Is your Board equipped to guide the business through its next stage of growth?

An effective Board does more than provide governance and oversight. It challenges thinking, shapes strategy and ensures the organisation has the leadership and capabilities required to succeed.

Haystack works with Boards and Chairs to independently assess Board composition, effectiveness, capability and alignment with the organisation’s strategic priorities.

Our reviews examine:

• • Board composition, skills and diversity of experience
  • Director capabilities against current and future strategic requirements
  • Board dynamics, decision making and effectiveness
  • Governance structures, responsibilities and accountability
  • Relationships between the Board and Executive Leadership Team
  • Succession planning and future Board capability requirements

The outcome: An independent assessment of Board effectiveness, identifying strengths, capability gaps and practical recommendations to improve governance, performance and future readiness.

Is your business structured to deliver its strategy?

As businesses grow and evolve, organisational structures do not always keep pace. Reporting lines become complicated, accountability becomes unclear and unnecessary management layers can slow decisions and execution.

Haystack helps organisations evaluate whether their existing structures are fit for purpose, commercially effective and aligned with their strategic objectives.

Our reviews consider:

• • Organisational design and reporting structures
  • Leadership responsibilities, decision rights and accountability
  • Management layers, spans of control and operational efficiency
  • Alignment between organisational structure and business strategy
  • Opportunities to simplify operations and improve effectiveness
  • Future structural requirements to support growth, transformation or change

The outcome: Practical recommendations for an organisational structure that improves accountability, enables better decision making and supports sustainable business performance.

Do you have the leadership capability to deliver your ambitions?

The leadership team that brought a business to where it is today may not necessarily be the team equipped to take it where it needs to go next.

Our Capability Reviews provide Boards and CEOs with an objective perspective on their existing leadership talent, identifying strengths, development opportunities, succession risks and potential capability gaps.

We assess:

• • Executive leadership capability and effectiveness
  • Alignment between individual capabilities and strategic priorities
  • Leadership behaviours, commercial acumen and execution capability
  • Individual and collective leadership team strengths
  • Succession readiness and critical role dependencies
  • Emerging capability requirements and future leadership needs

The outcome: An evidence based understanding of leadership capability, enabling informed decisions around executive development, succession, recruitment and organisational change.

Understand the talent market before you need to recruit.

The best talent decisions are rarely made under pressure.

Haystack provides organisations with detailed external talent intelligence, helping Boards and Executive Teams understand the availability, depth and quality of leadership talent across their industry and beyond.

Whether planning succession, entering new markets, building new capabilities or preparing for future executive appointments, our Talent Mapping services provide valuable visibility of the external market.

Our work includes:

• • Mapping executive and specialist talent across targeted industries and organisations
  • Identifying emerging leaders and potential succession candidates
  • Benchmarking internal capability against external market talent
  • Understanding competitor leadership structures and talent pools
  • Evaluating talent availability and market dynamics
  • Building proactive talent pipelines for future critical appointments

The outcome: A comprehensive understanding of the external talent landscape, enabling proactive succession planning, workforce development and more informed talent investment decisions.

Is your culture supporting your strategy or standing in its way?

Culture influences how people lead, collaborate, make decisions and perform. Yet the culture an organisation believes it has is not always the culture experienced by its people.

Haystack works with Boards and Executive Teams to examine the behaviours, values and leadership practices shaping their organisation.

Through structured interviews, leadership assessments and qualitative insights, we help identify cultural strengths, areas of misalignment and potential barriers to performance.

Our reviews explore:

• • Alignment between stated organisational values and actual behaviours
  • Leadership styles and their influence on organisational culture
  • Employee engagement, trust and accountability
  • Collaboration and effectiveness across leadership teams
  • Cultural readiness for growth, transformation or change
  • Cultural alignment between the Board, Executive Team and broader organisation

The outcome: A practical understanding of the organisation’s current culture, with clear recommendations to strengthen leadership alignment, engagement and organisational effectiveness.

Are you paying the right people the right amount?

Executive remuneration is about more than attracting talent. It plays a critical role in retention, performance, internal equity and ensuring organisations remain competitive in an evolving talent market.

Without reliable market intelligence, Boards and business leaders can find themselves making remuneration decisions based on outdated information, incomplete market comparisons or assumptions that fail to reflect the true value of a role.

Haystack provides independent salary benchmarking and executive remuneration insights to help organisations make informed, commercially sound decisions about how they reward their people.

Drawing on our executive search experience and market intelligence, we assess remuneration against comparable roles, organisations and industries, taking into account the scope, complexity and accountability of individual positions.

Our reviews examine:

• • Executive and senior management remuneration against relevant market benchmarks
  • Base salary, short term incentives, long term incentives and total remuneration packages
  • Remuneration competitiveness across comparable industries, organisations and roles
  • Internal remuneration equity and consistency across leadership teams
  • The relationship between role complexity, accountability and remuneration
  • Retention risks associated with remuneration positioning
  • Remuneration structures to support attraction, retention and succession planning
  • Market trends influencing executive remuneration expectations

The outcome: A clear, evidence informed assessment of remuneration competitiveness, supported by practical recommendations to help Boards and business leaders attract, reward and retain the talent required to deliver their strategic objectives.