Leading Edge and Performance Edge have collaborated to support senior leaders at global tech firm Insight through a period of extensive change.
This change period – driven by the organisation pivoting from being a product delivery business to a more services based platform – required the senior leadership team (SLT) to come together strongly, maximise their strengths and recalibrate the most effective behaviours to achieve their goals, in line with company values.
Critical to this was the senior team gaining a clearer sense of their collective story going forward in terms of how they wanted to turn up as leaders and what behaviours would be most impactful for this. Also central to this journey was reducing friction in the team, revealing blind spots and understanding not only how their environment was calibrated but also what behaviours and preferences were rewarded by the environment. Having this clarity would allow the environment to then be shaped for high performance.
Leading Edge and Performance Edge jointly supported Insight from the point of understanding their current landscape through to building a direction of travel the whole group was invested in.
Immersing themselves in the team, Performance Edge created and ran detailed and nuanced 360 interviews with both the team and key adjacent stakeholders to understand the team’s behaviours, strengths and blind spots. These sessions gathered human data that shone a light on how people experience working with others, and how the values and behaviours turn up, giving the team valuable insight to feed into maximising their use of strengths as a group.
Key at this stage was working out what unique behaviours would be essential to the task for this group, as well as looking at organisational values and understanding how they show themselves in behaviours.
To maximise the output of the Performance Edge immersion, Leading Edge then continued the journey by facilitating 2 one-day workshops with the senior leadership team, working with them to map out and create their stories based on the target behaviours and desired environment for high performance. Supporting the leaders individually to create their stories in this way helped them shape and establish what they each want people to see and hear from them in their leadership roles.
The output of these story-mapping sessions fed into the leaders’ individual ‘Narrative Arc’ profiles. These profiles formed the basis for feedback and coaching conversations, giving everyone involved a common language and nuanced start point to drive performance and the development of the target behaviours.
Leading Edge shared the journey and stories with Insight’s HR team, playing an important role in facilitating the next step: taking this to a wider community within the organisation.
Working with Leading Edge and Performance Edge on creating a high-performing team was an amazing experience – learning about the importance of feedback in high-performing environments and being given the space and time to practise the skills.
Learning more about how we interact with each other and how to get the best out of our interactions was both thought-provoking and inspiring. I would not hesitate to work with them again!
”- Karen Mclaughlin, Senior Vice President, Insight
