Situation

The Board of a global corporation with revenues of over $45 billion charged a regional president with reversing the chronic level of underperformance in an entire European business sector.

The president formed a new team of VPs and SVPs. Their success would depend on becoming an inspirational ensemble of leaders and on following the president’s global strategy whilst leading major improvements in their separate businesses.

The president described this as ‘a deep mission’ in which each team member would have to:

  • Adhere to a seamless set of methods and metric that stretched across teams, categories, and countries.
  • Cultivate a free flow of transparent accountability and eliminate repeated work.
  • Contextualise, concentrate, think in staging posts and give each other cross-support.
  • Become creative in ways they had never dreamed of before.

There was resistance. Each individual person and team believed their way of doing things was more manageable. As a result of weak belief in the strategy, a negative perception of senior management began to take hold. Even those who recognised the need for change couldn’t visualise the process in its entirety and felt overwhelmed.

Action

After a process of intense investigation and internal research The Corporate Theatre crafted a bespoke program for the client. This 5 week process of pre-work, reading, and a 2.5 day workshop, inspired individuals throughout the organisation, embedding new behaviours into the DNA of the firm and helping to create an organisational culture powered by Collective Intelligence.

This involved helping the firm to develop:

  • A relationship culture of cross-border sharing of knowledge and insights.
  • Skills of inspirational narrative communicated across contexts & matrices.
  • Individual and interpersonal knowledge of character strengths.
  • The team’s ability to create and deliver individual vision for their businesses.
  • Visceral commitment to making the whole business one movement, rather than a group of parallel movements.

Yield

By tapping into each individual’s capacity to inspire and be inspired the workshops led to deep connections (1) with the president’s strategy; (2) with each other’s interpretation of that strategy; (3) with each other. Knowledge acquisition, practice of the knowledge in real situations and transfer of knowledge and practice led to new behaviours that could support the president’s remit. Three months later, a follow up session further embedded the new behaviours into each business’s winning formula.