Effective leadership through coaching
Success story: Improving executive team effectiveness and performance
The executive team of a defence sector organisation was facing its toughest challenge yet: guiding its firm through a 10-year transformation programme while also improving operational delivery and in-year performance to customers. This created a unique set of leadership challenges for the CEO at a time of significant upheaval. The executive team had seen significant change in recent years, and the CEO needed support creating and sustaining a high-performance leadership team – fast.
Our approach
The CEO sought team coaching to support the executive team to work effectively and autonomously and to provide collective leadership to the wider organisation. As for the executive, they wanted clarity on where to focus their efforts to perform best as a team. Our award winning diagnostic tool, teamSalient®, helped them situate themselves in relationship to each other and the organisation as a whole. Using data points collected from the members, we generated a profile of the team that we shared openly and used to generate an executive team coaching agenda. teamSalient® identified the CEO’s leadership skills and scope for improving collective leadership. It also revealed that the team needed to act faster to keep pace with the changes that were taking place, and was spending too much time on individual challenges. This underlined the need for a greater sense of trust and safety that would empower the executive to face changes more quickly and decisively.
The result
As a result of our team coaching, the executive team was able to recognise the common challenges its members faced, and the importance of leading transformation as a united team. teamSalient® increased team cohesiveness and identified new collective ways of working. By focusing on developing clearer leadership roles and stronger team alignment, the team culture and executive mindset improved significantly, which led to an immediate improvement in team performance.
Client testimonial
“The Senior Management Team had honest conversations, which they had never had before. It helped us get to the hub of the issues between us and as a result our working style and performance as a team improved”.
CEO, Media sector organisation
