Leadership team case study
They asked for team-building. What they needed was a way to lead together.
A leadership team of 25 at a global technology company was planning an offsite.
As I worked with the organisers, a more useful question emerged. How could leaders make decisions together, use limited resources and take responsibility beyond their own functions?
Start before the session
The first enquiry came six weeks before the offsite. Over the following weeks, I worked with the organisers, HR partner and leadership representatives to understand what the team needed, refine the aims and design the session.
One concern was how leaders solved problems across team boundaries, particularly when conditions were imperfect.
I worked with the organisers to revise the choices in Buy a Feature, so the decisions participants faced reflected the behaviours the team wanted to strengthen.
Make room for everyone to think
With 25 leaders in the room, I wanted to give everyone the chance to form their own views before hearing the most senior voices.
I designed and facilitated the session around individual thinking, followed by pairs and mixed-function groups. Senior leaders participated alongside everyone else.
Leaders drew the pressures facing their teams and compared what they saw. In Buy a Feature, they used play money and a limited budget to decide which priorities deserved investment. They had to make choices and explain them.
I also used TRIZ, an exercise that turns the usual approach to problem-solving upside down.
I asked leaders to design a guaranteed failure, identify which of those behaviours they recognised in their own work, and agree what they needed to stop doing.
This gave the team a way to examine difficult habits without making any one person the problem.
Turn the conversation into commitments
The team recorded commitments, including reducing the number of priorities and being clearer about the reasons behind decisions.
Participants left with accountability partners and a two-week check-in built into the design.
Three weeks later, the HR partner wrote:
“The frameworks and language from your session have woven themselves into how our leadership team talks about accountability and culture.”
What the engagement included
I led the work from preparation through to delivery: stakeholder conversations, defining the problem, tailoring the exercises, designing and facilitating the offsite, and producing a written report with commitments and planned follow-up.