Growing up the right way.

THE CONTEXT

Fast growth hides things.

For over three and a half years, our client has gone from start-up to a recognisable name in the skilled visa space. The firm processes around 4,000 visa applications a year, with a team of about 80 working across Australia and offshore. A strong tech backbone sits behind the legal work, and the CEO has plans to continue to scale over the next three to five years.

By any measure, the firm has done the hard part. The challenge the CEO brought to us was a different one. Fast growth hides things, and the next stage of scale would need something the team had not yet had time to build: a clear, shared view of how each part of the business was wired, what each team actually needed, and who to hire next.

“They'd grown fast, and fast growth hides a lot. Before they added anything more, they needed to see the business clearly.”

Richard Dunks · New Horizon Solutions

Together, we agreed to put real data underneath the next set of decisions. Compono Engage and Work Personality became the lens we used to do it.

THE APPROACH

Culture, engagement and Work Personality in one view.

We ran Compono Engage across the entire business, combining its culture and engagement diagnostics with Compono's Work Personality assessment. Together, these tools provided a detailed view of how people experienced the organisation, the culture they wanted to create, their level of engagement, and the natural ways individuals and teams approached work.

Participation reached around 95 per cent, with only two employees unable to complete the assessment for genuine reasons. That gave us a highly representative picture of the business and confidence that the findings reflected reality rather than the views of a vocal minority.

What made the results particularly valuable was that we were not just looking at engagement scores or culture gaps in isolation. The Work Personality data helped explain why teams behaved the way they did. It revealed the types of work different teams naturally gravitated towards, the work they were likely to overlook, avoid or overdo, and how those patterns influenced decision-making, communication, leadership and performance.

Compono Engage then translated that data into detailed organisational, team and leadership reports, highlighting the specific behaviours, strengths, blind spots and cultural dynamics shaping performance across the business.

Rather than simply identifying symptoms, the platform connected culture, engagement and personality data to uncover the underlying drivers of behaviour. This gave the leadership team practical, evidence-based insights they could use to improve team design, strengthen leadership effectiveness, refine hiring decisions and better align the organisation for its next stage of growth.

WHAT THE DATA REVEALED

This is a "growing up" story.

The first finding was encouraging. The gap between the current culture and the culture people wanted was small. Engagement was strong. Comments leaned positive, with several team members noting that recent leadership changes had moved the business in the right direction.

A few consistent asks came through: more role clarity, clearer expectations, better recognition, more planning, and a slightly stronger people focus. None of it pointed to a crisis. It pointed to the next stage of organisational maturity.

“This isn't a fix-it story. It's a growing-up story. The headline is good news. The work from here is about putting the right structure around what is already working.”

Richard Dunks · New Horizon Solutions

Each team had its own personality profile

The richer insight came one layer down. Different teams were wired differently, and the differences mattered.

The legal, administrative and support functions looked like a high-performing execution engine. Heavy on detail, process and follow-through. Exactly the shape the migration business needs to move 4,000 cases a year with quality.

The technology team operated to a different beat. They prefer more planned work, more autonomy, more space to question and challenge, and more room for innovation. Their way of working was meaningfully different from the rest of the business. That was not a problem. It was the right shape for the work they do.

The inbound enquiry and conversion team showed a different pattern again. High diversity in team member personality profiles and, interestingly, a clear preference for cooperation over competition. When the team's actual role was examined, that made sense. Their work is triage and conversion of inbound enquiries, not classic outbound hunting. The label didn't match the work.

Side by side, the three team profiles looked like this:

One pattern ran across the entire business

When we stepped back and looked at the organisation as a whole, a clear pattern emerged. The business was heavily weighted towards execution-oriented personality profiles. That was not a problem; in many ways, it was one of the reasons the firm had been able to scale so successfully. The organisation was filled with people who could get things done, maintain momentum and turn decisions into action.

However, the data also highlighted a potential risk. Across multiple teams, the dominant personality patterns were remarkably similar. Left unchecked, that creates a predictable organisational bias. Businesses become exceptionally good at execution while gradually losing capacity for innovation, strategic thinking, challenging assumptions, generating new ideas and driving future growth.

That does not happen overnight. In fact, strong execution often masks the problem for years because performance remains solid. The risk only becomes visible later, when growth slows, new challenges emerge or the business discovers it has built an organisation optimised for delivering today rather than designing tomorrow.

WHAT CHANGED

The data didn't sit in a slide deck.

Three things shifted across the business.

1. A clearer story for the leadership team. The "growing up" framing gave the CEO and her leadership team a non-defensive narrative to take to the wider business. Conversations about role clarity, planning and recognition landed as next-stage moves rather than criticism of how things had been done.
2. Team-specific operating decisions. Each team got its own focus. Org-wide priorities narrowed to a small handful: more people focus, stronger team-based recognition, more planning and forward thinking, and clearer roles and processes. A separate alignment workshop was set up with the tech team to define what should align with the rest of the business and what should stay deliberately different. And the findings prompted a deeper review of the inbound enquiry team, examining how role design, leadership and incentives were shaping behaviour and performance.
3. A new lens on hiring. This will be the longest-lasting change. Before this exercise, hiring decisions were largely based on competence and fit at the organisational level. The data revealed that different teams required different personality mixes to perform at their best. Rather than hiring for a generic company fit, leaders could now hire with a clearer understanding of each team's strengths, gaps and future needs.

“They used to hire people who could do the work in front of them. Now they hire to the shape of the team. That sounds like a small change. It isn't.”

Richard Dunks · New Horizon Solutions

Practically, that means:

• The default "Doer" personality profile is no longer the unconscious template across every role
• Tech roles are profiled against what the tech team actually needs (planners, questioners, innovators) rather than against the org-wide average
• Inbound enquiry and conversion roles are profiled for the work the team really does, not for a "sales" archetype that never fit
• Where a team is overly concentrated around a particular personality type, hiring decisions are used to introduce complementary strengths and balance the team
• Compono Work Personality data is now part of every role discussion before a brief goes to market

WHAT'S NEXT

A continuous discipline, not a one-off project.

The firm is treating this as a continuous discipline rather than a one-off project. Compono Engage runs on a regular cadence to track movement against the strategic priorities and tactics.

As the organisation evolves, team personality dynamics are revisited to ensure each team maintains the right balance of strengths and capabilities. New Horizon Solutions remains close to the leadership team, and Compono continues to support the data interpretation as the business evolves.

“Treat this as growing up and you stay ahead of problems instead of chasing them later. That is what the data gives you.”

Richard Dunks · New Horizon Solutions

THE TAKEAWAYS

Takeaways for other growing businesses.

1. Strong engagement does not mean there are no issues. Overall engagement scores can paint a positive picture while masking team-level dynamics, strengths and blind spots that only become visible when you look deeper into the data.
2. Subcultures are a natural consequence of growth. As organisations scale, different teams develop their own ways of working. The leadership challenge is not to eliminate those differences, but to understand which cultural elements should be consistent across the business and which should be intentionally different.
3. Personality data brings greater precision to hiring. Rather than relying on instinct or broad notions of culture fit, leaders can make more informed decisions based on the specific strengths, gaps and behavioural patterns within each team. The best hire is not always the person who looks most like the existing team, but often the one who brings the capabilities the team is missing.
4. Fast-growing businesses tend to clone themselves. The same personality profile gets hired again and again because it is what the business knows. Catching that early protects future growth.
5. Completion rate is the foundation. Around 95 per cent participation made the data credible enough to act on, which made everything else possible.