The Challenge
The Europe, Middle East & Africa leadership team of a US-based technology organisation wanted to elevate their performance and achieve more cut-through in a complex, highly-matrixed business. They were heavily focused on overseeing day-to-day execution, and created little space for strategic thinking on behalf of the region.
The key challenges the team wanted to tackle were increasing their sense of agency in the global structure, building greater trust with one another and creating space through effective delegation. They also sought to foster more collaboration and collective problem-solving between their own teams to reduce the number of escalations.
What We Did
We designed and delivered four tailored development modules for the senior leadership team (8 people), as well as three learning events that also included their direct reports (35 people). These covered a range of topics, including:
- Taking responsibility, and moving from a passive to an active mindset
- Growing trust, through acceptance, openness, reliability and congruence
- Empowering and enabling teams, by knowing when to ‘lean back’ versus ‘lean forward’
- Collaborative problem solving, and harnessing the perspective of others
These experiences provided a combination of grounding in leadership concepts, space for individual reflection and interactive group exercises to support learning, application and connection.
The Impact
Feedback about the programme was highly positive, with participants scoring the interventions highly in terms of both the content and facilitation approach. Areas of longer-term impact included:
- Increased self-awareness through structured exploration of mindsets and behaviours, enabling leaders to focus on their individual areas of development
- Stronger cohesion between leaders reinforced by shared experiences and language, and an increased ability to hold one another to account in areas of shared focus
- Ongoing development and learning using reference tools and models, which could be disseminated more widely in the business to support learning at all levels