Senior Leaders
Top 25
Post-Programme Rhythm
90-day
Engagement Duration
3 Months
Behaviour Shift
L3 Evidenced
Cohort
Top 25 senior leaders
Scale
Multi-business conglomerate
Methodology
Director's Forge, Floor Simulations, Leadership Operating Rhythm
Duration
3 months (diagnostic to 90-day rhythm)
The problem before ProventusHR
The strategic pivot required the organisation to stop competing internally for shared resources and start allocating them against an enterprise logic rather than divisional logic. In practice, this meant business unit leaders making decisions that were suboptimal for their individual P&L in service of a group outcome that would not show up in their performance scorecard for twelve to eighteen months. The diagnostic conversations that ProventusHR conducted before the programme design revealed the precise nature of the problem: the leaders did not distrust the strategy. They distrusted each other. Specifically, they did not trust that their peers would make the sacrifices required if they themselves made them first. This was not cynicism. It was a rational response to an incentive architecture that had historically rewarded divisional performance above group performance. The leadership alignment problem was simultaneously a trust problem and a structural problem.
What the diagnostic surfaced
ProventusHR conducted individual diagnostic conversations with all 25 leaders before designing the intervention. The conversations used a structured format that explored each leader's understanding of the strategy, their confidence in the enterprise team, and the specific scenarios where they anticipated the highest tension between divisional and enterprise interests. The data was aggregated and fed back to the Group CEO as a pattern map rather than individual attribution. Three specific tension points emerged consistently: resource allocation decisions, cross-divisional talent movement, and pricing decisions where one division's margin was affected by another's commercial terms. These three tensions became the design brief.
ProventusHR designed a three-day Director's Forge SLT intervention followed by a 90-day operating rhythm redesign. The Forge began with a floor simulation built specifically around the three identified tension points. The simulation placed the 25 leaders inside a compressed version of the strategic pivot, requiring them to make the exact types of cross-divisional decisions that the real situation would demand. The observation data from the simulation provided the raw material for the most important debrief of the three days: a facilitated conversation in which each leader named, from the data, the specific condition under which their enterprise behaviour broke down and their divisional identity reasserted itself. This conversation was unlike the ones the leadership team had previously had. It was specific, evidenced, and generative rather than defensive. Day two focused on building the trust infrastructure: the protocols, the shared language, and the accountability mechanisms that would allow enterprise decisions to be made with confidence. Day three designed the 90-day leadership operating rhythm: the specific cadences, reporting formats, and decision forums that would make enterprise alignment a structural reality rather than a cultural aspiration.
The Forge was held at an offsite location, residential, over three days. The residential format was deliberate: the informal conversations between sessions were as important as the structured ones. Several leaders described conversations at dinner on night two as the first honest exchange they had had with a peer about the real tensions in the organisation. The 90-day operating rhythm was implemented by the Group CEO on return. ProventusHR provided a 30-day check-in and a 90-day review session to assess the rhythm's effectiveness and make adjustments.
At the 90-day review, the leadership team reported a measurable shift in the quality of enterprise decision-making. Three specific cross-divisional resource allocation decisions, which had been stuck in the pipeline for months before the Forge, had been resolved. The Group CEO described the change as moving from a group of people who all wanted the same destination but would not get in the same vehicle, to a team that was actually travelling together. Stakeholder 360 data on enterprise orientation, collected at 90 days from a sample of direct reports, showed improvement across all 25 leaders on the target behaviours. A business unit head wrote: I came in thinking the alignment problem was about the other people in the room. I left knowing it was about me.
Senior leadership alignment fails when it is attempted through strategy clarification alone. Leaders who understand the strategy and do not yet trust their peers will not subordinate divisional interest to enterprise interest regardless of how clearly the strategy is articulated. The intervention that works creates the conditions for trust to develop by making the specific barriers to trust visible to the people holding them, and by building the structural and relational architecture that allows enterprise-oriented behaviour to be practiced before it is required.
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