Covanta

Covanta is a Global leader in the Energy to Waste Space, focussing on sustainability to offer their customers and communities world-leading, end-to-end materials management solutions.  

Covanta was a private capital business owned by the US, predominantly operating in the US, but with a European arm. The European arm was in growth phase, whereas the US was in operations phase, resulting in a slight mismatch of MO between the businesses. Owen Michaelson was placed as the European CEO and DRAX was engaged to build and optimise their organisational structure, analyse existing structure and identifying gap analysis to deliver potential exit.  

The process was broken down into two stages; stage one was to analyse the existing leadership team looking at strengths, development areas of the existing team and feeding back directly to them etc; stage two was to look at how to optimise the existing team, with coaching support and where additional hires would be needed to optimise the leadership structure to deliver the strategic objective.

"Using Drax’s in-house leadership analytics tool on our senior leadership team helped me devise our people plan, as well as identify any skills and experience gaps. We have used similar tools in the past, but DRAX’s one was better and got me to the answer a lot quicker. I would use it again.” - Owen Michelson, CEO & President