Driving Organizational Restructuring Through Coaching

Our client is a 400 retail pharmacy system serving 180 communities in Canada – 8500 employees.

Following their acquisition by a larger healthcare managed care provider in 2020, our client was focused on strategically integrating its operations, cultures, and re-designing their leadership organizational structure to position the organization for future growth and operational scale.

As a result of the acquisition, our client’s HR leadership team was intentionally redesigned by creating new roles and adding new team members to a legacy, high performing, and award winning HR team.

The business challenge TalentRise was engaged to address was to help our client build stronger, consistent leadership competencies across the new HR leadership team, and eventually to their broader high potential leadership team across multiple business units, and at all levels.

This engagement is a multi-year ongoing partnership that began in 2021.

Phase I – Mental Fitness Leadership Competency development for the HR Leadership Team

Our first engagement was a 6 month group coaching / leadership development program for 9 HR leaders.  Our approach was to use the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness program framework, using the PQ mobile app to support behavior change and reinforce learning concepts.

The developmental goals for the cohort included:

• Build a solid team through team building activities
• Build stronger, consistent, leadership competencies
• Use PQ / Mental Fitness strategies to build more self awareness among the HR team, and in how they are showing up as leaders in the eyes of broader leaders in the org.

Our Process / Approach

Initial 3 months – weekly group coaching sessions were conducted with the participants with a focus on identifying self-limiting beliefs and team saboteur behaviors.  The PQ App was used in between sessions to reinforce behavior change, and track progress against key learning concepts.

Second 3 months – We provided bi-weekly group coaching sessions with the participants with a focus on the application of the PQ framework in real-life scenarios. Members built a universal language through PQ that helped build a closer and more collaborative team.

The HR leadership team and their executive sponsors, reported:

• Much stronger clarity around roles, personal missions and life purpose aligned to the organization and team’s goals

• Gained valuable insights into how they had previously derailed or sabotaged their own, or the team’s, success during times of stress.

• Learned how to support each other when they see these derailing behaviors on the team showing up so that they can move past them with a positive outcome.

Phase II – Broader Leadership development by business unit

Although the organization had a solid performance management program built upon best practices, with the various departmental integrations and role changes resulting from post M&A integration, there were a few gaps to close related to broader leadership skills development in various departments that TalentRise was engaged to address.

The focus of this engagement was to create customized leadership development programs for selected high performing leaders in various business unit groups. These leaders were at various levels in the organization and had ad hoc development needs identified in their individual development plans through manager feedback, and via HOGAN assessments conducted by the HR team on each leader.

Our Process / Approach – TalentRise, working in partnership with our client’s HR team, and a certified HOGAN consulting partner, co-created a customized leadership development program for several departmental teams tailored to each team’s unique developmental needs.

The Operations Team Developmental Goal – They were overly task oriented coming out of the pandemic, experiencing a lot of turnover and stress related burnout related to being stuck in firefighting mode for the past 2 years. With the pandemic waning, they wanted to shift out of being firefighting, reactive leaders, and into being a more strategic, growth mindset leadership team.

Using the HOGAN Leadership Assessment– we did a team assessment diving deep in to the 5 traits of a highly effective leader and team.   Our goals were to:

• Help the team understand their current state alignment with these 5 leadership competencies

• To design their future state around defining their “Collective Win” goal of being a “Customer Experience Obsessed” culture

• Help the team define what is needed to get all 8500 employees aligned to this goal

Over the course of 2022, we conducted regular leadership team coaching sessions and a leadership team in-person retreat.  Quarterly check ins were scheduled with the team to measure individual and team progress against their Collective Win goals, as well as progress as a team against decision making, communication, and mutual support effective leadership skills development goals.

Our client realized through the Phase II engagement, that they needed to conduct a restructuring of their operations team roles in late 2022 which resulted in the addition of a regional leadership team layer between their district leaders and the operations VP’s. This new level of leader on the team resulted in their VP’s being able to focus their talent and time on being more strategic vs tactically focused on the business.

TalentRise then conducted a formal HOGAN leadership TEAM assessment of the newly reorganized Operations team, including the new Regional Directors.  The assessment was focused on assessing the following:

• Individual self-awareness
• Team awareness
• Role clarity
• Division of labor by role with goals

This engagement, and the feedback shared with the leaders and team, created unity between roles with the recent addition of the new Regional Operations leadership role.

In 2023, TalentRise continues ongoing active work with the operations leadership group and has begun work with the merchandising and marketing teams providing a combination of customized individual and team coaching and development services.