ConsultingThe Situation
A logistics and freight group built rapidly through acquisition — road transport, express, contract logistics and global forwarding brought together under one parent, spanning dozens of countries and a dozen or more operating divisions. Growth strategy hinged on both organic expansion and further acquisition, and on becoming genuinely "one" business to customers: one brand, one approach to technology, people, safety and business development, whether divisions worked independently or together.
The people side of that ambition hadn't caught up. Every division had its own history, its own sense of what a leadership role meant, and no shared language for what "good" looked like at each level — from the group executive team down through business unit leadership to service delivery. Without one accountability framework, succession planning, performance management and remuneration were being built division by division, at real cost to consistency and to the "one business" promise the strategy depended on.
The Approach
We built what the organisation came to call its Global Job Framework: a single accountability structure applied across three tiers — executive leadership, business leadership, and service leadership and delivery — using the same underlying logic at every level. Each tier answers a different question about how performance and growth actually work.
Every executive and senior leadership role across every division and geography was profiled individually against this framework — a two-page role profile covering strategic context, expected contribution, and accountability, using the same five domains (strategy and capability, growth and innovation, operational excellence, profitability, customer focus) whether the role sat in the parent company, a regional forwarding business, or a country-level operating entity.
The Delivery
The framework and the underlying role-design methodology — our patented approach to defining accountability by impact and input rather than by hierarchy or tenure — were licensed for use across the group's global HR function, not delivered as a one-off document set. It was later integrated as the core people-framework layer inside the organisation's global HR information system, giving every division a shared structure for succession and career planning, performance management, and remuneration, translated for use in multiple languages and jurisdictions.
The framework's durability was tested in the most direct way an accountability system can be tested: a change of ownership. When the group was acquired several years later, the acquirer's own HR consultants worked to map their compensation structure onto the existing framework, rather than replacing it — evidence that the underlying accountability logic had outlived the organisation that commissioned it.
The Outcome
Distinct executive and senior leadership role profiles built to one consistent framework, group-wide.
Leadership tiers — executive, business, service delivery — unified under one accountability logic.
Framework translated and deployed across multiple countries and languages inside the group's HR system.
Framework that survived a change of ownership, mapped onto rather than replaced by the acquirer.
From the group's published growth strategy