Enterprise Leader Development & Strategic Alignment
One of our core capabilities at EDC is creating transformative impact through custom development journeys for senior leaders. Our Enterprise Leader Development solutions help companies align and engage executives across the organization and build the skills and behaviors needed to lead their teams through change. In partnership with CHROs and CEOs, we design solutions to bring leaders together across time zones, operational areas and strategic viewpoints.
CASE
STUDY
Our custom solution helped a Fortune 100 company pivot their top 200 leaders to a new revenue model.
THE CHALLENGE
Adapting to a new revenue model
Our client, a Fortune 100 company, had determined that, for the company to remain relevant, they needed to pivot from a one-and-done sales strategy to a recurring revenue model.
But when leadership contemplated making the change, their overwhelming response was anxiety. Some of the questions their senior leaders were asking were:
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How do we pivot without disrupting our present operations?
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Will we jeopardize our current client relationships?
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Does our current sales team have the skills to meet this new goal?
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How can we align our leaders to a new way of working?
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How can we pivot more than 500 employees at once?
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What will it take to get everyone on-board across global time zones and cultures?
THE SOLUTION
Aligning and equipping senior leaders
EDC worked with the client’s commercial arm to implement a program that would align more than 600 of their senior leaders around the world to the new strategy. It would also provide these leaders with tools and frameworks to better lead the change that was required by this new business model.
The experience was designed to:
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Move sales leaders from a “closing deals” mindset to a “customer success” mindset.
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Change the one-and-done sales model to a relationship model, where customer connection led to revenue growth over time.
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Accelerate the change by reminding senior leaders of their own potential for irrelevance by tangibly showing them how and where disruption is occurring in the spaces where they compete.
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Break down internal silos by engaging mixed cohorts of leaders from differing global teams.
EDC’s custom enterprise leadership development program
​​The program experience we developed with the client included:
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A three-day workshop experience. The curriculum was delivered to more than 600 senior leaders across the company.
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Intentionally small cohorts. Thirty-person groups blended leaders from across teams and regions, disrupting relationships that could lead to groupthink or resistance to change.
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Help leaders assess their own skills. Using psychometric assessments and, where needed, more hard-hitting 360-degree reviews, we gave leaders a candid sense of where they were succeeding and where they needed to level-up.
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Make it engaging. We believe a well-run development session shouldn’t feel boring or irrelevant. Instead, it should feel like a compelling and productive business meeting, complete with exciting new ways to think about the work.
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Create actionable and adaptable tools. Development journeys don’t lead to transformative change unless there’s a clear road to put the theory into practice. This experience prioritized sharing insights, techniques, and new ways of working to drive change.
The workshop jump-started the conversation around changing market dynamics and left leaders with a new mindset that would prove invaluable—and profitable—for the organization as a whole.
THE IMPACT
A team that champions innovation
The team experienced a profound transformation. Instead of seeing their value as “problem-finders,” they developed an understanding of what their role actually was: to focus on the long-term future; to be more strategic and champion innovation; to have productive conflict about how best to move the business forward and to take smart risks together. They created a narrative around the decisions they were making and how they mutually saw the role of the business in the future.
The other result? The rest of the organization started to view them as engaged leaders ready to take the company into the future.
Meet the Team
Cade Cowan
Cade is known for his insightful understanding of leadership in today’s ambiguous environment. He began developing leaders as Director at Coca-Cola University’s Bottling Investments Group and has subsequently worked with executives, CEOs and boards from Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Walmart, Aetna, PayPal, Johnson & Johnson, and more. He is the co-author of Leader: Balancing Contradictory Answers to Unsolvable Problems, published by Jossey-Bass in 2014.
Stacey Philpot
For over 20 years, Dr. Stacey Philpot has advised some of the world’s most admired companies on how to use leadership development to accelerate growth and increase their competitive advantage. Her work has helped companies such as Apple, Bristol Myers Squibb, General Mills, Harley Davidson, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, Nike, PayPal, and Time Warner. Stacey received her doctorate in Organizational Psychology from Rutgers University. Her doctoral research explored how early family experiences influence women’s career expectations and selection of work roles.
Widely experienced.
Specifically creative.
Lindsey Hayes
For nearly 20 years, Lindsey has helped companies better know, grow, and leverage talent to enable their business strategy and growth. Her experiences as a corporate Talent executive, business HR leader, and senior leadership consultant help her deliver solutions that combine business insight, talent theory, and pragmatic execution. She has worked with global leaders across various industries, including Nike, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Bumble, BASF, Harley-Davidson, McDonald's, ITW, and Endeavor.