Case Studies

Situation: A biopharma director sought to grow his influence and ability to communicate with impact

Actions: Jon conducted an initial intake, skills and preferences assessment, and 360 interviews, which he leveraged to co-create with his client a development program including practices and resources to support his client’s goals.   Through one-on-one coaching sessions, Jon partnered with his client to debrief learnings, identify and respond to challenges, and build skills.  Jon also supported his client to work with key stakeholders, including his supervisor, to measure progress as well as facilitate changing perceptions.  Finally, Jon provided a end-of-engagement wrap and next steps, which resulted in the decision to re-engage Jon for continued coaching.

Result: The directer noted a greater ability to influence others and communicate more skillfully, including conducting difficult conversations.   His supervisor and other stakeholders observed improved relationships and greater effectiveness and based on progress achieved, a decision to invest in additional coaching was made.

Situation: A new SVP’s work style was creating challenges for his organization

Actions:  After conducting an assessment and set of qualitative interviews, Jon partnered with the new SVP to create a development plan and sought feedback and alignment from the CEO, SVP of HR and key stakeholders, including measures of success.   Jon then provided one-to-one coaching sessions focused on improving awareness, building trust and expanding the SVP’s ability to vary his leadership style, including out-of-sessions practices and key resources.   Jon also conduct mid-session alignment sessions plus follow-up interviews with key stakeholders to chart progress and identify additional areas of opportunities and guided the leader to adjust key behaviors.

Result: The SVP greatly improved his team and organization relationships to wide acclaim,  based on follow-up interviews and observations, including from the CEO.  Stakeholders observed a great increase in morale, the SVP noted his own sense of “traction” and customer satisfaction increased, leading to C-suite support to take on a new set of customers that increased the business’ portfolio by 40%.

Situation: A leader sought to address feedback in order to be promoted, including building his executive presence and ability to lead

Actions:  Jon conducted an assessment and worked with his client to define goals and obtain executive support.   Jon then provided coaching focused on sharpening his client’s ability to present confidently and appropriately to executive audiences, including improving audience awareness, presenting strategically, and aligning verbal and non-verbal messages.  Jon also worked with the leader on building team member capability, including setting expectations and giving feedback using examples and role-play scenarios.

Result:  The leader quickly elevated his ability to present confidently as well as set expectations and deliver feedback.  Within 3 months after the coaching engagement ended, he was promoted to Vice-President.

Situation: A VP wanted to improve division performance

Actions: Jon co-designed and facilitated 4 multiple day off-sites focused on building collaboration, teamwork, and overall performance.  He guided two teams through a series of work and team member development activities, including unit mission, strategic imperatives, and work alignment.   In addition, Jon provided coaching and support to VP and team members

Result: Successful delivery resulted in high team member satisfaction and executive report of increased productivity and cross-team work effectiveness 6 months later.

Situation: New leader sought to re-evaluate value and delivery of business unit services

Actions: Jon coached the leader and his team to develop new organization strategy. He collected feedback from key leaders, stakeholders and customers and facilitated the creation of unit vision, mission, strategic objectives, target metrics, and deployment plan. Follow-up engagement resulted in prioritizing and standardizing key processes as well as the development of an organization capability model, including competencies.

Result: The unit increased visibility and value provided to stakeholders and customers. Discussions with leadership team members led to greater alignment about objectives, sharing of best practices, and increased leader effectiveness, including in developing team members.

Situation: Functional barriers led to inconsistent retail designs and cost overruns

Actions: Jon provided guidance and consulting to enable the creation of a new retail design organization. Jon facilitated work sessions to clarify and adjust the current and future model, key roles, function responsibilities, and interfaces.   He also led the development of “to be” work process.   He partnered with the internal lead to develop an integration and transition plan.

Result: The new design was endorsed by the division president and other key leaders and is currently being implemented.

Situation: A merger resulted in two, overlapping IT functions.

Actions: Jon guided the IT VP through an integration process, including facilitating organization design, defining roles planning transition activities, and helping managed the associated change of the transition.   He coached five IT unit leaders in designing their post-merger organizations and facilitated leadership meetings to ensure new designs were appropriately integrated across the new IT Division.

Result: The two functions were successfully integrated within 120 days, including retention of all desired employees, and enabled savings > $2M.

Situation: A company sought to introduce competency models

Actions:   Jon led a team to design and implement a global competency strategy for a consumer apparel company. He worked with and influenced global leaders around the use of competencies to drive capability building and leader development.   Jon brokered agreements between regional leaders around the creation and use of world-wide models.   Jon also guided the redesign of the company’s global performance management process to incorporate competencies.

Result: Competencies were introduced across critical functions and in the three regions of the company (over 7,000 employees) and were used in selection and performance management processes.

Situation: Internal worker’s comp process is “tangled, confusing, and inefficient”

Actions: Jon worked with a client project team to map the current process, including hand-offs and duration.   He then facilitated the team to identify a desired “to be” work flow, identify gaps, and prepared recommendations and implementation plan, including change management, to support the transition.

Result: Redesigned workers’ compensation claims process reduced processing time by 90% and the number of hand-offs by 75%.

Situation: New customer solution meant changes for long-time customers in Asia

Actions: Jon developed and implemented a change plan to support his technology client.

He clarified the impact of the changes, worked with Program Managers to develop supporting customer communications and materials and guided the engagement of key internal audiences.   Jon worked with Asia integration and channel partners to ensure delivery and assess effectiveness.

Result: Solution implemented across Asia-Pacific theater with minimal customer complaints; critical customer accounts retained (no impact to existing business)

Situation: An operating company sought to deploy processes internationally

Actions: Jon provided project coaching, team facilitation, and change management support through all phases of process development. He guided engagement of key global stakeholders ensure appropriate business and regional representation.   Also, Jon guided implementation planning, including working with various regions, and material development.   Jon lead the design and facilitation of global workshops and supporting tools to ensure process sustainability.

Result: Global, cross-business deployment of 4 operational processes to over 90 countries.

Situation: A new merchandising system would require considerable change during a critical business cycle.

Actions: Jon guided the development of an adoption strategy, including conducting stakeholder assessment, developing a communications plan, identifying deployment metrics and facilitating change readiness assessment. He coached leaders and helped prepare organization-wide communication to accelerate adoption.

Result: Achieved implementation targets and high client satisfaction for smooth delivery.

Situation: A new sourcing strategy needed field buy-in to deliver target value

Actions: Jon provided coaching and change leadership consulting to project team.   He coached the team leader to identify key stakeholder needs, including field requirements, develop an adoption strategy, created a plan and target deliverables, and supported leader and field engagement through all project phases. Jon also facilitated team meetings and workshops to implement the initiative, including gaining field support.

Result: Sourcing strategy was implemented with strong field support, resulting in the consolidation of 90 suppliers to two, > $10M savings, and an increase in customer satisfaction

Situation: A leadership team wanted to increase employee engagement and test awareness of company initiatives

Actions: Jon lead a consulting team to conduct a employee survey.   Jon conducted leadership interviews, guided question design, facilitated focus groups, and supervised data collection and analysis.   Jon and his team presented the results of the survey back to the leadership team and coached leaders through an action planning workshop.

Result: Survey results enabled the leadership to create and execute an action plan, including tailoring employee communications, which resulted in increased employee satisfaction and engagement

Situation: A diverse leadership team needed to identify and agree on priorities for the next three years

Actions: Jon partnered with his client to develop a 2-day offsite agenda, create an approach to vision development and strategic planning, prepare supporting materials, and facilitate the offsite and follow-up work sessions.

Result: The team successfully developed a 3-year strategic plan, based on a visioning and priority-setting work sessions.   The offsite was viewed as “highly productive and creative”.