We enabled a senior leadership team to shift from underperforming to high-performing in under a year, then scaled the same approach to 100+ leaders across the next tier of management, cascading new ways of leading across the business.
Client profile
A dominant, globally recognized automotive OEM with $2B+ revenue
Challenge
Although the company held a leading market position, it was not reliably delivering on its financial performance targets, particularly operating income. The CEO and executive team suspected that internal misalignment—particularly across Sales, Product, Supply Chain, and Operations—was creating inefficiencies.
Insight
The CEO recognized that the leadership team itself was the leverage point. Improving how the team aligned, made decisions, and led together was critical to restoring performance.
ExecLead was able to quickly confirm that misalignment and mistrust at the top were cascading throughout the organization. Work wasn’t flowing effectively across functions. The organizational structure and leadership dynamics were preventing cross-functional collaboration, slowing decision-making, and eroding profitability.
Solution
To fix execution on the ground, alignment needed to start at the top. Our firm engaged the executive leadership team over the course of a year to strengthen alignment and effectiveness. The work included:
Individual executive assessments and coaching
Team offsites focused on strategy, structure, and decision-making
Creation of a shared operating rhythm and performance narrative
Together, we helped the team surface and address the organizational barriers that were limiting performance
Impact
Midway through the engagement, the global Covid pandemic hit: demand plummeted, factories were temporarily shut down, and massive cost reductions became unavoidable.
Because the executive team had already started to build trust and alignment to work collaboratively, they were able to navigate the crisis with speed and unity.
They right-sized the business and came back stronger—more profitable, more focused, and more cohesive:
The company was able to successfully recover financial performance following the significant disruption due to the pandemic, with a 121% increase in profitability over the next 2 years
Significant increases in confidence in the achievement of the strategy, trust, clarity, and cross-functional collaboration (as measured by post-engagement surveys)
The success led to a second phase of work—extending the team transformation to over 100 leaders across the organization.