The Rooflight Co. had already put considerable thought into developing its organisation and culture. But there was a missing link.

Job descriptions existed, but weren't particularly useful. The appraisal process had become tired and ineffective. What the business needed was a straightforward way of connecting its strategy and values to what individual people were actually accountable for delivering.

I worked initially with the leadership and core management teams to define clear individual roles and measurable accountabilities, all linked directly to the company's direction and strategy.

Together, we also translated the company's values into specific behavioural expectations and brought the two strands together in a simple performance planning and review process.

When the business later became employee-owned and appointed a new MD, we revisited the work to make sure the organisation was fit for its next stage.

Directors and managers became clear about both their collective responsibilities and their individual accountabilities. Gaps and overlaps between roles were identified and resolved, and the company gained a practical way of managing performance against both results and behaviour.

Most importantly, it wasn't a system imposed from outside. It became part of the way the organisation manages itself.

Nara was a successful 15-person agency going through a period of rapid growth and transition.

The business hadn't done anything wrong. It had simply reached the point where the informal structures that work brilliantly in a very small organisation were no longer enough.

It needed to stop, look at the business as a whole and create a clearer platform for its next stage.

Over two intensive days, we mapped out a new team structure and reporting lines, clarified the roles and accountabilities throughout the business and defined the values that would underpin the way people worked together.

It wasn't a lengthy consultancy exercise.  The people who knew the business best did the thinking and made the decisions; my job was to provide the structure, challenge and facilitation to help them do it.

The immediate result was greater clarity about the organisation itself: who did what, who reported to whom, what people were accountable for and how they wanted to work together.

But the real test came afterwards.

At a check-in three months later, the changes agreed during those two days had been put into practice - and the difference was noticeable.

The three owner-directors of this growing specialist manufacturer had ambitious plans for the next three to five years.

But growing the numbers wasn't enough. They needed to make sure the organisation underneath them was capable of supporting those ambitions.

That meant getting aligned at the top, resolving some difficult issues, creating a stronger layer of management and becoming much clearer about how responsibility would be shared.

We started with the directors, clarifying their future vision and strategy and then defining the roles and accountabilities needed to deliver it.

That surfaced some personal and organisational issues which needed addressing, so we addressed them.

We then took the work into the next level of management, establishing a small core management team and clearer agreements about accountability and delegation.

Finally, the wider company became involved in understanding the future direction and creating the values and behaviours that would support it.

Instead of growth depending primarily on three owners at the top, the business began building the organisation it would need for its next stage.

The directors were aligned around the future. Management responsibility was spread more widely. Accountability and delegation became clearer. Difficult interpersonal issues had been surfaced and resolved.

And the whole organisation had a much clearer understanding of where it was going and how people were expected to contribute.

Preedy Glass is a long-established family business with more than a century of history behind it.

Like many successful SMEs, it had developed an enormously helpful culture. People stepped in wherever they were needed and made sure things got done.

There was just one problem.

Over time, roles had evolved informally. People weren't always operating within the roles they had actually been employed to do. Ownership had become blurred and the very willingness to muck in that had helped the business succeed was making it harder to run in a structured, sustainable way.

MD Andrea Millington knew change was needed - but also knew that changing established roles could lead to some difficult conversations.

Rather than redesigning the organisation behind closed doors and presenting people with new job descriptions, we involved them in the process.

People helped examine and define their own roles and accountabilities, while we kept one crucial question in view: what does the business need from this role now?

That allowed some challenging conversations to happen constructively, while giving people genuine ownership of the outcome.

The work has continued into management development and clearer communication across the wider team.

Roles are now clearly defined. People understand what they own and where accountability sits.

More interestingly, they haven't resisted the additional clarity - they've embraced it.

Andrea reports a more engaged team, greater confidence about responsibilities and people increasingly holding one another to account constructively. The working environment is more positive and the business runs more smoothly.

Perhaps most importantly, the energy has returned.

Cogent was an established independent creative communications agency of around 90 people, operating across two sites.

The business had a newly formed senior team and needed a stronger platform for managing its people and performance into the future.

This wasn't simply about drawing a new organisation chart. Two existing senior groups needed to become one leadership team - with shared responsibility for the whole organisation rather than simply representing their own parts of it.

I worked with the executive team to create that platform while simultaneously helping the new team establish itself.

Two senior groups were brought together as one Business Leadership Team. Each member developed a clear and distinct set of accountabilities, including agreed measures so that everyone understood not only their own contribution but what they could expect from one another.

The process was then cascaded through the organisation.

Alongside the structural work, the company agreed its values and translated them into specific expected behaviours. These were brought together with individual accountabilities in a home-grown performance management process.

Cogent gained much more than a set of revised roles.

A newly formed group of directors had worked together on the real business while establishing how they would operate as a leadership team.

Accountability became clearer throughout the organisation. Expectations about behaviour became explicit rather than assumed. And performance could be discussed in terms of both what people delivered and how they delivered it.

The result was a practical people-and-performance framework designed around Cogent itself - rather than an off-the-shelf system imposed upon it.

Passing a family business from one generation to the next can look straightforward on an organisation chart.

In practice, it rarely is.

DSA's founder, Dave, was a talented natural entrepreneur who had built the business through energy, ideas and personal involvement. But as the company moved towards its next stage of growth, that same entrepreneurial style was beginning to get in the way.

His daughter and son were taking over the leadership of the business. They needed clearer roles and accountabilities, more streamlined and documented processes and the authority to make decisions about the company's future – and Dave was finding it difficult to let them.

New projects and ideas kept appearing. Decisions were questioned. Potential recruits were suggested who didn't necessarily fit what the business needed at that stage.

The succession had happened on paper. Now it needed to happen in practice.

First Dave’s daughter, Emma, and eventually his son, Alex, took full control of the day-to-day business and DSA was able to settle into a more structured phase of its development.

Dave remained important to the business, but no longer needed to be at the centre of every decision.

Then Covid arrived.

Like many businesses, DSA was thrown back into crisis mode - and some old leadership patterns resurfaced. More recently, I've facilitated further conversations to help the family reset the boundaries and re-establish the leadership arrangements they had worked so hard to create.

It's a useful reminder that succession isn't an event.

It's a transition - and sometimes, particularly under pressure, you need to revisit it.

Roles are now clearly defined. People understand what they own and where accountability sits.

More interestingly, they haven't resisted the additional clarity - they've embraced it.

Andrea reports a more engaged team, greater confidence about responsibilities and people increasingly holding one another to account constructively. The working environment is more positive and the business runs more smoothly.

Perhaps most importantly, the energy has returned.