Group-Wide Performance Management System Across Seven Distinct Creative and Media Businesses

A global holding group operating across seven distinct businesses — creative agencies, above-the-line advertising, below-the-line and through-the-line media buying, and public relations — needed a unified approach to defining roles and managing performance across all of them. The group had over 120 distinct positions spread across these businesses, each shaped by a completely different commercial model: a client-servicing role in a media buying company looks nothing like a creative role in an agency, which looks nothing like a specialist role in a PR firm. The group's existing competency framework had aged out of relevance, and leadership had decided this was the moment to rebuild the performance management system itself, not just refresh the paperwork around it.

The brief was demanding in a way that is easy to underestimate from the outside: design job descriptions that didn't just list duties, but defined the actual deliverables expected against each role, broken into behavioral and technical competencies, weighted differently depending on the nature of the job and the business it sat in. A client-facing sales role might be weighted 70% behavioral and 30% technical; a designer's role might invert that ratio entirely. There was no single template that could work across all seven companies — the framework had to flex by design while still functioning as one coherent system at the group level.

The technical complexity was only part of the difficulty. The deeper challenge was organizational: getting senior stakeholders, subject matter experts, and business leaders from seven different companies — each running their own P&L, their own client relationships, and their own competing priorities — into enough alignment to agree on a shared framework. These were people whose calendars were already full with client pitches, account management, and creative deadlines; carving out their time for discovery sessions was a constant, ongoing negotiation rather than a one-time ask.

Compounding this, the group's expectations on timeline didn't initially account for these ground realities. The original ask assumed the operational complexity of seven different local businesses could be abstracted away — a common tension in group-wide initiatives, where head-office urgency and local operational reality pull in different directions. Establishing a credible baseline schedule required first understanding how each business actually worked, which meant the early timeline itself had to be built, not assumed.

Catalyst Convoy spent the first six to eight weeks doing nothing but discovery — building relationships with stakeholders across all seven companies, understanding their pain points, their ambitions for the project, and what would actually earn their buy-in rather than their reluctant compliance. An eight-person team, working under Catalyst Convoy's direction, ran an extensive series of structured conversations across the group, documenting input from business leaders and subject matter experts and using it to construct a preliminary draft design, tested with the client early, specifically to confirm the direction was right before committing months of further work to it.

By month six, a critical decision point emerged: building an entirely new competency framework from scratch, on top of everything else in scope, was not realistic within the timeline. Rather than forcing it, Catalyst Convoy made the call to update the existing framework rather than replace it outright — building a workable competency dictionary, then running a two-way mapping exercise to ensure every competency referenced in a job description existed in the framework, and every framework competency was actually being used somewhere. It was a pragmatic recalibration that protected the timeline without compromising the integrity of the underlying system.

The performance appraisal process was mapped end-to-end: trigger points, self-assessment by employees, manager-led evaluation, recording of outcomes, development planning, and the feed into the following year's training plan. None of this had been explicitly requested by the client at the outset — it emerged from the discovery process, once it became clear that job descriptions and competencies alone weren't enough without the operating process that would actually use them.

Deployment followed a structured, group-wide communication push — emails, canteen posters, mobile messaging, and open houses. Catalyst Convoy supported each group company's leadership in building their own internal training and support teams rather than running the rollout centrally, a deliberate choice to embed ownership locally rather than have the new process feel imposed from outside. Every employee received their new job description, with the behavioral and technical competency weighting already set at the group level, leaving managers free to agree the specific deliverables and goals with each person individually.

From job architecture to live reporting — every deliverable built to function as a unified system across seven different businesses.

The competency framework, the redesigned job description architecture across all 120-plus positions, and the new performance evaluation process were deployed across all seven group companies, supported by the Performance Framework Manual, which became a recognized reference point across the group rather than a document that sat unread. Catalyst Convoy continued to manage the process through its first live cycle, capturing the resulting performance data and producing reporting and dashboards handed directly to the group CEO and senior stakeholders across the businesses.

What had started as a job description and competency exercise became something larger: a fully operational performance management system, embedded with local ownership in each business, running on a framework precise enough to differentiate a media buyer from a copywriter from an account director, while still functioning as one coherent system at the group level.