Revitalizing a Leadership Team
A newly formed U.S.-based leadership team needed to move from functional leadership to enterprise-level alignment.
Bright Arrow partnered with the team to clarify purpose, strengthen decision-making, improve trust and candor, and build the working rhythms required to deliver against high-value business priorities.
Background
A global company’s U.S.-based leadership team was newly formed and composed largely of recently promoted functional leaders.
The team was facing several challenges that were slowing collaboration and execution. Decision-making authority was unclear. Roles and responsibilities were not consistently understood. Interpersonal dynamics were affecting trust, candor, and progress.
The team was also oversized, which made communication, prioritization, and decision-making more difficult. At the same time, there was uncertainty about who owned enterprise goal-setting, creating confusion between global and local leadership priorities.
Bright Arrow was engaged to help the team clarify how it needed to operate, strengthen alignment, and build the leadership practices required for stronger performance.
Bright Arrow provided a six-month leadership team coaching engagement designed to support the team both in structured working sessions and in the flow of real business challenges.
Team Coaching Duration: 6 Months
The engagement included discovery, workshops, and bi-weekly team coaching.
Discovery
Bright Arrow began with a robust discovery process to understand the team’s dynamics, culture, operating context, and barriers to effectiveness from both outside-in and inside-out perspectives.
Discovery included:
- Team meeting observation
- Artifacts review and analysis
- Team and stakeholder interviews
- Team member skills evaluation
- Team Diagnostic Survey, or TDS
This discovery process helped identify the patterns, strengths, and leadership behaviors most affecting the team’s ability to operate as an aligned enterprise leadership team.
Workshops
Bright Arrow facilitated a series of workshops designed to help the team strengthen clarity, alignment, and working practices.
The workshops focused on:
- Refining the team’s shared purpose
- Defining measurable results the team would own collectively
- Establishing effective working rhythms
- Building tools for prioritization
- Clarifying decision-making practices
- Strengthening accountability across the leadership team
The workshops used dynamic, live exercises that kept the work grounded in the team’s real context. Rather than focusing on abstract concepts, Bright Arrow helped the team apply new practices directly to the priorities, personalities, and business challenges in front of them.
Bi-Weekly Team Coaching
Bright Arrow also provided ongoing team coaching every other week to support the team as it worked toward its goals.
These sessions helped the team address challenges as they emerged and build critical capabilities in real time, including:
- Trust
- Agility
- Risk-taking
- Prioritization
- Candor
- Enterprise thinking
- Decision-making
- Peer accountability
Executive Shift:
The engagement was designed to help the team improve how it worked while the work was happening.
The coaching engagement resulted in substantial improvements in team dynamics, working practices, and business performance.
Enhanced Team Dynamics
The leadership team developed a clearer shared purpose, improved communication, and stronger trust and collaboration.
The team also established new norms around:
- Candor
- Enterprise thinking
- Accountability
- Respect
- Professionalism
- Strategic focus
- Collaboration
As the engagement progressed, the team worked to:
- Take more risks and speak with candor
- Move from functional thinking to enterprise thinking
- Think and act more strategically
- Improve team meeting agendas and collaboration
- Set measurable results and hold the leadership team accountable
- Clarify decision-making authority
- Cultivate an environment of respect, camaraderie, and professionalism while working toward program goals
Team of Teams Model
Bright Arrow supported the leadership team in creating and operating Team of Teams, or ToTs, to deliver on unique initiatives with greater agility in four-month sprints.
The team learned how to:
- Form ToTs around priority work
- Disband ToTs when the work was complete
- Create new ToTs when emerging priorities required focused attention
- Bring work back to the broader leadership team for feedback, decisions, and visibility
- Keep peers informed of progress, roadblocks, and interdependencies
Bright Arrow also provided ongoing coaching to help the ToTs deliver on their specific initiatives.
Three ToTs were charged with priority workstreams:
- Enterprise Priorities: Create a centralized tool and review process to establish enterprise priorities, integrate emerging priorities, and reprioritize or deprioritize work as needed.
- Culture: Define the company’s renewed values as the organization prepared for expansion and greater agility, then determine how to activate those values across the organization.
- Capabilities: Identify the capabilities talent would need to support a future-ready organization, determine implications for hiring and talent management, and raise the bar on performance.
Improved Business Performance
The U.S. division exceeded its plan goals, including sales performance.
This demonstrated the business value of improving leadership team effectiveness, alignment, and execution capacity.
Effective Working Practices
The team implemented practical tools and norms to manage priorities and decision-making with more discipline.
New working practices included:
- Prioritization tools
- Decision-making tools
- Clearer accountability practices
- Norms for managing changing priorities
- More structured team agendas
- Use of the ToTs model to deliver key initiatives
- Practices for bringing decisions, feedback, and roadblocks back to the broader team
Functional Area Reorganization
The coaching engagement also contributed to positive shifts inside functional areas.
Several functions reorganized to better support enterprise goals, reflecting the team’s move toward broader enterprise thinking and stronger alignment across the business.
Executive Shift:
As the senior team changed how it worked together, functional areas began adjusting to better support the enterprise.
Through structured leadership team coaching, the U.S. leadership team moved through early ambiguity, role confusion, interpersonal friction, and decision-making challenges.
The engagement helped the team build stronger trust, clearer operating norms, better prioritization, and a more disciplined approach to enterprise-level work. The team also gained practical tools for accountability, decision-making, and cross-functional execution.
Most importantly, the coaching helped the team shift from a group of capable functional leaders into a more aligned leadership team capable of delivering additional high-value work.
The impact was visible in both team dynamics and business outcomes.
Executive Shift:
Leadership team coaching creates the greatest value when it helps teams improve performance while they are doing the real work of the business.
