Building High-Performing Teams Across Leadership Layers

The Challenge

The organisation is a global sport governing body that sets strategic direction and operational standards worldwide. Its senior leaders and managers were capable individually but underperforming as a group. Staff feedback kept raising the same concerns about how leadership communicated, how fairly people were managed, and how consistent expectations were. The problem wasn’t a skills gap in any one person. There were no shared standards, no common language and no collective accountability across the leadership layers.

• A diverse, multi-layered global organisation had capable senior leaders and managers who weren’t yet working together as cohesive, high-performing teams.
• Employee feedback consistently pointed to inconsistent leadership communication, along with a perceived lack of fairness and alignment that was eroding trust.
• Leaders and managers varied in how confident they were giving feedback and managing performance, and as a group they tended to avoid challenge and difficult conversations.
• The senior leadership and management groups worked largely in isolation from each other, without a shared language for discussing behaviour, performance and expectations.

The Results

• A two-year, three-phase partnership grew from an individual management & leadership development programme into a whole-team transformation.
• Year one built the Senior Leadership Team’s capability in communication, feedback, coaching and emotional culture.
• Year two extended the same standards to the management group, creating one connected approach instead of separate, parallel programmes.
• Difficult conversations became the norm. Managers began holding senior leaders to account more constructively, the CEO’s own reports said he was noticeably more willing to tackle hard conversations, and staff said they could feel the effort leadership was making to communicate better, which helped rebuild trust across the organisation.