I came in expecting slides and theory. Instead, we spent the first morning mapping the actual tension between my sales and operations teams. By lunch I had a clearer picture of why our quarterly targets kept slipping than I had after three internal reviews. The facilitator, Maren, pushed back on my assumptions in ways my direct reports never would.
The twelve-week coaching program caught things I had been ignoring for years. My coach, Daniel, recorded short video summaries after each session so I could revisit the key points during the week. That small detail made a big difference. I changed how I run my Monday leadership meetings and the feedback from my team has been noticeably positive.
We sent our entire senior leadership team to the alignment workshop. The exercise where each person independently ranked our top five priorities and then compared lists was uncomfortable but necessary. Three of us had completely different number-one priorities. That single exercise justified the investment. We left with a shared framework that we still reference eight months later.
I was sceptical. I have done leadership courses at two business schools and walked away with binders I never opened again. This was different because the cohort was small enough that every person spoke every hour. The facilitator tailored scenarios to our actual industries rather than using generic case studies from American textbooks. I have recommended it to three peers since.
Barossa Regional Health had lost four of its seven department heads in eighteen months. Exit interviews pointed to unclear decision authority and a fractured relationship between clinical and administrative leadership. We ran two team alignment workshops, two weeks apart, with all seven department heads and the CEO.
The workshops produced a written decision-rights matrix that clarified who owns what. Six months later, no further departures had occurred, and the CEO reported that the average time to resolve inter-departmental disputes dropped from eleven days to three.
Result: zero leadership departures in the following twelve months.
When Solari Software raised a Series B round, the founder suddenly had a formal board with two external directors. She had never presented to a board before and found the quarterly reporting cadence stressful and adversarial. Through our twelve-week coaching program, she developed a board communication framework, practised presenting financials under time pressure, and learned to separate strategic discussion from operational updates.
Her board chair later told us the quality of board packs improved so much that meetings shortened by forty minutes on average.
Result: board meeting duration cut by 40 minutes, improved investor confidence.
