Case Studies

It’s All Debatable

A Senior Vice President with one of SFB’s key clients was looking for a creative way to launch and begin communicating his strategy for the coming year.  Working closely with a steering committee, SFB worked first to align this group with the Senior Vice President’s intent and then began designing launch day events to support the strategic initiative.

Rather than the typical PowerPoint decks with much corporate speak, Steve Boehlke, President of SFB Associates, pushed beyond the group’s comfort zone to design a structured debate on the key proposition of the strategy.  Despite much trepidation and skepticism, the lively debate unfolded and flourished allowing for unexpected points of view, ideas and questions to emerge.  In the end the group of 100 key leaders were on board with the proposition and the business case and buy in for the new strategy was strengthened.  As Steve Boehlke says “any truth worth propagating is a truth worth debating”!

If you want to learn more about the value of structured debate visit Steve’s Blog. 

Instilling Integrity

The president of a global R&D organization had a reputation for micro managing and squeezing the life out of innovation. Through one-on-one coaching we helped the president become more approachable, communicative and engaging.  This enabled him to impart his professional passion to the rest of the team in a way that created a compelling vision for the future and an environment where innovation and creativity emerged from all levels of the organization.

Transforming Turmoil

Seeking greater stability and collaboration, a global research organization of 10,000 came to us for help in transforming their leadership culture.  We worked directly with the company’s new president and executive committee to establish priorities for the executive group and introduced new methods for leading the entire organization. This provided the path for more actively engaging top tier leaders in critical decision making and helped to build the leadership pipeline.

Combining Cultures

SFB Associates partnered with a major consumer electronics company to ease operational inefficiencies and management instability caused by post merger misunderstanding and conflict.  By assessing leadership competencies and by applying profitable collaboration principles we were able to help top leaders identify, create and execute new leadership models.

From Mass Exodus to Mass Appeal

What do you do when a large number of PhD scientists are walking out the door? With rising discovery costs and bureaucratic decision-making everywhere standing in the way, our client’s original answer was to send their executive leadership to an off-site team-building seminar for five days.  Recognizing this would not “fix” the problem we worked directly on-site with the leadership and staff of the lab to create an R&D culture where collaboration flourished, decision making was done by those with the requisite knowledge and all individuals saw their technical contributions come to life. Transforming the organization from a place people couldn’t wait to leave to the division of choice.