Success Stories
Challenge: Trust Issues Impairing
Team and Organizational Performance
Overview – The IT department of a large healthcare organization was plagued by numerous problems, many of them stemming from a lack of trust on the senior leadership teams. These people had worked together for years but avoided addressing the resentments and conflicts that were simmering below the surface of their day-to-day interactions.
Approach – Two senior leadership teams undertook 15 hours of training in Collaborative Conversations. This included sessions on social, emotional, and somatic intelligences and their role in self-regulation. They also learned skills to handle conflict creatively.
Outcome - After completing the training, participants reported vastly improved interpersonal relationships, greater openness to new ideas and approaches to work, and a much clearer sense of being guided by the organization's purpose and mission. Many reported that their relationships outside of work also benefitted. Here are the before and after survey results:
Challenge: Integrating a New
Leader into an Existing Team
Overview – A newly hired SVP and his leadership team needed to rapidly bring out the best in each other while achieving ambitious growth targets. We embarked on a six-month team coaching adventure.
Approach – A roadmap for the next 24 months was developed and fully fleshed out detailing responsibilities and action items that were agreed to by everyone and made visible to the team for ease of tracking and shared accountability.
Outcome – Polled after four months, the consensus was that team conversations were far more productive than they were prior to the coaching and people were consistently hitting or surpassing their KPIs.
Challenge: Consolidating UCSC's IT Departments
Overview – in order to streamline costs and achieve greater efficiency, the UCSC campus needed to consolidate 24 separate IT departments into a single entity.
Approach – Using participant-driven methods, we first brought together the heads of each department and helped them to make their collective knowledge, concerns, aspirations, and burning questions visible in ways that helped to identify the critical path forward. We eventually involved all 250+ people in the department, allowing each of them to have a voice in the consolidation process.
Outcome – The integration initiative was a success by every significant measure. Of 250+ people affected, fewer than a dozen were laid off, several took early retirement and some opted for part-time status through job sharing. The new department kept the continuity of service that was present under the older divisions, and surveys of customers showed a higher level of satisfaction as a result of the consolidation effort.