Infra Services: building collective governance to move beyond a growth plateau

Context

Infra Services is an SME recognised for its technical expertise and the quality of its work. Following the takeover of the company by a group of employees, its President, Tony Benard, identified a central challenge: preserving the company's established strengths while adapting the organisation for its next stage of development.

The challenge was not to change the people. It was to change the way the leadership team worked together.

Toryo initially supported Infra Services in structuring its governance: clarifying the Executive Committee, roles and responsibilities, decision-making processes and delegation.

Two years later, the Executive Committee conducted a Strategic Alignment Diagnostic by Toryo ® to assess the gaps between stated strategy, shared understanding and actual execution, and identify the next realignment priorities.

Interview with Tony Benard, CEO of Infra Services

What was the context when you first approached Toryo?

Infra Services was going through an important period of transformation.

A group of employees had taken over the company with a clear ambition: to preserve recognised technical expertise while preparing the organisation for the changes taking place in our industry.

Continuity was a strength because several of us knew the company extremely well. But it also meant that some inherited ways of working remained in place.

We wanted to move from an SME historically led by one individual to an SME led by a genuine leadership team.

The issue was not people's competence. I trusted the team. The risk was organisational: decisions taking too long, responsibilities sometimes being unclear, and employees not always knowing who to turn to.

What did the initial engagement achieve?

It helped us turn a group of capable individuals into a genuine leadership team.

Before the engagement, we only held two Executive Committee meetings a year. The discussions were valuable, but the same issues kept coming back without being properly resolved.

With Toryo, we clarified roles, responsibilities and decision-making processes. We introduced Executive Committee meetings every two months, with prepared agendas and concrete decisions coming out of each meeting.

We also worked on delegated authority to make areas of responsibility clearer.

Today, employees have a much clearer idea of who to turn to, decisions are taken at the right level, and the Executive Committee has become a genuine leadership forum.

For me, the biggest change is that I am no longer the compulsory route for every decision. That has reduced bottlenecks and strengthened trust within the leadership team.

Why did you conduct a Strategic Alignment Diagnostic two years later?

When I first discovered the Strategic Alignment Diagnostic, I was fairly sceptical. I wondered how much new insight a diagnostic could really provide into a company we already knew very well.

But the timing was right. After two years of working with the Executive Committee, we had structured our governance and changed our practices. It was becoming useful to step back, assess our level of maturity and identify the next areas for progress.

The Strategic Alignment Diagnostic helped us ground perceptions we already had in evidence, when we had not always been able to measure them.

It confirmed several intuitions, revealed some gaps and, above all, gave us a shared view of the situation.

What did the Strategic Alignment Diagnostic make visible?

The Diagnostic showed that our situation was more nuanced than we had imagined.

In a difficult economic environment, we expected short-term performance to be the dominant concern. Instead, the Diagnostic showed that the desire for solidity and long-term sustainability remained very strong.

That helped us look at our trajectory differently. At the time of the takeover, we were probably much more focused on immediate performance. The current results show how far we have moved towards a better balance between performance and robustness.

One concrete example is customer quality. That focus on quality has always been one of Infra Services' strengths. But the Diagnostic also highlighted that it could sometimes lead us to over-deliver.

Everyone had sensed it. The Strategic Alignment Diagnostic allowed us to address it factually and constructively, rather than as a criticism of individuals.

What value do you see for a leader?

The main added value is the time saved.

The Strategic Alignment Diagnostic quickly turns perceptions that can sometimes be subjective into shared findings and concrete areas for improvement.

It makes trade-offs easier and helps engage teams around a common view of the progress that needs to be made.

For a leader, that is valuable: it allows you to focus effort where it will have the greatest impact.

What would you say to a leader whose organisation is beginning to limit further development?

When the same issues keep coming back without ever really being resolved, it is not necessarily a problem of people or competence. It is often a sign that the organisation itself needs to evolve.

In our case, the engagement helped us step back, assess certain situations and structure the decisions needed to change the way we worked.

What I appreciated about Toryo was that they did not arrive with ready-made solutions. They helped us understand our own challenges and build responses suited to our reality.

Toryo Perspective

The Infra Services experience illustrates a common challenge during periods of growth or scaling.

The issue is not always a lack of strategy. It often lies in the gap between stated intent, shared understanding and actual execution.

The first engagement helped clarify the conditions needed for collective leadership and decision-making. The Strategic Alignment Diagnostic then helped assess the trajectory already under way, make remaining tensions visible and identify realignment priorities.

A diagnostic is not there to judge an organisation. Its role is to make visible what needs to be understood, preserved, clarified or realigned.

So that the leader can decide with greater clarity what to realign, in what order and why.