Shantel

Director, Large Global Pharmaceutical Company

As a brand marketing director with many years of experience, I had to work with multiple teams within the organization and use influencing skills without direct authority to be effective.

While I had a strong track record of getting things done, my new manager was getting some feedback that I wasn’t collaborating effectively.

It’s a Process

We worked to identify how I would like to “show up” for others and how I would like to be remembered. By conducting a series of 360 feedback interviews we were able to identify my strengths and opportunity areas while collaborating with others cross-functionally within the organization.

Based on the feedback we developed an action plan to help me increase my influencing skills by building more trust with people. A critical part of the action plan was to identify accountability buddies that were willing to work with me on key areas of the action plan providing feedback along the way and being part of my success. Over the course of 4 months, we facilitated 15 min. meetings every 2-3 weeks with me and my accountability buddy to track my progress against the action plan. On a weekly basis, we had one on one coaching sessions to provide additional support and to track progress.

The Outcome

At the end of the plan, I was able to strengthen my relationship with my teams. During my performance review a few months later, my manager acknowledged the hard work that I had done with the plan and that the leadership team had also noticed the turnaround in my working relationships across the team. This allowed me to gain trust, strengthen collaboration, and therefore produce better results.