Case Study

Challenge

Our client is a global business services and brokerage firm with operations in 100+ countries, serving the world’s leading companies, organizations and governments. The firm partnered with Karl Laird, a leadership and change management expert, and Leading Indicator Systems, human capital assessment experts, to help drive growth.

Fueled by rapid globalization and a merger, the company’s operations had quickly doubled. Senior leadership was challenged to make the merger work. Karl Laird, CEO of Lang Shih-ning [Translation: The World is at Peace] Leadership Consulting, was hired to facilitate greater collaboration across the new teams. Laird, who had worked on human capital integration in some of the largest financial services mergers, including Citibank/Travelers and Shearson/Lehman, was the right choice for this challenge. Over the next two years, Laird facilitated 32 change leadership sessions on three continents.

During the course of these change leadership sessions, senior executives identified and started to tackle a range of challenges. The Asia-Pacific Region was quickly identified as a critical growth area but also as a region short on leadership depth to drive that growth.  For one, the regional business was much smaller with a less experienced team and limited management bench strength. The region head posed the challenge: “how do we help our young managers assimilate leadership skills in 18 months that leaders in other regions have developed over decades?” Again, Laird was the right choice for the challenge.

Solution

Karl and Lang Shih-ning went to work designing a leadership program to fill that developmental need and support the region’s ambitious business growth plans. The program was built around a behavioral-based framework directly tied to business challenges faced in the local marketplace and took leader participants through a rigorous three-month cohort learning program.

Leading Indicator Systems (LIS) was an obvious choice to build the assessment program supporting the leadership curriculum. LIS experts worked with Laird’s team and the client to craft custom content, high impact reporting and the supporting resources. The 360° feedback tool delivered participants systematic and comprehensive feedback from all key stakeholders in ways that promoted deep conversations and learning.

The invitation to participate was as prestigious as the program was rigorous. Participants had to commit to two classroom days per month for three straight months with ‘homework’ and team assignments in between the monthly sessions. The 360° tool kicked off the process and provided participants sobering but inspirational feedback for their 3-month journey through Self-Awareness | Social Awareness | Wider-world Awareness.

Results

The program is now in its 9th consecutive year. Together, Laird and LIS have run well-over 1,000 participants through the 360° assessment and over 500 leaders have completed the leadership program. News of success in Asia Pacific region spread and Western participants have now benefited from it. Almost a decade later, a large majority of leaders in the Asia Pacific region have gone through the program, and many of those participants are now leading their businesses and markets.