AI Issue 6 2017

Acquisition International - June 2017 9 Best Management Consultancy & Award for Excellence in Leadership Consulting 2017 - Hong Kong quick wins. As a result, Susannah believes in the power of staying true to YSC’s core focus and only engaging in work where they are confident it will have real impact in the organisation. Having started her career working for a psychometric testing distributor, she understands how to get the best from tools while using them flexibly and knowing their inherent limitations. “Often the discussion and the individual’s reaction to their results can be more insightful than the results themselves,” she explains. As specialists in the Executive space, YSC has longstanding partnerships with many of the largest and most renowned global companies. This means that YSC is well positioned to understand the leadership and talent challenges that clients face and understand what ‘great’ looks like for different functional specialisations. A prevailing need for clients currently is greater levels of resilience to lead change and manage increased performance pressures. YSC have combined their academic knowledge with client experience to create Leadership Resilience interventions that support change management, talent retention and business performance. “Many providers are now leveraging technology to make leadership assessment more formulaic and automated. Whilst this may reduce costs, generic outputs lack the individual insight that increases accuracy and contextual meaning. The challenge for the wider industry is how to utilise the value that technology can offer while retaining the depth that makes development meaningful”, Susannah explains. YSC has made good progress in this space through a successful partnership with CorpU, a US-based strategy activation company. Working in partnership with CorpU, YSC is now able to offer their clients the ability to drive global organisational change at pace and scale. YSC programmes on the CorpU platform use a robust social change methodology that includes network learning, global collaboration and open dialogue. The programmes generate individual and organisational insight. “Linked to the rise in technology in our market is the digital and sociological disruption of traditional corporate sectors, which is drastically changing how leaders lead,” Susannah concludes. “As a consequence, clients are increasingly demanding solutions that are fit for their rapidly changing strategic context rather than generic off- theshelf tools, and there is an increasing need to demonstrate the impact of leadership interventions. Virtually enhanced consulting services with impact measures are the new frontier. Some consultancies have strong technology capability but less content expertise, necessitating more partnerships like we have launched with CorpU.” “Ultimately, we anticipate that this trend will continue and will become the new normal in leadership consulting. As such, there will be a need for more integrated solutions which are technology-enabled and backed by high quality consultants, and we are thinking ahead to meet the changing landscape over the coming months and years.” “Virtually enhanced consulting services with impact measures are the new frontier. Some consultancies have strong technology capability but less content expertise, necessitating more partnerships like we have launched”