This London-based financial technology service firm had grown exponentially over the previous year.  It had to promote and hire people to senior management roles, revealing skill gaps in leadership, resulting in a loss of high performing employees and a drop in employee engagement scores.  In addition, evidence of duplicate activity and inconsistencies in directional messaging began to surface.

With over a thousand employees based across the globe, the firm needed to sustain a competitive edge by ensuring faster, cutting edge technology was developed and delivered to its clients.  In order to sustain this value proposition, the CEO and executive team recognised the need to create a consistently credible leadership language, focused on employees as customers.

We worked with the executive team and HR to define “what success looks like”, jointly developing an agile leadership language, transferable across divisions and the globe.  A blended program inclusive of workshops, executive coaching, follow-up reviews and webinars, as well as cross-company peer coaching.

• Working with a representative group of managers, developed a core set of leadership competencies.
• We then agreed to a toolkit and program design that would best fit with the firm’s culture and way for the learning to stick.

• Outlined an integrated program that would ‘go beyond a series of workshops. In other words, learning would be collapsed with on-the-job performance.
• The program included, “conversation-based” workshops, feedback loops, on-the-job development plans and measures.
• To complement the learned coaching skills, managers were paired up with peers to peer-coach each other, supporting their learning journeys.

Starting from the top, eight cohorts of 30 peer groups experienced the following program:

1. Online assessments, focused on self-awareness and providing participants with a baseline understanding of their strengths to leverage and develop priorities, based on the newly developed competencies.
2. Webinar-based orientation and “connection” sessions.
3. Workshops focused on creating a structured conversation, focusing on developing coaching and conflict management.
4. On-the-job development plans supported by executive coaching.
5. Internal peer-coaching.
6. Follow-up internally led sessions to review progress against development and performance measures.

A large oil refinery was instructed by head office to reduce operational staffing hours by 60% in order to remain financially viable.

The refinery was going to be closed if it did not make the operational cuts.  However, following a previous reduction in staff, safety-related incidents increased by 35%.  This latest directive resulted in threats of strike action across other refineries and aggressive union action.

We proposed and rolled out a program that was inclusive and driven by respected and influential operational staff.  Critical staff cuts would be left to those on the ground and “not the white collars in their tower”.

We trained two parallel groups of employees:

• One to identify where the operational changes needed to be made, whilst critically obtaining buy-in from their peers
• The second focused purely on safety, involving the local fire station and emergency services in the conversation.  In parallel, consulting within the refinery to put a safety proposal together.

• Over a three-week period, both teams consulted with their peers and external stakeholders, checking in to a “central station” every morning and evening.
• Teams would go through a process of proposing, taking feedback and re-proposing to staff, external stakeholders and company executives.

• A final proposal was built with extensive buy-in and the safety diligence conducted
• This proposal did not focus on cutting specific roles but how the refinery could reduce hours equitably across the team.

It is a great problem to have – growth. This start-up was now growing up into a medium-sized company, experiencing high demand for its exceptional service and product portfolio.

The challenge that quickly surfaced was that its entrepreneurial founders were not equipped to manage larger teams, with spread across Asia and more layers of management.  The company was beginning to struggle with maintaining its “intimate” approach to customer service, whilst internal conflict started to surface.

The entrepreneurial approach to “in-corridor” team conversations was now becoming redundant, and directional communication was lacking.

The executive team started to have some serious disagreements resulting in internal competition between departments and their employees.

Reframe the culture of the company retaining its entrepreneurial spirit, without becoming a bureaucratic beast, and implementing values-based practices that would facilitate communication and trust.

• We first did a reality check with employees about what was going on and synthesised the causes.
• We created a “distributive leadership model”, meaning that accountabilities were redrawn with some shared responsibilities and ownership across departments.
• Values were revisited and conversations across the company were conducted to:
1. Identify how those values manifested in behaviours.
2. Ensure employees “announce” how they were going to live the values with corresponding commitments.
• The executive team was reconfigured to meet the collaborative requirements of the new culture.
• A management development program was developed and rolled out.

A prominent legal publishing conglomerate was facing two challenges:

1. It was falling behind in balancing revenue traditional paper-based publishing with digital.
2. Ensuring digital was user friendly and attractive for its traditional users such as barristers who preferred paper-based material.

The publisher was facing competitive pressure from newcomers, bringing with them new technologies including their approach to sales of their products. 

The CEO was facing pushback for directional change given the traditional nature of legal publishing.  She was concerned about not getting the buy-in from employees who were respected in the industry.

Develop a “Front End Customer Strategy” (FECS) involving traditional customers, faculty and students in driving a new direction for the client, involving external stakeholders in the solution. 

• Videotaped 25 influential customers on what information was important to them and what was missing.
• Involved these customers, senior leaders and knowledge experts in a series of strategy workshops to define:
  • A new purpose for legal publishing.
  • Ways of working in the industry, including interactions between the client and their customers.
  • Top five goals to achieve this newly defined purpose.
  • Constraints to meeting the goals with corresponding solutions.
  • Defined ownership, measures and actions for key individuals.

A global networks and information B2B services company knew that to remain ahead of its competitors, it needed to have stronger partnerships with its customers.

The client wanted to be seen as the trusted vendor and more importantly, the consultative partner of choice.

Our client wanted to transition from a “solution” selling approach to a “challenger” coaching-driven one, transforming its relationships with customers.

We had to change the sales culture of this client and that included how they were internally structured, the type of sales skills, and how the client was structured to interact with its customers.

1. Develop a new set of “job families”; key skills required to be an effective sales coach, with competency requirements varying depending on the type of customer.
2. Benchmark where current customer-facing employees were against each of the skills and competencies.
3. Performance and development conversations conducted with these employees, led by their managers and supported with coaching skills development.
4. Conducted 2-day workshops with sales staff mapping out “challenger sales” strategies for their key customers.
5. Success measures articulated with coaching support.