Services - Success Stories

A CEO Achieves Breakthrough Leadership

The Situation

The Board of a Fortune 500 company wished to take their organization beyond P&L growth to become a global market leader. The company adopted a bold long-term strategy to achieve breakthrough results within three years. A key component of the plan was to immediately engage the global CEO and divisional CEOs in a global, intensive leadership development program, linked to driving performance and building organizational capability.

What We Did

We conducted a comprehensive leadership assessment for the organization's divisional CEOs. It included both pre- and post-engagement 360° assessments, on-site observations of leaders in action with immediate feedback, as well as individual coaching over a twelve-month period. For one CEO, our assessment revealed that:

• The CEO was globally acclaimed as a visionary, strategic leader; she had consistently delivered exceptional performance and inspired others to excel as well.
• She was viewed as a genuine, caring, authentic leader; perceptions of her leadership were strikingly consistent across all levels of the organization - an exceptional trait for a leader of such a large division.
• She was considered to be one of the organization's key thought leaders, providing the organization with a level of intellectual leadership not often equaled; this had served as the foundation of her success and rapid advancement to date.
• However, the CEO often refrained from sharing her own opinions or taking directive action in key situations in the belief that she was protecting relationships; as a result, critical issues were left unresolved and/or decisions were often less effective or were delayed unnecessarily; in team meetings, agendas were not sufficiently substantive and often no clear decisions were taken as she and others increasingly avoided conflict.
• Outside of meetings, the CEO was often overly careful in her communications, at times raising more questions in others' minds rather than providing clear direction; in a belief that she was empowering others, she did not take on a more directive, authoritative style when situations often called for it.

The Results

The CEO and the organization took decisive action in several ways:

• Through individual coaching for a year, the CEO focused on expressing her leadership more fully, specifically, sharing her views and thinking more directly and calling herself and others on their conflict-avoidant behaviors, which were holding them back:
  • She increasingly took on a more directive style when a situation called for quick, decisive action; she encouraged her executive team to reveal their own thinking more fully as well, so the group could debate issues more substantively and effectively.
  • The CEO leveraged her individual coaching for organizational consulting as well to assist her in efforts to align her team's structure and roles to better support the broader organization's strategy.
• Over a twelve-month period, there was a dramatic improvement in the CEO's assessment results; she went from being viewed as a valued high potential leader to one considered to be truly exceptional and was added to the potential list of successors for the Global CEO in the next 2 - 3 years.

The Outcome

The CEO, having taken on expanded strategic, global responsibilities, initiated a second year of coaching to assist her in ensuring that her leadership transformation continued as the organization strived to remain on track with its growth objectives in a challenging economy.

To obtain these results see our CEO Coaching Services.