The Brief
A group of VPs were working remotely for >15-months, had lost touch with one another personally, and had fallen out of alignment strategically. The organization was growing rapidly, and conflicts were emerging in cross-functional teams at every intersection. The executives feared the organization was lagging behind its goals, and wanted to equip the VPs to level-up and drive the broader organization more effectively.
HAVEN Approach:
HAVEN started by assessing the needs of the learning community. Through candid discussion with the VP-participants, as well as their constituents (execs and direct reports), we aligned on a series of experiences that would help them make progress on their learning priorities. The program offered a combination of in-person interactions to build rapport with one another, and virtual sessions to accommodate hybrid working cultures.
The experiences were offered in bite-sized modules over time that could be fit into the busy schedules of a scaling company, with experiments and peer coaching sprinkled in-between plenary modules. Throughout the program, VPs learned to shift their mindsets and behaviors, and discussed how they can cascade this learning throughout the organization. HAVEN also met with the executives for an accelerated review of the content and tools, so that executives could recognize and reinforce the new mindsets and behaviors trained in the program.
Results:
Participants reported overwhelmingly that the program was a good use of their limited time. They built stronger relationships with their coworkers, learned important skills to interact productively during challenges, and committed to practicing these new mindsets and behaviors.
In a follow-up survey with the constituents of the participants, 70% of direct reports reported “significant” improvement in the leadership effectiveness of the participants, while the executives unanimously pointed to more impactful results for the business after the program. They made a commitment to put a new cohort through this program every 6-months, so that more and more of the organization adopted a uniform language-system and set of tools for leading effectively in their culture.
