1. Situation

A business unit of a leading Saudi chemicals corporation recognized a crucial need: Aligning its upper management, specifically the roles of SVPs, VPs, and Directors, with its ambitious growth strategy. The challenge was to design these roles to propel the company’s strategic trajectory and enable growth.

2. Approach

As an initial step we clarified key strategic pillars of the business unit including the growth vision, prioritized growth offerings and markets and the key sources of competitive advantage across the value chain.

Based on the overall company goals and objectives, we shaped an objectives tree, ensuring a consistent cascade of mandates from the CEO to SVPs, VPs and Directors. This mechanism assured alignment while underscoring strategic coherence across functions and tiers.

KPIs were clearly defined and limited to a core set of five for each role, to assure a clear role focus. These KPIs were also linked to the Performance Management System to incentivize role imcumbents for the right results.

Clear role descriptions were defined outlining the scope and influence of each role within the company’s value chain. Central to this was the detailing of responsibilities for top managers within the business unit across the entire value chain using the RACI approach, ensuring essential activities within the company’s operation were clearly defined.

3. Impact

Our approach provided the client with a clear and effective leadership structure, better aligned to their growth strategy and operational needs. Each role, be it an SVP, VP, or Director, was now equipped with a clear job definition that captured the role purpose, well-defined accountabilities, decision rights, and strategically aligned KPIs.