This professional services firm boosted engagement, intent to stay and leadership sentiment through the implementation of a unique and personalised progression program.

A key challenge small businesses often face is limited career pathways for employees once they reach a certain level. Leadership positions tend to be highly coveted, meaning that for the majority of employees, progression and remuneration stagnates at the middle management level.

From a business perspective, this puts retention rates at risk, with ambitious, high-performing employees more likely to jump ship to larger firms offering greater diversity in progression and leadership opportunities.

With just 35 employees, Grosvenor – a 100 per cent employee-owned professional services management consulting firm – was facing this very challenge.

“When you’ve only got 35 people in your business, your management model can only hold so many senior leader positions,” says Charitee Davies, Head of Capability Development and Visible Expertise at Grosvenor, which is a finalist for the Best Learning and Development Program Award at the 2024 AHRI Awards.

“Like many professional services firms, the global pandemic and its aftermath left us with a workforce shape that was skinny in the middle. We had a good cohort of senior and newer, more junior consulting staff, but we found it difficult to attract and retain quality people in the middle levels that we considered ‘safe pairs of hands’ for delivering client work with autonomy.”

As a result, many of Grosvenor’s most senior employees were getting stuck in the weeds of work.

“Our EVP, particularly for our senior people and those who had long-term tenure, clearly needed some work,” says Davies, who, as a trained psychotherapist, is also responsible for employee wellbeing at Grosvenor.

“If you were a really good high-performer in the middle ranks, there were limited options for progression beyond Senior Manager. Essentially, you might have to wait until someone in a leadership position stepped out and then vie for that position if you wanted a promotion. 

“We didn’t want that. We wanted to make it really clear that every person, irrespective of level, could make a positive impact on the business, on our clients, and on the communities we work within.”

For years, leaders at Grosvenor had ambitions to be recognised as experts in their target industries.

“The value of this from a market or client perspective is very clear, but we’d never been able to nail what that looked like from the perspective of our people within the business.”

This prompted the development of the Visible Experts (VE) Pathway – an initiative designed to improve the EVP not only for Grosvenor’s senior cohort but all employees across the business, irrespective of tenure, background, experience or seniority.

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Removing the ceiling on progression

The purpose of this opt-in development program was twofold: to grow the business in terms of market share and to promote a sense of autonomy across the organisation.

“The type of people who work in Grosvenor are stimulated by challenges. Giving individuals control over their journey allows them to design their own set of challenges and pursue them,” says Davies. 

By positioning employees as visible experts, Grosvenor was able to create alternative progression and remuneration pathways that aren’t constrained by the management structure. 

Becoming a visible expert means:

• Leveraging firm-wide support to develop capabilities in a specific area. This could be anything from advancing governance with clients to becoming an expert on program evaluation or procurement.
• Teaching others in your areas of expertise, and becoming a trusted voice in your industry.
• Delivering tools, resources, support and thought leadership for your target market within your expertise.
• Marketing your expertise both internally and externally (such as speaking at events, engaging in media opportunities, etc.)
• Having your expertise validated and verified by an external group of experts in your field.

“Even if there isn’t a leadership position vacant in our management model, you could still be promoted to an Associate Director level by virtue of what you achieve in your VE journey.”

In the past 18 months, 11.4 per cent of Grosvenor’s employees have been promoted to Senior Manager or Associate Director level. While they’re not leading a department, they are leading through their VE journey, so they attract the same salary and status as others at that level within the management model. 

“We’ve baked it into all of our existing operating rhythms so it becomes second nature, instead of it being something extra they need to do.” – Charitee Davies, Head of Capability Development and Visible Expertise at Grosvenor

As is often considered best practice, Grosvenor started with a pilot program to test the waters.

“Piloting is ultra-important,” she says. “Especially when you’re doing something that could disrupt your business model.”

Through this piloting stage, she learned valuable lessons around the realistic amount of time a VE journey would take to stand up, when to introduce internal stakeholders such as marketing experts and leadership peers, and how to set up operating rhythms that worked well for the business.

Grosvenor allocated a dedicated ELT resource for the pilot program across a 12-month period.

“That was me. I took off my ELT hat and instead turned my focus to a part of our strategy we had not previously been able to crack. 

“I was conscious of not standing up a program for staff that might result in major disruption, burn people out or shake people’s confidence. If I’m saying the business should do something, then it should be me who goes through the sausage machine first.”

Program in action

Given that this was an opt-in program, Davies was originally concerned that not enough people would be interested in being involved. In fact, within Grosvenor’s initial business plan, they only accounted for two-to-three people expressing interest in FY 2023. Instead, in that initial year, 34 per cent of employees signed up.

Once signed up, each person has an initial discussion with Davies in her capacity as VE Coach.

“We assess if there is a genuine need in the market for what they’re interested in pursuing. How would that translate to a service offer? What support might they need? Are there competitors in this space? How can we position the work to maximise our impact and the experience the VE has along the way? How far along in their VE journey are they already?”

On the latter point, acknowledging that it takes a considerable amount of time to develop expertise in some areas, Davies leveraged the Hinge Visible Expert approach to develop a ranking system to determine the stage people are at in order to align their development to that specific stage (see below).

“We differentiate between a ‘visible expert’ and ‘visible expertise’ because not everybody’s happy to put themselves out there as an expert when they’re just starting out. Instead, we’ve said there’s a journey to develop visible expertise within the business and then, over time, become a visible expert in their own right.”

VEs meet with Davies once a month to discuss ideas, remove any blockers to progress, engender support from the broader business to gain and maintain buy-in, and utilise her networks to expand their own.

A key aspect of the VE pathway is garnering external industry verification. This requires individuals to craft their own ‘brain trusts’, so to speak, which could include academics, experienced industry leaders and thought leaders to peer-review their work.

“We believe what you’re doing should be validated by reliable external professionals, not just by those internal to the business. That’s an important factor for us.” 

Baking it into existing operating rhythms

Grosvenor’s Visible Expert program isn’t something that operates in a silo; it’s deeply embedded into the business’s operating rhythm and it’s action-focused.

“We have a fortnightly growth meeting for all senior people in the business and anybody on a Visible Expert journey. One of the VEs speaks at each of those meetings to give a status update and a call to action to the rest of the group. We all have to support each other’s journey.”

For example, one employee’s VE pathway is around environmental, social and governance (ESG) work.

“She presented what she’s planning and had a call to action asking each other person in that meeting, of which there’s about 12, to find two clients she could talk to about her ESG work. So the rest of the group are creating leads for her to form relationships with and expand her network.”

Grosvenor also hosts a monthly town hall meeting to report back to the business about progress, as well as a quarterly ‘Share Fair’ where everyone in the business comes together face-to-face to discuss VE lessons and broader business progress.

Importantly, this isn’t additional work that’s piled onto employees’ to-do lists. Davies has been strategic about layering the program into existing workflows and operating rhythms to avoid overwhelm, burnout or a lack of engagement with the program.

“These meetings were already happening. What we’ve done is centre all of our existing operating rhythms around the VE pathways. So, at our quarterly Share Fair, instead of having employees talking about this project or that project, we’re also presenting it through the lens of visible expertise.

“We’ve baked it into all of our existing operating rhythms so it becomes second nature, instead of it being something extra they need to do.”

Impressive results

After the success of the six-month pilot program, Davies developed a playbook in mid-2022 to roll the VE pathways program out across the entire business. 

“Now, we’ve had a dozen people go through the program. Every senior person who is not in a site management role or a ‘head of’ role is on a visible expert journey. We’ve also got a bunch of people at the more junior level who are also taking up journeys now.”

Giving people the opportunity and space to lean into an area of work they’re passionate about is a highly energising experience for employees, says Davies. 

This is reflected in the program’s impressive results, which come just two years after officially launching the program.

As well as overall business revenue, sales and profit increasing as a result of the program, employees’ salaries have also been boosted since launching the program.

“We’ve gone from 10 per cent of people receiving an increase in their pay [since joining the VE program] to 55 per cent. The value of our work order book has gone up, our invitations for public speaking engagements have gone up, our reach has gone up.”

Davies is “absolutely delighted” that AHRI has nominated this particular initiative for an award.

“Being nominated for this proves our intent is to have a positive impact on our people, our communities and the industries we work within by building genuine capability, and sharing our knowledge and information freely. We’re absolutely delighted to be nominated, especially along with the other finalists. 

“I looked at the finalists list and I thought, ‘There are some heavy hitters there, so how great that our small firm has been nominated!’ Our growth strategy has been to stay small deliberately. We don’t want to get much bigger, but we want to get better. Oftentimes that knocks you out of the running for big awards because people think, ‘They’re such a small organisation.’ We may be small, but we’re big hitters when it comes to positive impact.”