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Unlearning From Past Success to Meet Future Demands: Creating & Institutionalizing a Learning Culture

Fortune 500 ExecutiveFortune 500 Corporation

The Challenge:

This successful products division in a Fortune 500 corporation was faced with an increasingly complex and competitive market. Could leaders break out of a culture of comfort and complacency to develop a learning and growth culture that supported increased personal accountability and a dramatic restructuring of how the division related to its internal and external customers?

The Solution:

In collaboration with division leadership, the SyncUp group staff designed a strategic learning program that impacted 150 leaders and managers. Experiences included strategic planning sessions, off sites, workshops, facilitated team and cross sales team discussions, individual coaching, applying new processes and protocols for customer service and customer retention.

The leadership team developed dialogue practices that expanded their ability to step back, assess the situation with new eyes and challenge current understanding. They taught these practices to all division leaders and managers. Younger managers were invigorated and given opportunities to grow and innovate.

The Impact:

Innovative and strategic thinking and action, once limited to a few leaders, became more commonplace throughout the organization.

Managers eyes were really opened to how their approaches sustained old habits in the organization and that by using new approaches dramatic change in organization could occur…not only did our results begin to shift but people in the organization began taking greater responsibility for their results and became more self reliant.

Customer issues were no longer problems to be solved, but issues to be understood at a deeper level. Sales teams have become consultants to their customers, including holding more educational product meetings.

Coaching and mentoring practices increased. Four leaders were promoted to global and corporate sales positions and two moved to executive positions.

The learning culture was institutionalized. Today, the ability to learn and apply learnings is a core competency.

This division has increased its size 5X since the collaboration with the SyncUp team.