Case Study

Driving Better Results: New Strategy, New Leadership Team

The Problem

When an oil and gas company brought several new leadership team member on board, they knew they needed to get the right support to help that team form and align quickly. The external environment was incredibly challenging with rapidly increasing environmental and safety regulations, declining reserves, and very aggressive revenue expectations from owners.

With new team members coming from different backgrounds and many of them new to the organization, it was clear that the team required clear alignment in purpose. Additionally, the organization needed a clear new direction to respond to the challenging external environment and the team would be required to quickly come together to articulate a strategy, align around it, and work together to communicate and implement it. All this needed to happen without any solid working relationships among members. So, the team needed to identify purpose, individual roles vs team roles, and set team dynamics to support the needs of all their stakeholders.

The Solution

The team brought in an RBL consultant to help facilitate some purposeful team development sessions. Using team and individual assessments helped the team identify the right starting point and created a foundation for cohesive teamwork moving forward. Recognizing this top team would serve as a model for every other team in the organization, expectations and norms were set for expected behavior. These expectations helped create alignment, cohesiveness, and facilitated the development of mutual trust.

Over the following year, the CEO and the CHRO relied on RBL’s support for both connecting vision to strategy and to flesh it out with most of the functional teams reporting directly to the top team and deploying behaviors to the whole organization. Once the executive team was aligned, five functional-level teams were brought in to manage deployment. RBL supported the formation and launch of these teams as well as an inter-company team identified as critical for their strategy. These interventions helped the whole organization maintain the right results with the right teams.

The Outcome

Since the first interaction with this team, improvements are very obvious. As a team, the senior leaders exhibit better decision making, increased speed of execution, improvement in meeting and agendas. One notable result is that their meetings include more time for discussion and debate, in which trust is evident as all engage. Other stakeholders including the Board, Management, Regulators among others have noticed that as team execution has improved, extraordinary results have followed.

Positive results are also visible throughout the functional teams as well. Surveys suggest a more than 10% increase in employee commitment and engagement tied to the action enacted by the top teams.