Focus & Alignment with Leadership Skills Development

A major international financial services company’s Data Center with a $2 Billion budget was not meeting profit goals because of losing sales that were booked but not fulfilled. The COO was looking for a permanent solution that would provide a lasting leadership culture. He wanted to develop leaders who could communicate clearly articulated goals, set the example, seek responsibility and accept accountability.

Using the Academy Leadership Lead2Succeed™ process we first assessed the gap between the current leadership skills and the ideal leadership style and skills.

Second, we spent two days with executive team immersed in a Focus and Alignment workshop which resulted in a clarification of the critical components of a successful Data Center. The participants felt a sense of enhanced teamwork and accomplishment. They realized they had built a foundation for common agreement on where the Data Center was going and what the major action steps were to get them to this common vision. They also knew who within the executive team was accountable for each major step.

Third, we facilitated a nine week Leadership Development Program (LDP) for the executive team. We focused on the leadership skills needed to communicate and implement the outcomes of the Focus and Alignment workshop. Each week we facilitated the practice of a different skill by applying it in the workplace to accomplish the goals and objectives.

The result was a leadership team that was focused on evaluating and accepting only the work requests that were in alignment with their vision. When they scheduled work assignments, they would clearly define the production goals and the methods to be used to measure performance and correct variance between planned and actual outputs so as to maintain customer satisfaction and decrease cancelled sales.

The end result: on-time product delivery increased over 8 months from 48% to 96.3% leading to attainment of their profit goals.