Challenge

North America’s leading and most respected fresh produce distributor had decided upon a growth strategy dependent upon new business acquisitions. Senior Management realized that they did not have the infrastructure of key homegrown talent needed to fill senior roles and ensure a successful roll-out of this strategy.

Solution

We designed and implemented a custom executive development program to increase the pool size of qualified candidates for future executive positions.

Our custom program included:

• Creating a customized framework that identified and clarified the attributes and behaviors of the most effective executives at this company
• Targeting the high- potential candidates that would be a part of this program
• Creating a customized 360 degree assessment and individual report to help high-potential candidates identify areas of strength and opportunity
• Delivering personalized coaching sessions for each participant to: review their report, develop clear and measureable developmental goals and identify actions for consistently improving their effectiveness
• Identifying common areas of opportunity that the group collectively needed to improve upon and delivering team training that increased the ROE (return on effort) of participants
• Establishing mentor relationships between program participants and internal senior leaders
• Creating and facilitating a virtual university that included tele-seminars and online discussions to provide real-time application and deeper integration of content
• Providing a year end “commencement” experience to reinforce the concepts and development that had taken place over the year and creating ongoing momentum by challenging the leaders to integrate this leadership improvement process into corporate culture by developing leaders within their subordinate teams

Result

This program surpassed company expectations – dramatically increasing the pool of qualified key role candidates enabling the company to be more than adequately prepared to acquire additional business units. Additionally, employees are reporting a significant improvement in the quality of their leadership experience.

In addition to meeting and exceeding the initial project objectives, Top Talent Edge was able to go beyond the development of future executive talent pools of individuals to actually develop future executive teams. This was accomplished through the facilitation of relationships both vertically and horizontally – increasing the natural mentoring and education that participants gained from direct access to senior leadership. Additionally, communication channels were established to foster the sharing of best practices with their peers to develop solutions to improve the business on the whole…not just their own individual areas.