The Context
A regional leadership team in a major global pharma company brought country heads and function leads together across a strategically important geography. On paper, they looked like a capable, high-powered group.

Until one of them named something many top teams never fully realise:
 
“We don’t have a clear shared purpose.  And without it, we may as well just report in individually.  It's not like any of us actually need to be here to deliver our objectives, after all.”

Once said aloud, it was undeniable.

They weren’t acting as a regional leadership team. They were acting as a federation of countries and functions, loosely connected, but not united.

What was the company losing?
 

• COLLABORATIVE VALUE CREATION: gaining from what this high powered group could achieve for the business together.
   

• MUTUAL LEARNING: looking good had become more important than learning from each other - mistakes and all.
   

• ENTERPRISE LEADERSHIP: without unity at the top, teams and leaders below this level could only ever exist as separate islands within what needed to be a globally connected organisation.
   

What we discovered
From a Cohesion Deep Dive and real-time observation, several themes emerged:

• Team dynamics weren’t yet mature enough to unlock collective strength.

• Trust was conditional. Challenge was cautious. Support was siloed between clear cliques and sub-groups.

• Interactions were dominated by individual brilliance or informal alliances, rather than full-team cohesion.

• There was low visibility of blind spots - and even lower permission to call them out.
   

The team was smart, committed, and experienced. But without deliberate alignment, those qualities weren’t compounding - they were cancelling each other out.
 
What we did
Over the next 9 months, we supported the team through a series of carefully paced interventions:

Laying the Groundwork
 

• Building trust and connection: de-compressing, and building social capital.  We helped leaders get to know each other behind their corporate masks in a safe and boundaried environment, and built shared language and a few simple frames for trust-based ways of working as a team.
   

• ​Co-creation of a Shared Regional LT Purpose: exploring and naming what only this team could do together.  This unleashed a huge amount of energy.  At last, people gained a clear sense of their "role beyond the role" for the company, and what it could lead to for them and their team's results.
   

• Mapping the three big shifts: getting concrete and practical about what they wanted to accomplish together.  Shaping the external market, developing talent, and sharpening commercial excellence are common recurring themes in our work with teams like this.
   

Embedding New Behaviors

• Defining the leadership behaviors required - and the individual commitments needed to shift them.

• Deep work on self-awareness and other-awareness - helping leaders identify triggers, strengths, and blind spots.

• Coaching leaders as peer coaches.  Learning to listen to each other strengthened relationships, melted tensions, and eventually transformed how peer challenge played out in monthly meetings and beyond.
   

Sustaining Collective Impact

• Shifting team rhythms and routines to keep purpose alive in the work.

• Establishing accountability loops and shared scorecards to measure what mattered.  Coming up with new metrics was another highly energising session, which shifted perceptions of what might be possible.

• Extending ways of working to direct reports, and cascading shared behaviors.
   

What shifted
Within 3 months, the team already reported:

• Perceptions of Trust and Psychological Safety up from 32% to 78%.

• Fewer passive-aggressive loops, more care and support, more productive challenge and creative tension.

• Faster progress on issues that had previously stalled for months.
   

Within 9 months, they were building an internal reputation as a cohesive, high-trust, high-performing leadership team. Not just a group of impressive individuals, but a regional engine for change.
 
What We Learned

• Shared purpose is not a slogan.  It’s a strategic choice that demands work.  The biggest mistake is believing that the company's commercial purpose is the only purpose a team needs to legitimately lead for.

• A small number of non-negotiable aligned behaviours are King and Queen.  Without them, the notion of over-arching strategies collapses under the weight of old habits.

• Team alignment can’t stick if it stays generic.  It has to get practical, personal, and peer-accountable.