Helping a new leader align her senior team

Following an acquisition, Brimstone worked with a leadership team to transform ambiguity and skepticism into clarity and alignment around a new direction. Our approach helped the organization add over $7M to the bottom line.

A $50 billion+ global pharmaceutical manufacturer completed an acquisition that increased global operations by over 70%—much of it in Europe.

While the expanded footprint created new opportunities, it also introduced significant challenges associated with bringing together the combined companies’ IT systems. Our client, the newly appointed VP of Global Operations, was charged with converting European operations to a global operating model. She faced a complex task with a tight timeline, a high level of skepticism among country leaders, and a strained relationship with her new boss, the CTO.

Instead of approaching this as a technical change management issue, we at Brimstone helped our client see the situation through the lens of leadership. Through one-on-one coaching and a 360-degree assessment, we helped her identify ways she could “show up” differently with her team and shift her relationship with the CTO. By sharing her personal development plan with the European team, she established a greater level of trust with this group and opened a dialogue that began the process of building alignment.

Next, Brimstone engaged the European leaders in a Senior Team Alignment Process—a series of offsite workshops designed to build an effective leadership team, implement key operational changes, and achieve strategic alignment between regional and global objectives. Brimstone guided the team to develop a Strategic Business Framework that mapped to corporate IT’s roadmap.

The European version of the document helped the team understand the global objective of reinventing IT as well as the role that each team member needed to play in leading the transformation.