3 Secrets to Building Virtual High-Performing Teams
As Covid-19 forces us to work from home, the importance of building and maintaining effective virtual teams is more important than ever.
Private Equity & Principal Investors
De-Risk the Leadership Bet to Accelerate Execution
We work with investors, operating partners, and portfolio company leaders, applying methods proven across many engagements to reduce leadership risk and strengthen execution across the deal lifecycle.
Reducing Leadership and Operating Risk
Throughout the Deal Cycle
Validate CEO and executive team capability against the value creation plan
Before you commit capital, you need confidence that the CEO and senior team can execute at the pace your thesis requires. Rapid, objective diagnostics give you clarity on leadership capability, scalability, decision-making, and alignment so you are not underwriting avoidable risk.
Surface misalignment risks before capital is deployed
Misalignment between the investor and the management team, or within the portfolio company C-suite itself, is the most common reason a value creation plan stalls. Unclear accountability and structural gaps follow from it and compound quickly.
We Understand the Unique Operating Pressures of Private Equity
Private equity environments require distinct decision dynamics. We tailor our work to the specific pressures facing stakeholders in the deal ecosystem.
Private Equity Leaders
Deal Partners
You are making a bet on a business and its leadership. We deliver a fast, defensible read on the CEO and top team to reduce leadership risk and help you shape the value creation plan.
Talent Partners
You are accountable for getting the best out of executives across your portfolio. We give you diagnostics tied to performance, scalability, and exit readiness, along with the proven interventions to act on them.
Portfolio Company Leaders
CEOs
You are delivering against aggressive targets on a compressed timeline. Success depends on your leadership team and your people practices pulling in the same direction. We help you align the team and build the operating discipline proven to accelerate execution.
CHROs
You are making sure the right leaders are in place and the people practices work at the speed the plan demands. We help you make the right talent decisions and build systems that accelerate performance through the hold period.
Services
Explore Team Performance
Leader Assessment
Fast, high-precision assessments of CEOs and executive teams during diligence and in moments of transition and succession. We evaluate capability, alignment, scalability, and execution risk relative to the value creation plan.
Explore Leader Assessment
Leadership Development
Targeted development that accelerates leader performance on compressed deal timelines. We build the capabilities portfolio company executives need to operate at greater scale, take on expanded scope, and lead through the pace of change the value creation plan demands.
Explore Leadership Development
Executive Coaching
Performance-focused coaching for CEOs and senior leaders navigating scaling challenges, board dynamics, and high-stakes decision-making. Measurable, pragmatic, and tied to business impact.
Explore Executive Coaching
Team Performance
Executive team alignment and optimization. We strengthen how leadership teams set priorities, make decisions, and hold one another accountable under pressure.
Execution Readiness
Organizational diagnostics and proven interventions pertaining to alignment, structure, operating discipline, and decision-making, mapped to the investment thesis. Designed for speed and clarity in critical, high-stakes moments.
Explore Execution Readiness
FAQs
Common questions about how we work with private equity firms, institutional investors, and family offices.
Leadership due diligence is a structured assessment of the management team conducted before or around the time of a transaction. CLA’s approach includes structured interviews with key leaders, psychometric and behavioral assessments, stakeholder input, and an analysis of how the team operates together. We deliver a clear read on each leader’s capability, scalability, and fit relative to the value creation plan, along with specific recommendations for mitigating key risks.
For a single executive, a focused assessment can be completed in five to seven business days. For a full C-suite, we can typically deliver findings within two to three weeks. We work around your timeline, including during active deal processes.
CLA does not recruit. This ensures our assessments are entirely objective. We have no financial interest in a particular hiring outcome. Our only interest is giving you an accurate read on the people you are evaluating.
Execution Readiness is CLA’s PE-specific service that combines organizational assessment with advisory and implementation support. It evaluates whether the organization has the structure, operating rhythms, decision-making processes, and people practices to deliver on the value creation plan, and then works alongside leadership to address the gaps. It is not a one-time report. We stay engaged through the changes that matter most to the thesis.
Both. Many engagements originate with a sponsor through a deal partner or talent partner. Others are initiated directly by portfolio company CEOs or CHROs. We have worked successfully in both structures and tailor our engagement to meet your specific needs and dynamics.
We bring a holistic perspective to helping our clients successfully integrate acquired businesses. Our integration work typically spans pre-close alignment and leadership diligence, first-100-day integration architecture, and post-close alignment of the combined leadership team. The most common failure point is misalignment between leadership teams. We help you understand the interconnected elements across the organization that will enable––or inhibit––success.
Many other firms assess your executives in isolation. And that approach can tell you whether a leader is capable, but not necessarily whether they can deliver against this value creation plan, inside this particular structure, with these incentives and this team around them. When a portfolio company misses its targets, the cause almost always lives in that interaction rather than in shortcomings of a single executive. We assess both executive capability and systemic factors at the same time. Another key difference is who does the work. Our practitioners pair operating experience with behavioral science credentials, giving us a unique ability to diagnose problems and implement solutions. We have been doing this for three decades with Fortune 500 companies and leading private equity firms.
Insights for Investors and Operators
Perspectives on leadership risk, alignment, execution discipline, and organizational effectiveness in high-stakes environments.
Working alongside deal teams and investors, we understand the pressures of private equity timelines and what leadership has to deliver inside them."
