The Challenge
Senior leader overseeing cultural change in a new role, new company and new country wanted to engage with a coach who understood at least two of the three mind-set shifts he needed to undertake.He also wanted a coach who understood the world of executive development and could challenge him and his thinking on the transformation he was being asked to undertake with his new team and division.
Approach
As we do with all our clients, we had a ‘chemistry call’ to ensure right fit and agreed and scheduled our 12-month programme. We agreed our parameters around confidentiality, company and personal objectives, plus our audit trail, which gave us benchmarks to monitor our progress.
The leader’s agenda was reset at the start of each session and was always front and centre of the coaching conversation. Underpinning this agenda were the objectives set at the start of the engagement in the chemistry meeting and in the 3-way meeting with his boss to establish our goals.
To each session, the leader brought issues that he had tackled, as agreed, since the prior session and key forthcoming decisions and challenges which he wanted to explore from different perspectives. At the end of each session, we exchanged notes/key take-aways and actions for follow-up in the next session.
We leveraged prior psychometrics to understand values that influenced his preferences and used selected tools to unlock thinking.
Results
12 months on and at the end of the final session, in January 2019, the senior leader had reformed his team.
Achievements included:
- Releasing certain key individuals to new opportunities
- Reducing headcount in the wider team for which he was responsible and the overall cost structure of his operation by 30% - all through voluntary departures.
- Increasing the value added by his division and through his team, introducing game-changing new deliverables and influencing major stakeholders to release, to the oversight of the team, activity that had previously been held by other parts of the group – thereby increasing the effectiveness of the function across the whole company.
In the end-of-coaching review meeting, his boss said that the senior leader had fulfilled the leadership team’s highest expectations for a seamless transition, in an accelerated time-frame, and was adding greater value across the senior leadership team than had been anticipated.
