You are Meredith Osei, People Director at Meridian Cloud Systems, a data-platform company based in Waterloo, Ontario. Your CEO has given you three weeks to turn a complaint and a compliance flag about the company's best salesperson into a formal leadership review for the board. First you must decide what the evidence actually shows.
The situation
Daniel Vos, SVP of Enterprise Sales, has beaten quota for eleven consecutive quarters. He personally holds the client relationships behind 38% of Meridian's new annual recurring revenue, about CA$26 million. His promotion to Chief Revenue Officer, a role that would put all of Meridian's revenue under one person, is on the same board agenda as your review.
Two files reached your desk on 3 February. One is a complaint from a member of his team, filed over his head. The other is a compliance note: a client discount that went out without the required sign-off, the first formal breach on his record, though not the first thing anyone has heard about how he works. In his division, voluntary attrition among people the company wanted to keep runs at 19% against a company average of 9%, and engagement sits 22 points below the company average.
Meridian has CA$240 million in recurring revenue, 1,650 employees and an IPO about two years away, when outside investors will start reading how it governs its senior leaders. Your career has been built on measuring what others call intuition, but you have never built a case that could cost the company its largest revenue relationship, or hand that relationship even more power. Whatever you recommend will have a fixed development budget of CA$120,000 behind it, and the board already knows his numbers.