Helping leaders and their teams get clear on what they are in service of, uncovering their enduring mission and purpose, what they value, and the ‘why’ of their work; informing strategic choice, and practical everyday decision making, alike.

For instance, a mid-tier professional services partnership anchoring and energising an ambitious strategy, and a distinctive culture, in a (re-) discovery of their enduring core purpose – passion, edge and engine.

Contact us to learn more about our client work

Facilitating the crucial conversations that face leadership teams into the crux of their strategic challenges: articulating an inspiring vision, ‘facing the brutal facts’, and developing an architecture for change; aligning strategy, leadership and culture, with operating models and management practices, to fulfil mission and purpose.

For instance, a health care innovation agency revamping their operating models and organisational structure to deliver on their strategy via an ‘end to end’ participatory re-consideration of all the facets of their business model and organisational design.

Leadership in the matrix, partnership, and innovation are greatly desired in contemporary organisations, but what does it take to actually inculcate responsiveness, resilience, flexibility and adaptability in management practices and a leadership culture?

For instance, a decentralised global building materials concern seeking to hard wire trust, empowerment and collaboration into their leadership culture, looked again at their approach to OD and leadership development to see how they could engender the mindsets, behaviours, and practices needed to create the requisite agility required by their growth strategy.

Extraordinary performance requires people to be motivated to set themselves breakthrough goals and build their capabilities to achieve them; this cannot be mandated but it can be coached and enabled by line managers who know their people and know how to focus, care for, and inspire them.

For instance, facing the challenge of partner performance and development in a ‘big 4’ professional services firm, senior partners recognised that this couldn’t simply be and matter of processes, systems and incentives – it was bigger than that, it was a question of transforming leadership culture, focusing partners on big breakthroughs, liberating their passions and ambitions, confronting them with their blind spots, and providing the ‘feedforward’ to accelerate personal growth and performance.

For many contemporary firms, engendering teamwork, the skills of ‘teaming’, and creating the team of teams is a question of how to lead and partner in the matrix.

For instance, the internal change management team in the R&D organisation of major pharma company sought an ambitious transition from a global project management group that provided cross-functional coordination to one that provided strategic leadership in their organisation. They adopted the role of Change Leaders, focusing on bringing people with them, enabling teams to connect and build their cohesion and effectiveness within the new context and way of working.

For many businesses, the workplace experience is now both part of the employee value proposition, and a key determinant of the effectiveness of their business culture.

For instance, a national grocery retailor, with multiple brands and businesses including wholesale and food service, had to think through the ‘return to office’ for their office based staff having achieved extraordinary profitability, productivity, and collaboration and innovation, during nearly two years of ‘working from home’. Now facing into a very different and difficult business environment, yet seeking to capitalise on the breakthroughs in working practices already achieved, we equipped each of the scores of semi-autonomous leadership teams across the business with the practical mindsets and mental tools to make their own decisions about their form of hybrid working and how they would align organically with other teams and their decisions.