Global Leadership Programme

Imagine a very large successful global professional services firm, having the ambition to service their global clients even more effectively.

They select 25 high potential experienced partners to take part in an intensive development programme in order to shift both the aspirations and capability of these partners to deliver outstanding service across the world.

The Challenge

You have very capable partners, however they tend to be organized by functions and much of their success is measured through their local office / department P&L. The partners also tend to be functional experts and therefore a starting point is to view clients as an audit /tax /consulting client.

The partners are also extremely busy as delivering excellent service to clients always comes first.

The partners operate from 13 cities across Europe.

The Shifts Needed

In order to achieve the ambition of the firm, these partners will need to make a big shift from focusing on local execution to engaging with clients and their own teams globally. To do this well partners will have to ‘make things happen” despite any organizational constraints within the firm.

In the journey they have started they will be making a shift from locally focused transactional leaders to globally focused transformational leaders.

How Gordon Cooper Helped Achieve Success

Staring at the beginning might help to illustrate what we were able to do. We were selected to provide executive coaching support to the programme because we were able to demonstrate:

• We have great experience and expertise in leadership development through executive coaching and other blended approaches.
• We have great credibility when working with senior leader
• We have a great team of executive coaches who bring a collective strength and approach to delivering client service and can deliver this globally.

We deliver our service through a Lead Coach who co-ordinates the work of the team, and acts as a principle contact with the client programme team. The lead coach can therefore draw together insights and themes arising from the coaching and provide the firm with valuable insights about their organization, capabilities and challenges.

Common Goals – Different Journeys

The overall goals of the programme were clear, the specific coaching objectives of each participant varied according to personality, current performance, previous experience and market focus.

Our coaches were able to work with each partner to define their specific development objectives and therefore agree a tailored coaching programme for each participant. The precision and relevance of these objectives was achieved after running diagnostic discussions using 360° feedback and psychometric tools.

There were a number of elements to this programme in addition to the executive coaching support. Each partner had a target client on which they were to develop and implement a client service plan, each partner could call on an experienced LCSP to act as a mentor, the group also met at two learning summits in which Experienced LCSP’s shared their experiences, clients gave their views about what a good LCSP does and our Lead coach brought insights from the coaching and input around leadership development. The participants also shared their experiences from developing their approach.

Measuring Success

The acid test relates to: are these partners now behaving differently? – and the answer is clearly yes. Also can the firm see better client service and increased revenues as a result of these changes? – again the answer is yes.

In terms of the coaching it was pleasing to see that right from the start the partners were fully engaged and getting a lot of value from our sessions. They report high levels of satisfaction with the coaching and also report that this was one of the most useful aspects of the programme.

What the GCA Team bring:

• Highly qualified Master Coaching Practitioners
• Track record working with LCSP’s
• Track record in delivering global consulting assignments (Deloitte/PWC/McKinsey)
• Current senior engagements
• Qualified supervisors and top level coaching faculty members
• Recent coaching publications
• Linguistic capability
• Psychometric and 360 expertise
• Masters qualification in working with Diversity
• Experience in working globally