Aligning Internal Teams

The CEO of a leading financial services firm, fresh off the acquisition of a major competitor, hired Ferrazzi Greenlight to align its new senior leadership team to a shared culture and goals. Two groups that had formerly seen each other as competitors now needed to function as a team.

To speed cohesion among the new executive team, we focused on specific objectives:

1. Reestablish the goals and beliefs of the firm among the senior leadership team.
2. Develop a new shared identity between two formerly disparate groups.
3. Promote individual buy-in for the new, shared culture, helping employees answer the question, "What's in it for me?"

After prepping with the CEO and the head of HR, our consultants held four sessions with the firm's senior leadership, including divisional presidents, company officers, and others ambassadors of the new company. Each session explored core principles of intimacy, transparency, accountability, and generosity, in the context of real business problems faced by the company.

The sessions were focused as follows:

Session 1: Eliminating preconceptions and breaking the ice; leadership training with set parameters and goals.

Session 2: Promoting and practicing transparency and candor as central attributes of the shared corporate culture, bolstered by research on how transparency contributes to business value.

Session 3: Exploring collaborative problem solving and applying it to a current business issue.

Session 4: Inculcating the notion of leadership as a service with a primary mission of helping people understand and manage change in their lives. Executives were pushed to explore the needs of their team and its individual members, and to set leadership goals for the year.

As a result of the sessions, the executive leadership – roughly half original employees, half acquisitions – laid down a solid foundation for a successful, cohesive team environment.