Knight Frank

Leading Real Estate Consultancy

Knight Frank is the UK’s leading independent real estate consultancy. Headquartered in London, they have 411 offices in 59 countries and more than 14,000 people, providing a worldwide service that’s locally expert and globally connected.

Identified as a potential supplier for delivering leadership development programmes a few years ago, Leaders Lab were engaged by the Knight Frank Residential team across 2017-18.

Leaders Lab worked with Knight Frank to help create accountabilities for two leadership roles in the Residential business, as well as identifying the development needs of a number of their Partners.

This has led to:

• Accountabilities and clear role definition for two leadership roles in the Residential business
• Identification of development needs for a number of other leaders in the Residential business
• A basis for future recruitment and succession planning in the business

The programme was then cascaded to other roles within the organisation, creating consistent accountabilities and role definitions across the Residential business, and a framework for skills gap analysis right across the business.

Knight Frank engaged Leaders Lab in order to realign our senior management team and to ensure we have the correct structures in place to maximise the focus for the leadership of the business. Kate Mercer and Amanda Baines have been both a delight and effective to work with. We wished to challenge our senior roles and structures as we were concerned that, as the Real Estate industry rapidly changes, our roles were outmoded and not focused on what truly added value to the organisation. The most important outcome was to reshape the roles so that they were of most value to the business, as opposed to perhaps what would be most comfortable for the individuals. This recalibration has removed a great deal of low value parts of the role and given clarity and focus to what really adds value and is most important for the future of the business. Leaders Lab particularly solved problems relating to low value operational elements of the role (as opposed to leadership roles) and also removed the ‘nice to do’ parts that had crept into certain roles but which were irrelevant in terms of driving the strategy and plan of the business. As a result we now have a set of leaders who are focused on the key leadership elements of clients, our people, strategy and dynamic leadership. I sense that the exercise has been very beneficial but will require future health checks to ensure we don’t slip back into some of our old ways. Kate and Amanda have been challenging, charming and constructive. I am very grateful for the help they have given us.

Andrew Hay, Group Head of Residential, Knight Frank

Having set out to create accountabilities for two of our leadership roles in the Residential business, as well as identifying development needs of a number of our Partners, working with Kate and Amanda has meant we have achieved our goals and are now cascading the leadership accountabilities programme to the next two levels of the business in the coming months.

Sally Chacatté, Group Head of Human Resources, Knight Frank