01
We add senior judgement without a permanent hire
Fractional People leadership puts experienced judgement in the leadership team on a defined commitment, focused on the decisions that are expensive to reverse.
Who We Help
Companies without a senior People leader
The gap is real long before the headcount is justified. Most companies fill it with whoever has the least resistance to the work.
The problem
People decisions with long-term consequences — structure, levels, pay logic, performance standards — are often made by a founder, a CFO or an office manager who inherited them. They are usually made carefully and without a framework, which means each one is defensible on its own and inconsistent with the others. By the time a senior People leader arrives, the first task is undoing decisions rather than building on them.
- 01People decisions default to whoever has capacity, not to whoever has the frame.
- 02Employment and policy questions are answered case by case.
- 03The board asks organisational questions that nobody is prepared to answer.
- 04A capable junior People or Operations person is working well above their remit.
- 05A permanent senior hire is not justified for at least a year.
How it works
How we approach it
02
We build the systems in the right order
Rather than reacting to whatever surfaced this month, the work follows a roadmap: what to build now, what to build next, what can safely wait a year.
03
We leave a working function, not a dependency on us
Everything is documented and handed over. The engagement is designed towards the point where a permanent hire makes sense, and defines what that role should be.
What changes
Senior People expertise now, without committing to a permanent leadership hire before the organisation is ready for one.
- Organisational decisions made against a framework rather than one at a time
- A People roadmap owned at leadership level
- An internal team developing rather than improvising
- A defined trigger and role definition for the permanent hire
Your company has changed. Has your organisation caught up?
The People Diagnostic establishes where the organisation is constrained, and what to fix first.