure allowed the redeployment of 15% of personnel costs.
  • Regular use of CALM resulted in an increase in the success rate of internal promotions by 30%.

Creation of a new business

Sector: Business services

Client: An IT services and software development company.

Context: Creation of a new outsourced HR business unit growing from 45 to 700 staff within 20 months.

What we did:

We started by designing a lean organisation structure with only four value-adding reporting layers and with clear cross-functional role relationships. 

We then helped define long-term objectives and key results (LOKRs) for each senior managerial role. We further trained all managers in Universal leadership tools applicable at all levels in every function. 

Finally, we trained management in CALM methodology (Capability Assessment by Line Managers) and cross-validated this internal assessment via independent evaluation of key team members’ capacity for complexity.

Business outcomes:

  • Target operating margin (15%) reached within 18 months.
  • Staff turnover contained at 12%, less than half of the industry average.
  • Several letters of commendation from major clients about the quality of services.

Productivity and cost improvement

Sector: Mining & Metals

Client: Gold mining group with assets in 8 countries and 2,700 staff.

Context: In advance of a share listing, the company needed to increase productivity while bringing G&A costs in line with international benchmarks.

What we did:

We started by workshop introducing the company’s senior leadership to principles of science-based management of organisation and talent. 

Based on these principles, the organisational structure of most business units was significantly streamlined, reducing the number of reporting layers from 6-8 to 4. 

We also carried out an independent assessment of complexity orientation for over 300 internal successors and external candidates to key management roles in the business units and the corporate centre

Business outcomes in reorganised units:

  • Productivity up by 10-16%.
  • Staff engagement up by 10-27%.
  • Regrettable leavers down by 5-10%.
  • Personnel costs down by 8-14%.

References

  1. Craddock C. Requisite Organization Annotated Bibliography. 6th edition. Global Organization Design Society, 2021.

  2. Organizations on Public Record as Having Used Requisite Organization. Global Organization Design Society.

  3. Survey of 1,700 companies by Development Dimensions International Leadership Transitions Report 2021.

  4. Watkins M. The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

  5. Leadership IQ research of 20,000 new hires, quoted in Hire for Attitude, Forbes, December 2012

  6. Heidrick & Struggles analysis of 20,000 executive appointments, quoted in Rise of a Headhunter Financial Times, March 30, 2009

  7. Murphy M., “Leadership IQ study: Why new hires fail,” Public Management, 2005, Volume 88, Number 2

  8. Wheeler P., Executive transitions market study summary report, The Institute of Executive Development, 2008

  9. Results of talent pool evaluations comprising 4,400 people by PeopleFit (1995-2005). 

  10. Harding D., Rouse T. Human Due Diligence. Harvard Business Review, April 2007

  11. Heel J., Kehoe C. Why Some Private Equity Firms Do Better Than Others. McKinsey Quarterly, February 2005

  12. AlixPartners First Annual Private Equity Leadership Survey, 2015

  13. Lindberg U. Predictability of Investment Performance and the Impact of the Level of CEO’s and Partners. Requisite Organization International Institute, 2011.

  14. Clement S., Clement C. It’s All about Work: Organizing Your Company to Get Work Done. Woodlands: Organizational Design, 2015


My passion is about unlocking the hidden potential of people and organisations, leading to a level shift in performance. I do this by using research-based methods in four areas: organisational design, talent assessment, leadership development, and culture building.

Over 30 years, a winding working journey has taken me from running operations for a franchise network of printshops in Russia to heading HR in Europe for a global software company. I learned the ropes of corporate HR management at L’Oreal and was steeped in executive search and leadership consulting at Heidrick & Struggles and Korn/Ferry. London has been my base since 2001, after graduating from INSEAD in France with an MBA focused on Organisational Behaviour.

I’ve been doing the H.O.M.E. work since 2012, when I discovered the uniquely powerful and underrated body of knowledge around complexity orientations and levels of value-add. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to help 30+ companies in 15 countries, operating across 12 sectors and employing anywhere between 70 and 200,000 people, use elements of H.O.M.E. to create competitive advantage. 

My ‘sweet spot’ is making the methods used by industry leaders available to small and medium-sized companies. Engagements focus on high-impact issues and opportunities while addressing root causes, laying systemic cornerstones, and building the client’s internal capabilities, without the need for scores of junior consultants crowding client sites for weeks.

At the same time, for large-scale, multidisciplinary, multinational, and time-critical projects, I collaborate with closely aligned, long-standing colleagues from Anaka Partners, VALPEO, and Systems Leadership network. This way, the clients benefit from the combination of senior-level expertise, global reach, speed and cost-effectiveness.

When not working with clients, I like exploring new research at the intersection of organisational theory and leadership psychology. My recreational time is shared between hill walks, design exhibitions, karaoke parties, space-saving home improvements, and making memories with my better half of over 30 years and our three mostly grown-up children.