Challenge
Our client is a Fortune 100 retail provider of technology products, services and solutions, with operations in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Their business strategy focuses on aggressive growth within their core business while simultaneously transforming for a very different future based on evolving customer needs.
The client’s growth and transformation strategy called for a shift in leadership skills, including greater cross-functional collaboration and enterprise leadership. To complement performance data, they wanted to understand how their senior leaders aligned to the revised leadership behaviors and the impact that their leaders were having. The ask was to do this in a way that minimized bias by seeking qualitative, in-depth insights for each leader from multiple stakeholders across the organization.
The executive team wanted to understand the broader capabilities across the organization, with a view to support leadership performance, development and succession planning. They also wanted to use the insights to help embed a culture of feedback and learning through their annual talent review process of the top 100 officers.
Solution
We partnered with the officers and the executive team, working separately with each group.
For the Officers population, we conducted stakeholder feedback interviews, gathering detailed, confidential feedback about individual’s strengths, value add, development needs and key recommendations for growth against the organization’s leadership behaviors and business strategy.
Feedback from the calls was aggregated, anonymized and summarized into personalized insights reports that were fed back to each respective officer during a development planning session with a YSC executive coach. In addition, we provided a collective analysis of common themes from across the officer population to inform group-wide developmental priorities.
Partnering with executives and board members, we delivered a similar process to deliver in-depth stakeholder feedback to each member of the executive team. This was followed up with talent review sessions, delivering feedback and providing leadership and cultural insights to inform individual and collective executive development.
Impact
- This project helped our client accelerate their progress toward a culture of feedback and to embed their revised leadership behaviors through senior leaders’ development.
- Our insights helped the organization understand their current leadership and culture, and how this compared to what is required to drive sustained business growth and lead transformation with enterprise-wide impact.
- The insights informed leadership development recommendations for the group, executive team and each leader, framed against their leadership behaviors, and gave the executive team and board a sharp lens into their people from a talent and succession perspective.
