Towards a Unified, High-Impact Leadership Team

Organisaatio

• A Finnish service sector company whose operations rely heavily on employee expertise and daily customer interactions.

Background

The leadership team has changed significantly in recent years – most of its members started in their roles around the same time as the current CEO, a couple of years ago. The team consists of experienced professionals in their respective fields. Previous leadership team development work has focused on getting to know one another and building shared ways of working.

The development need has now shifted to a deeper level: how to genuinely work together. In theory, the direction is shared, but in everyday practice, operations remain siloed in places. Communication and interaction are key areas for development – matters are prepared and progressed in individual ways without sufficient shared visibility. This is not a matter of deliberate withholding, but rather a working culture that has not yet fully adapted to continuous, shared dialogue. The organisation's history and previous leadership culture continue to be reflected in current practices.

"I like your firm, focused style of guiding the group and facilitating its development."

How the program was designed and delivered

The goal was to develop into a unified, high-impact team: to strengthen a shared approach to leadership, open interaction and trust, and to build a feedback culture.

The process began with individual interviews and the Lencioni Five Behaviors assessment. In the first workshop, ground rules were established and, based on a narrative drawn from the interviews, key focus areas were selected to guide the work in the following stages.

A noon-to-noon offsite provided space to pause and focus on building trust, using DiSC and Lencioni results as well as learnings on constructive conflict. The one-on-one feedback discussions during the offsite were experienced as particularly valuable – they built trust and opened up new understanding of one another.

The leadership team's development was also supported through coaching for the team's leader, and through 1-to-1 sparring sessions for members based on DiSC and Lencioni Five Behaviors results. The development process also included an observation of a leadership team meeting, based on which each member received personal feedback.

The final workshop addressed the observations from the leadership team meeting together, agreed on development steps related to meeting practices, and examined each member's relationship to shared responsibility and their own role within the leadership team, resulting in personal commitments on these points. It was agreed that the agreed actions and personal commitments would be followed up monthly in leadership team meetings.

Client Voice

"We have been very pleased with our shared journey. It has been great to follow our progress against the goals we set. We have clearly progressed on all of the goals we set."

"I like your firm, focused style of guiding the group and facilitating its development. This programme has struck a good balance of theory, frameworks, and concrete action and practice. You have a great deal of knowledge and expertise, which you share at the right moments and in the right doses, sparking reflection and generating insights. I also appreciate your intelligence and situational awareness in adapting the plan along the way, so that it best matches our needs and supports our development in the best possible way."

– Client Voices: CEO & HR Director