Building self-leadership muscle
When you’re a lean, young company struggling with global expansion, how do you develop the leadership skills of your new and growing senior team as quickly and effectively as possible?
This lean, young global communication services company began partnering with us at a moment of rapid expansion with challenge of getting their multicultural senior team to stretch into relatively new roles as leaders, as quickly and effectively as possible. Our combined solution of leadership skills development, assessment, and feedback processes supported action learning to boost behavioral change in day-to-day execution. In record time, their senior team is now comfortably leading in ways that are improving motivation, performance, and collaboration within and across teams, as they continue to solidly and successfully build and expand their services across continents.
Our solution included a process of assessments to identify performance gaps and commitment to a multicultural teaming process, 360 feedback processes with action plans, executive coaching on self-leadership skills and leadership-point-of-view (LPOV), and learning content customized to each leader’s specific gaps and their chosen development areas. There was a follow-up survey 9 months later to gauge improvements and results.
We didn’t get a cookie cutter approach. Cynthia worked with us to tailor her coaching services to our business needs and culture, to mirror the real situations our leaders faced on a daily basis, including the fact that we were a multicultural group working globally in different countries across multiple continents.
Individual coaching streamlined leadership development by aligning it with the organization’s core values, to get the most bang for the buck. It was a powerful tool in helping each leader face their own specific challenges and engage their teams in a transparent process of feedback and action learning in making behavior change.
I was surprised at the way coaching focused on me and what I felt was most important, instead of on problems perceived by others. This helped me get a lot more out of it.
Thankfully I got more than just a printed report. The coaching around my 360 feedback helped me make a clear action plan and work through my resistance to some of the uncomfortable stuff. A big turning point was when I asked for inputs and support from my team, manager, and even customers, with the changes I wanted to make. My transparency and commitment to the process also helped bring us together as a team.
The coaching around my DISC profile helped me understand the way I communicate and the differences in style in the people around me. From there it’s been easy to learn how to adjust my behavior and I’ve definitely become a better communicator with everybody around me, especially in difficult conversations.
The IDI cross-cultural assessment was interesting, and pinpointed how our experience living cross-culturally impacts how we act and react to each other. We got some actionable insights for how we can work together better as a mulitcultural team.
Each leader reported their key results from the coaching as: increased self-awareness, better able to think and act more flexibly when leading and communicating, and higher trust and more open communication within their teams. Our follow-up survey with their raters nine months later confirmed these changes.
Cynthia’s focus on a coaching process that helped us change the behavioral side of the equation has made all the difference.