"How do we maintain our position as #1 in an increasingly competitive environment?"

This was the challenge facing an exceptional country leadership team within a complex global matrix organisation. The team's success brought with it increased visibility and greater external focus.  Over time, this visibility and focus resulted in a weight of expectation and pressure that was felt throughout the team. Rather than pulling them together, this weight was causing them to retreat into silos, shifting their perspective from outward engagement to inward protection. Rather than focusing on client and business performance, the leadership conversation was focused increasingly on internal dynamics and relationships. 

The team were clear that they needed to create space to surface the key issues hindering performance and how they could address these with a sense of urgency. We partnered with them on a diagnostic phase where we engaged key stakeholders across the organisation—the board, clients, and the team themselves. The results of this diagnostic showed a clear disconnect between stakeholder groups and the leadership team. There was a clear ask from stakeholders for the leadership team to engage more proactively, be open about the challenges, and drive collaboration with external teams. The team themselves were working hard internally to shift the performance and wanted to solve this before engaging back with the wider organisation. This diagnostic allowed us to focus the team's work on what the core of the issue was: rebuilding trust within the team and with the wider stakeholder group. 

The subsequent team sessions focused initially on rebuilding trust between the team members themselves through deep reflection exercises, surfacing the unsaid, and challenging the status quo. Once the team had identified and embraced the shifts among themselves, the conversation moved to focusing on rebuilding trust with key stakeholders and identifying actions to move these relationships forward. The team became increasingly curious about gaining clarity on what stakeholders needed, courageously leaned into collaboration, and held each other accountable for the commitments they made. 

The shift was certainly not immediate - building trust takes time, consistency, and resilience. As the relationships between the team members themselves shifted, the ability to engage on the revised narrative and invite others to collaborate on their journey became an integral part of the approach.