Leadership

For a complex, growing company in the fast-paced technology sector, leadership team alignment and collaboration has a critical impact on business success. This particular company asked Navigo to help build the leadership capability and effectiveness of their geographically dispersed executive team in order to improve collaboration, effectiveness and business performance.

The situation

With an executive team grown through acquisition and dispersed across North America and the UK, our client recognized that business performance depended on ensuring senior leaders had a clear and common understanding of the organization’s goals and strategic direction. Navigo’s engagement began as a request to conduct a multi-day leadership retreat but quickly evolved into a comprehensive leadership development engagement focused on three key objectives:

• Increasing leadership capability to drive increased business performance to a 300% increase in revenue.
• Surfacing and addressing inter-personal issues preventing effective communication, collaboration, and alignment among senior leaders.
• Improving collaboration and trust between key organizational areas to address silos and cultural differences resulting from acquisitions.

The approach

Navigo’s work began with one-on-one conversations with each leader to understand their perspective about the direction of the company as well as the executive team’s strengths, limitations and opportunities for improvement. In a candid conversation with the President, we confirmed that many of the issues the team was facing were a result of high growth without sufficient attention to the intersection between leadership, strategy and team. The three-day retreat would be a good start to addressing the issues, but to see the kinds of changes required to fuel the company’s ambitious strategy, an extended approach was required.

A series of strategic retreats were held with the executive team to engage them in challenging conversations in the five critical areas required for success in a high change, high impact organization: alignment, relationships, trust, accountability and flexibility. The team was led through conversations that resulted in a clearer business strategy, definition of core values and behaviours (for the leadership team and the organization), and resolution of time-sensitive business issues.

Between each retreat, momentum and learning was sustained through focused executive coaching with each of the team members. Not only did this coaching help each executive integrate the retreat outcomes into their day to day performance, but it continuously surfaced themes, barriers and enablers for continued organizational growth and success, allowing Navigo to tailor the design of subsequent retreats to what was most valuable to the business.

The results

With a balanced focus on relationships and business performance, along with the commitment of each executive, it only took one year for the team to see significant improvements in their effectiveness and impact on people, customers and business performance. This foundation has enabled them to move more quickly through issues typical of any high growth organization in order to focus on innovation, possibilities and success.