A Division Head of a telecoms company launched an initiative to improve B2B client service and satisfaction. Client feedback indicated that the company was behind its peers in delivering innovative solutions and the firm wasn’t winning proposals for complex high-value projects.

How the Accelerator helped:

Our research shows that firms when deliver integrated solutions, they are better able to address their clients’ VUCA challenges and deliver exponentially higher returns in the business. Insights from the Accelerator and group workshops can help surface barriers to collaboration and identify concrete ways for leaders and individuals to address them.

Working with the Division Head, we identified a group implementing a strategic project for a client. The group’s progress was slow and the focus of the team remained ambiguous both within and outside the team. The team leader hypothesized two issues hindering progress: the problem they were trying to solve was neither clearly defined nor well understood, and individual roles and responsibilities were vague.

We generated individual Accelerator reports for all team members, a Team Leader Insights Report for the project head, and held individual coaching sessions with all 10 team members. The group was open to sharing the results of their individual assessments and we discussed the diversity of strengths within the group. High Complex team members were asked to help better define the issues they needed to address. The high Concrete team members were asked to better define roles and requirements. Over the course of a week the team was able to better frame the challenge. They reoriented each team member’s focus and developed a communication plan to help the broader organization understand the project’s objectives.

Exit interviews at a large corporation showed that people of color were leaving the firm because they felt they “didn’t fit” into the culture. Feedback indicated that people felt strong pressure to conform, which undermined their engagement and ability to fully contribute. Leaders struggled to find actionable ways to reverse the trends.

How the Accelerator helped:

The Accelerator takes the heat out of the D&I conversations; by showing how different behavioral tendencies can be used as strengths for achieving collaboration-related benefits, it creates an appreciation for different working styles so that people can engage authentically. Working with the Accelerator can help groups develop strategies for tapping into diverse talent across the organization, and ultimately increase inclusion, engagement and business outcomes.

The Head of D&I piloted the use of the Accelerator in three teams. Teams were selected based on the urgent need to address complex issues, an opportunity to improve engagement, and leaders’ support for the pilot. All team members took the Accelerator. Each team ran a facilitated workshop to discuss insights from the tool, current barriers to collaboration, and how to leverage the insights to address specific business requirements. The leaders qualitatively measured success against business goals and quantitatively measured engagement and retention relative to teams that didn’t use the Accelerator.

A company launched a new business unit. Most team members hadn’t previously worked together, so the group lacked knowledge of each other’s skills and preferred working styles. The VP heading the group suspected that interpersonal trust was low because people had been in competing business areas. The team needed to get off to a strong start and tackle critical business opportunities.

How the Accelerator helped:

The Accelerator shows that various behavioral styles can become catalysts for Smart Collaboration and creates a shared language for the new team about their respective strengths.

Before the new BU launched, the leadership team took the Accelerator. The coach facilitated a leadership group meeting, where members discussed aspects of their profiles. The team learned that despite the previous organizational structure which had pitted them against each other, the majority of members were naturally high Trust but also highly Individual. The coach helped the leadership team identify where collaboration would be critical to address their business goals and understand their role in facilitating collaboration across their respective teams. Knowing which particular leadership team members were Wary, the VP designed a couple of projects to give them direct exposure to their peers so that they could develop trust in others’ competence.

After getting buy-in from the leaders, all members of the new BU took the Accelerator. The BU ran an on-line workshop to discuss the concepts and business case for Smart Collaboration, create a shared language and set of expectations around Smart Collaboration, and begin developing a strong collaborative culture.

The Managing Partner of a newly combined professional firm wanted to ensure rapid integration of the two businesses and bring new solutions to their clients. She knew that this would require senior employees to team up on innovation projects, client acquisition and servicing, and back-office operations. How could she turbo-charge post-merger integration?

How the Accelerator helped:

Quickly developing trust (both interpersonal and competence trust) is essential to successful post-merger integration. The Accelerator can help leaders understand their own tendencies, particularly around trust, and develop strategies to improve trust across the organization.

In group workshops with people from both legacy firms, an external facilitator used the Accelerator to unearth differences between corporate cultures and identify specific actions to leverage the strengths of both.

They ran a series of Smart Collaboration workshops, using findings from the Accelerator. They discussed the business case for collaboration and what they could achieve better together. They focused on how to structure teams and roles for maximum impact. For example, innovation projects need people who are drawn to Complex and creative thinking along with people who are high Concrete so that they can drive successful execution. Many Partners skewed toward Wary so they also discussed specific ways to help Partners internally communicate and share their expertise to help improve competence trust.

A company had a problem making new senior hires productive. Many left within 2 years, which lowered employee morale, impacted the company’s reputation, and wasted money. Research shows that new joiners have less than 6 months to integrate into the new organization or else their likelihood of derailing increases dramatically. The CHRO knew that those who collaborate quickly are more likely to be productive, to stay longer, and to return a positive ROI—but he lacked a systematic way to help them.

How the Accelerator helped:

The Accelerator can help the new joiner to understand the dynamics of the organization and their specific team, and it can provide leaders insights into how best to integrate new hires.

The CHRO implemented a program to use the Accelerator with experienced hires. The Accelerator helped the new hires understand their natural collaborative strengths, how to communicate their skills and experience in ways that new colleagues will value, and how to use their strengths to quickly contribute to project teams.

An internal coach helped each new hire develop a strategy for integrating into their new team. For example, one newly hired VP (call him Chris) was high on the Close dimension, but joining a high Distant team where interactions were quite formal and strictly task-focused. Chris focused on ways to bring his genuine warmth to increase cohesiveness and strengthen team communications, while keeping a watch-out in mind: how not to appear “flaky” to his no-nonsense peers. The coach also helped the leader understand how Chris could enhance engagement not just amongst VPs, but also with more junior staff.

In a work-from-home environment, the team leader (call her Michelle) sensed a lack of engagement—falling morale and a failure to get traction on key projects. She was concerned that some people were becoming marginalized and not contributing their fullest. She also wondered whether the juniors were receiving sufficient coaching and feedback. With remote working a longer-term reality, Michelle needed to re-engage the team and ensure they worked as effectively in a virtual environment as they did when they were co-located.

How the Accelerator helped:

The Accelerator can help team members understand their behavioral tendencies, specifically in the context of distributed teams working from home or across multiple locations, and learn to use their strengths to collaborate effectively in a virtual environment.

A coach used the Accelerator with Michelle’s team to understand their natural tendencies and see how those translated into strengths (or watch-outs) in the virtual world. Each person took the Accelerator, had a one-hour individual debrief, and then they came together as a group to discuss. For example, Michelle (high Distant on the communication dimension) realized that she needed to book team check-ins more frequently than her normal inclination in order to help Close members feel connected; she also needed to make time at the beginning of virtual team meetings for “off task” personal conversations to create cohesion.

Some team members who were high on the Hands-on dimension discussed new approaches to engaging with colleagues now that they were unable to simply drop by others’ desks for informal progress updates. The Hands-off managers learned which team members wanted more frequent direction and interaction during the course of a project. Having common knowledge and language about the Accelerator dimensions helped the group anticipate and handle their own collaboration challenges. It also helped turn team members’ differences—once a source of frustration—into team competencies.

A firm’s Executive Committee realized that the firm had missed significant growth opportunities, but that it could gain competitive advantage by more deeply penetrating existing clients with a broader range of offerings.

How the Accelerator helped:

Clients want more joined-up solutions, which demand inputs from multiple kinds of experts. The Accelerator helps bridge silos by developing a shared language about behavioral tendencies and providing concrete strategies for increasing collaboration.

Firm leaders identified the Banking and Finance practice group as the one with the highest potential revenue gains that could be achieved through broader client penetration, especially across offices. All Partners in this group took the Accelerator. Their results were aggregated into a Leader Insights Report for the whole practice, as well as the sub-groups (e.g., Project Finance). We individually debriefed the Group leader and the three sub-Group heads, who each came away with several specific leadership actions they wanted to take. As one example: after one leader realized that his sub-group was predominantly high-Responder, Concrete thinkers, he realized that they would need support in seeking out, identifying and initiating VUCA client issues. They created a peer-coaching program to capture this opportunity.

In addition, we facilitated a full practice group workshop to discuss the business case for Smart Collaboration, explain how to interpret the individual reports and the overall group profile. During the session, we discussed current barriers to collaboration, prioritized them based on the firm’s strategic priorities, and agreed concrete steps for partners based on the seven dimensions of Smart Collaboration.

The Managing Partner has decided to roll out the Accelerator to three more practice groups so that they could benefit from increased Smart Collaboration more broadly across the firm.