From a federation of entities to a group that decides together

The group grew through organic growth and acquisitions. Each entity has its own history, culture and clients. A purpose existed, but the five-year vision remained implicit, and the holding company’s role was seen in sharply contrasting ways: coordination and expertise for some, heaviness and distance from the field for others.

What was at stake: building lasting strategic alignment between the holding company and the entities, at the very moment a new leadership team takes the helm and needs to be able to carry its own story.

What the preparatory diagnostic brought to the surface:

• A constant tension between entity autonomy and group coherence.
• Information that flows poorly: decisions taken without group visibility, situations discovered too late.
• Entities submitting competing bids on the same project, inconsistent internal mobility.
• Governance that was only partly clarified: who decides what, above which threshold, and when to arbitrate.
• A group brand that is hard to read: some clients don’t know they are working with the group.
• A strong expectation of candour, voiced bluntly by the leaders themselves.

The leadership challenge: moving from a sum of entities to a group identity, without turning the holding company into a control tower.

We designed and facilitated a two-day strategic off-site, led by two senior Lead coach-consultants. The original three-day format was recalibrated at the client’s request: the design became denser, the preparation more thorough, and the post-seminar follow-up stronger, so the same objectives could be met. The principle: a semi-directed format, with framed themes and non-negotiable principles set out from the start by the chair and the CEO.

Before: frame and listen

• Scoping meetings with the executive chair, the CEO and the HR director: objectives, non-negotiables, each person’s role in the story.
• A mandatory, anonymised 37-question questionnaire (strategy, governance, role of the holding company, cooperation, expectations), with free-text fields for disagreement.
• Consolidated analysis by Lead, fed back as insights, never as attributable verbatims.
• An informal get-together a few weeks beforehand to introduce the two days and prepare minds.

Day 1: the foundations

Intention: build a shared story, name the useful tensions and turn the diagnostic into choices.

• A two-voice opening by the executive chair and the CEO.
• A collective strategic timeline: legacies, breaks, accelerations, opportunities.

“Yesterday’s strengths can become tomorrow’s limits.”

• A tensions and dilemmas workshop: moving from a debate of opinions to choices people stand behind.
• A reflective walk outdoors in rotating pairs, to step out of silos and cross perspectives.
• Clarifying mission, vision and values, and translating the values into observable behaviours.
• Exploring two futures: the one we choose and the one we endure.

Day 2: the commitment

Intention: build a credible vision, settle governance questions and leave with a prioritised plan, owned by named people.

• Governance lessons drawn from past episodes, treated as learning rather than a trial: “never again” rules, safeguards, escalation thresholds.
• Building the five-year vision, then stress-testing it: what does it change in governance, in the brand, in where energy goes, in collaboration between entities?
• Themed workshops: one decision, one solution and one indicator per theme.
• An impact and effort matrix to keep only the priorities that can actually be delivered, each with an owner and a sponsor.
• Individual commitments (“what I’ll do differently from Monday”) and collective ones.

After: anchor

• A consolidated synthesis, points of attention and recommendations written by Lead.
• A follow-up meeting with leadership to prepare the debrief to the extended executive committee.
• Finalising the roadmap and supporting the set-up of shared project tracking.
• An HR day on translating the values into practice, by HR job family.

The signature method: from structuring dilemmas to KIDI

Every recurring complaint is reframed as a dilemma: autonomy or control, speed or robustness, entity identity or group brand. For each one, participants describe the risk of going too far one way, then the other, the expected trade-off and the solution required. KIDI (Keep, Improve, Develop, Initiate) then turns the diagnostic into choices: what we preserve, what we strengthen, what we structure, what we launch.

The common thread of the two days: “This seminar is worthless if Monday looks like Friday.”

• A reworded mission and a five-year vision: to become a robust, profitable collective, able to decide faster and collaborate effectively.
• Three group values, translated into observable behaviours, with room for each entity to add its own accents.
• The three priority strategic dilemmas and their operating principles: subsidiarity, transparency, clear arbitration mechanisms.
• A governance framework: decision levels (entity, group coordination, strategic arbitration), escalation thresholds, investment and remuneration committees.
• 13 structuring projects prioritised on an impact and effort matrix, and a three-phase transformation roadmap over 24 months.
• A manifesto signed by the executive committee, and a list of topics to handle later so nothing gets lost along the way.
• The questionnaire analysis, the consolidated synthesis and a document of points of attention and recommendations.

The programme aims to make the group a collective system rather than a collection of entities side by side. In the weeks following the off-site, leadership formally took several decisions:

• formal adoption of the three values and their presentation to the whole extended executive committee;
• formalisation of an investment committee and a remuneration committee, with scope, frequency and thresholds;
• an “open framework” for autonomy: the entities decide, with explicit escalation rules by type of issue (pricing, HR, investments, legal);
• named owners and first deadlines for each of the structuring projects;
• the launch of a values roll-out by the HR teams, planned over two to three years.

The watch points are openly acknowledged: a risk of dilution with many projects running at once, foreseeable resistance in some entities, and the need for the holding company to prove its worth through concrete results.

• Preparation that gives everyone a voice before the seminar, so the two days start from reality rather than leadership’s hunches.
• Demanding facilitation that turns tensions into clear choices and refuses lukewarm consensus.
• A design that gives full room to the story of the chair and the new CEO, without making it a top-down exercise.
• Support that continues after the seminar: synthesis, recommendations, decision follow-up and translation into HR practice.

If your entities perform well but each moves forward on its own, we can design with you a strategic moment that leads to decisions, rules of the game and a plan owned by your leaders. Let’s talk.