Team: Global IT team    

Team Size: 8 Senior Leaders 

Engagement Length: 6 months

Focus Area: Improve trust and collaboration to set the way forward

Background:

A Fortune 500 company with operations in over 80 countries was struggling with a highly disjointed and maladjusted global IT function. The Global Centre of Excellence, tasked with driving digital transformation, often clashed with country-level IT teams, who felt excluded, misunderstood, and constrained. This dynamic had resulted in deep-seated resentment, forming a teams that worked against each other rather than as a collective. The company appointed a new Global Head of IT, a leader with experience in cross-cultural tech integration and digital agility, with a clear mission: align a global IT strategy with local execution and improved collaboration across the board. She invested in bringing the team together for an in-person offsite and subsequent virtual sessions to turn the page and build a path forward and lead the team to victory.  

Goals:

The goals for the team intervention were: 

• Build trust and repair relationships 

• Challenge assumptions and ingrained patterns of doing 

• Alignment on the Team’s purpose

• Determine high-impact team norms and ways of working 

• Establish actions and leadership behaviours to bring their purpose to life 

Approach:

In partnership with the CIO, a structured intervention was developed that included: 

• A one-and-a-half-day Team offsite (in-person): brought the team together in person for the first time in several years. The goal for the offsite was to reset the team dynamic and align on a shared purpose.

• Virtual Reinforcement: Following the off-site, a well-thought-out virtual follow-up program was developed to ensure participation in a future forum to discuss progress,, challenges in order to drive accountability towards the commitments made. 

Lessons Learned: 

• Human connection is the foundation of any global transformation project

• A shared in-person reset can unblock even deeply dysfunctional teams

• Virtual collaboration thrives after trust is built face-to-face

• Team dysfunction must be addressed proactively, not just acknowledged