The brief
The first call with the CEO nailed the biggest issue up front: an all-star cast, in subtle competition around the top team table.  
They’d just reorganised. Pressure was high. The pipeline was strong, but execution was faltering.
 
“We need to get to know each other, build trust, and bring some joy into the group”, she said.  “Then we’ll get on to priorities, and accountabilities.  But the people come first.”
 
It was a smart instinct.
 
As the leadership team of a multi-$bn lifesciences company, they set the cultural tone for the whole organisation.  

The "discovery" phase
 1:1 interviews and a team alignment survey kicked the process off.  
 
Turns out, the whole team felt the same way – just no-one had ever said it.  And with lots of recent churn, people had learned to keep their cards close to their chests.  

Tension was just below the surface.  Looking good around the top team, while staying loyal to their own team, had become a cultural norm.
 
As one leader later put it: “The interview was oddly therapeutic.  You managed to get right to the heart of things.  It was a relief to talk about the team like that, and felt like the first step in putting a lot of things right.”
 
We held a whole team debrief on-line shortly afterwards.  The discussion ran by itself for over 90 minutes, as people began to speak freely.  Already they’d made the crucial first step: create the space, and use data and their own anonymised quotes to open  sensitive topics safely.  You could almost feel the walls coming down.  

What happened next
Within 6 months, we’d met in person for two 2-day off-sites.  The CEO described the first as “the best team session of (her) whole career."  By the end of the second, the team judged that trust and alignment had almost doubled. 
 
They were ready to broaden the tent.
 
We designed a further event with the organisation’s 70-strong top leadership group. 

“In my 15 years with the company, I’ve never been part of such a great meeting as this”, said one participant.   
Amongst the whole group, clarity on commercial direction rose by 80%.  
Trust in leaders was up by the same amount.  

Impact
In a very tough market, it was enough to reverse the fragmentation that had begun to pull them apart.  Delivery focus, mutual trust, and constructive challenge became the cornerstones of the entire BU’s renewed momentum.  The top team, people realised, was not just a bunch of distant over-achievers.  It was a unified, human leadership group that others could finally believe in. 

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