Services - Success Stories

From Good to Great - One CFO's Road to Success

The Situation

A Fortune 500 company, faced with a rapidly growing market with increasing regulatory pressures and complexity, had recently promoted a valued, successful vice president to the role of leading a senior team empowered to formulate and drive a new strategy across the organization. The organization recognized the need to accelerate the executive's role transition and learning in order to best leverage her full potential for immediate business results.

What We Did

Through an interview-based 360° process, we conducted a comprehensive leadership and role assessment of the executive. The assessment process revealed:

• An executive whom top leaders in the company clearly viewed as a high potential leader - someone who could advance to the most senior roles within five to seven years
• A leader with tremendous strengths: intellectual capacity, strategic thinking, functional expertise, and integrity and credibility
• Some areas in which others wished she could be more effective. In particular, key leaders wished her to:
  • Adjust her usual individual approach to management to one of greater collaboration and working through others to be effective with the increased scale, complexity, and competing demands of stakeholders her new role required
  • More actively influence a large and diverse team to share a common vision, resolve vast differences among members, take individual and collective responsibility, and implement the strategy throughout the company, in effect, to create a living strategy
  • Take more calculated risks to seize business opportunities and make judgments based on limited data amidst changing market conditions
  • Be more vocal about her position and stance on key issues in meetings and be more willing to debate issues until resolution, rather than to focus so much on maintaining harmony

The Results

The executive and the company took decisive action in several ways:

• The executive immediately leveraged and focused her significant strengths by becoming more vocal about her ideas and options, achieving several "quick wins" and establishing a pattern of success for her and her team.
• She took greater interpersonal and business risks and began to exhibit a greater entrepreneurial perspective in the company.
• The executive utilized a variety of influence and negotiation approaches to shape the direction and strategies in the company on a variety of strategic initiatives.
• The executive began to trust and leverage the collective strengths of those who worked for, and with, her and learned to set direction rather than manage and control so many tasks individually.
• Senior leaders, over a six-to-nine month period, noted visible improvements in both the executive's individual effectiveness and the performance of her team and organization overall.

The Outcome

The executive's "star" continued to rise and her growth and learning in this role ultimately resulted in successive advancement to the role of Chief Financial Officer within two years of the conclusion of our coaching engagement.

To obtain these results see our Executive Coaching Services.