At a Glance
COMPANY
A German athletic apparel and footwear corporation, the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second largest in the world after Nike.
OBJECTIVE
Rebuild the Innovation division’s leadership community, culture & accountability after substantial organizational change.
OUTCOME
Re-established a shared identity, team trust and an improved sense of accountability.
Challenge
After several years of challenging organizational restructuring, the Innovation division had made progress re-forming and defining standards and processes -- but its leadership team was struggling to work together effectively.
Directors held siloed mindsets, were frustrated by misaligned expectations, defensive when their expertise was challenged and had difficulty solving problems together. Subtle tension existed amongst the team and they regularly engaged the executive team to resolve their disputes.
Solution
The executive team wanted to create a clear understanding of the expectations of leaders within the team, establishing guiding principles to enable them to solve problems as a cohesive unit. The leadership team needed to experience a shared sense of leadership identity and empowerment, as well as build trust with each other and the executives.
Following were steps taken to achieve these objectives:
Step 1: Complete a Pre-Project Discovery with the executive team to analyze the situation, create an understanding of the team, understand their shared expectations and align on a course of action.
Step 2: Based on their input, develop Leadership Principles that would align leaders’ behavior to the team’s mandate, culture and values that had been shared by the executives.
Step 3: Design a Leadership Workshop to establish that shared sense of leadership identity, deepen trust and build connection across the leadership community. Leave them feeling empowered and clear on how to lead, together.
Step 4: Create a Change Management Plan for how to finalize Leadership Principles based on workshop feedback, integrate them into team standards and best practices, capture learnings and maintain adoption over time.
Impact
The workshop went really well!
I have received a lot of feedback from the executive team and other participants alike, across all functions, commenting on how impactful the workshop was in both content and flow.
I felt very confident going through our run show thanks in no small part to the thoroughness of your prep work.
Most importantly, we had near unanimous feedback on the questions:
1) Do the leadership principles make sense to you?
2) Can you fully commit?
95% response on both questions!
Britt Jorgenson, Vice President North America Innovation