Leadership Development & Cultural Change With A Fortune 100 Retailer

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.

This client’s growth and transformation strategy called for a shift in the 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 new defined 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.

This would also help the executive team understand the broader capabilities across the organization, with a view to support leadership performance, development, and succession. This would also facilitate embedding a culture of feedback and learning through its annual talent review process of their top 100 officers.

YSC partnered with the Officers and the Executive Team, working separately with each group.

For the Officers, YSC conducted Stakeholder Feedback Interview calls for over 60 officers gathering detailed, confidential feedback about an individual’s strengths, value add, development needs and key recommendations for growth against the organization’s leadership behaviors and business strategy. Insights from these calls were 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, YSC provided a collective analysis of common themes from across the officer population to inform group-wide developmental priorities. For this project, YSC completed 221 calls and generated 63 individual reports within three weeks.

For the Executive Team, YSC delivered a similar process: partnering with executives and board members to deliver in-depth stakeholder feedback to each member of the executive team. This was followed up with in person Talent Review Sessions with the Executive Team and Board Members, delivering feedback, and providing leadership and cultural insights to inform individual and collective executive development. YSC conducted all calls and completed all reports within a two-week timeframe.

This project helped our client to accelerate their progress toward a culture of feedback, and to embed their revised leadership behaviors through senior leaders’ development.

YSC’s insights helped the organization understand their current leadership and culture, and how this compared to what is required to drive sustained business growth, lead transformation with enterprise-wide impact.

The insights provided 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.