Investments often fail because of leaders who are not listening. And what makes a good Entrepreneur or Managing Director is not what makes a good CEO.
In front of a target, investment directors should ask themselves questions such as: is this entrepreneur a manager? How does he work in a team? Is he the change agent needed for the long run? Will he be able to turn around the company he has founded? Will he abide by the new strategy?
All these questions help make a SWOT analysis of a targeted company and the answers are often hypothetical. Agora Human Capital offers a full evaluation of the human potential at stake in a company at the organization, management team and individual levels.
At the due diligence phase, the entrepreneur and his partner (if any) may willingly unveil themselves and can give enough material to evaluate their potential, competencies, values, motivations and their emotional intelligence. Agora does this through semi-directive interviews and online tools with an individual debrief by a certified consultant that can be the foundation of a coaching thereafter.
Post-investment, it becomes easier to access the whole management team and expand the evaluation to the team and the organization.
The same individual assessment as described above is applied together with a systemic analysis of the organization and the exploration of the team’s effectiveness, morale and team spirit.
And here the collective debrief to the team itself can serve as a basis to develop collective intelligence and fix organizational issues, if any.
We recommend launching this process before the investment and during the first year after; it requires an ongoing partnership with the investment directors.
Benefits are setting clearer expectations on both sides, a better alignment between the fund and the management team strategy, and more engaged stakeholders.
Florence Bonpaix has been leading the Human Capital unit
of Agora Search since 2017. She supports clients in two main
areas: leadership development and talent management
optimization through developing competencies and
leveraging motivation, and HR strategic planning in alignment
with business strategy, focusing on the human impact of
transformations serving collective intelligence and engagement.
Florence holds dual M.A.s in Mandarin Chinese and international
business from INALCO and the University of Paris III.
She is an NLP master, trained in systemic coaching (ICF).