The Client
A fast-paced, innovative, and rapidly growing retail start-up (The Client) wanted to elevate the leadership skills of their senior leadership team and enhance their team dynamics to position their organization for continued success through expansion.
The Challenge
The Client grew rapidly from a start-up to a mid-sized player in their market, largely attributed to a quality product line, diligent leadership, and effective marketing. They were suddenly competing in a highly competitive category with extremely large players in a global context.
To fuel their growth and break into new markets, they quickly recruited many geographically dispersed, diverse, technical experts who were young leaders. They needed to accelerate the growth of these new leaders and develop them into senior leaders who could deliver aggressive mandates.
The Solution
We designed and delivered a comprehensive leadership development program for 30+ participants across all levels of leadership. We worked with them to identify priority learning needs and success measures and designed a program that focused on transitioning learning into new committed behaviours and habits through a highly experiential learning process that combined formalized learning (representing 10%), coaching (20%), and process and tools to actively encourage the 70% with on-the-job experience.
The initial curriculum included topics such as:
- Employee engagement
- Resilience and well-being
- Active listening and effective dialogue
- Work-life balance
- Meaning and purpose
- Conflict resolution
- Difficult conversations
We followed this program with another series of modules intended to sustain the learning and introduce more advanced leadership topics which were built on the previous modules.
Throughout the program, we provided simultaneous coaching for individuals and small groups to embed key concepts and learnings and provide an open forum to deeply explore solutions to real employee or personal situations.
The Outcome
The Client expressed that the program was integral in building team effectiveness, leadership intelligence, and strategic development. Overall team performance and KPI’s have improved steadily since we have been working with them, and we continue to be a trusted advisor in supporting their leadership development initiatives.