Engagement Leader

CLIENT: Our client is a strategy consulting and venture development firm; they advise leaders, conduct research, and work with founders to build companies. In our client’s Advisory practice, they partner with top leadership of large corporate enterprises across a range of industries on strategy, strategy execution, organizational performance and innovation. A significant part of our client’s practice also focuses on systems change, working in partnership with philanthropy and leading non-profit organizations. In their venture practice, they are partners to founders, growing ideas into businesses that scale and endure, taking equity positions in these ventures. Across these different types of engagements, our client’s focus is often on collaborating with leaders to drive solutions at the intersection of strategy and organization. Founded in 2013, our client’s been building a small team, slowly and carefully. Each team member plays an integral part in developing our client as a firm that discovers better ways to create, build and run organizations. They orient themselves as generalist thought partners and catalysts, rather than specialized experts; focused on their client’s larger journey more than the discrete project; and work in smaller teams with team members at all levels engaged directly with senior clients

ROLE:

Our client is seeking an engagement leader. Engagement leaders are the day-to-day owners of work on the high-stakes questions that range from developing the corporate strategic plan for a Fortune 500 to helping a company transform its culture. Our client is much flatter than a traditional consulting hierarchy, and they think about team structures in a flexible, bespoke way. Inside a principled, unwavering commitment to the long term, they encourage team members at all levels to contribute to developing lasting relationships with clients and creating new opportunities for the firm. They think about their objectives as broader than simply maximizing the performance of their firm as a business. Our client holds four fundamental commitments–Discovery, Impact, Community and Economic Value–and at different times they make trade-offs to give these distinct commitments the weight they need.

EXPERIENCE:

Our client is looking for candidates who will take ownership of important client relationships and firm objectives, and at the same time who will be active citizens of the firm, contributing beyond areas of direct responsibility. Successful candidates at the engagement leader level could come from a range of backgrounds, with experiences that demonstrate their ability to drive strategic thinking in the “white space” of difficult, ambiguous problems; bring together multiple disciplines, reaching beyond their own areas of specialized expertise; lead teams; and navigate complex stakeholder environments, building organizational support for important decisions and driving change. A demonstrated track record of applied business acumen, entrepreneurial drive, and a commercial growth orientation is essential. 

Most hires into this role will have had prior strategy consulting experience; those who have not worked in a strategy consulting firm will have engaged in similar kinds of work in a different environment, for instance inside a large enterprise or in rapidly-growing start-ups. While our client does not privilege any specific academic background, an engagement leader should have mastered a range of “MBA-like” skills and mental models, although not necessarily with particular focus on financial analysis.

FIRM PEOPLE AND CULTURE:

Senior members of the firm lead by example and take the time to teach in a way that embodies, nurtures and develops the attributes they look for in all of their team members:

• Conceptual thinking: the capacity to see high-level patterns and principles and the ability to translate concepts into concrete decisions and action
• Empathy: the capacity to imagine how the world looks to others and to build bonds of trust even in difficult circumstances
• Discipline: consistent follow-through and the capacity to translate intentions and decisions into sustained actions and results
• Drive to learn: intense curiosity, a commitment to honest self-examination and open feedback, a willingness to take risks
• Intentionality: thoughtful and deliberate about each aspect of one’s work; commitment to make each detail express the broader vision
• Our client’s firm is a demanding environment, wonderful for people who are built in this specific way, and not for anyone who isn’t ready to be stretched to his or her limits on these dimensions
• When our client notices something isn’t working as well as it ought to, they work to understand root causes and to push through to implications
• Our client doesn’t have a defined title system and career ladder like traditional consulting firms. Similarly, our client’s business model is not parallel to the large consulting firms and they are not attempting to create a parallel compensation model

WHY THE ROLE IS COMPELLING:

A role with our client is likely to feel particularly compelling to an individual with one or more of five profiles:

• A person who loves the work of being an advisor, and is drawn to an environment that will provide a supportive context for this development, without a formal up-or-out model or the purely commercial focus that comes with the path to partner in the big firms
• A deep thinker who values the opportunity to develop themselves as a thought leader. Our client invests dramatically more time than traditional consulting firms in drawing conceptual insights from their work with clients, offering an intellectual home akin to that of a business school faculty
• An entrepreneurial individual, who values the ability to work across stages, combining work with large enterprises with the ability to play a role in developing and building businesses from the ground up
• An individual who is attracted by the ability to work both in the private sector and the social sector and to draw connections between the two
• An individual who is excited over time to develop a practice in a particular industry domain. Our client engages with large enterprises and early-stage ventures, and with for-profit and nonprofit organizations. While they do not organize by practice area, they could imagine somebody with entrepreneurial vision and excitement about specific domains might “major” in deepening their work in one of these spaces

COMPENSATION:

Engagement leaders encompass a wide band in terms of experience sets, professional backgrounds and expectations regarding commercial leadership. Someone just moving into this level of responsibility could have a base salary of $145,000 - 170,000 and a total compensation package with an expected value of $195,000 - 235,000. At the experienced end of the spectrum, compensation is more variable, with base salaries that could reach $250,000 - $275,000 and total compensation packages that could have an expected value of $500,000 or in exceptional cases even more. Payouts above or below a target “baseline” bonus are based on firm performance and holistic assessment of individual performance, not formulas tied to specific economic targets at the individual level.