Our bespoke leadership team coaching intervention, designed for Heineken Romania’s specific needs and cultural context, helped the sales management team define and deliver a shared vision for a stronger, more interdependent sales function. It also created a new dynamic in the team and in the teams it leads – with more trust, transparency and appetite for constructive challenge.
The shift our client was looking for
When we first met Geert Swaanenburg, he was Heineken’s Sales Director in Romania. The company had already cornered almost 30% of the local market, by combining its own internationally-recognised brands with local acquisitions, but Geert saw scope to further improve the company’s position. A Heineken veteran eighteen months into the post, he had already ensured he had ‘the right people in the right seats’ and was keen to harness the full potential of the team. He asked us to help him…
Inspire his team to act as owners of the business
Encourage more open and direct communication and frequent, honest feedback
Help the team transmit this learning and the resulting shift in culture to the teams they led
The approach we took
Geert asked Heineken Romania’s Organisational Development Manager, Raluca Modoran, to find a team coach. She approached LeaderSpace following a recommendation from a Romanian participant on one of our leadership programmes.
From our initial conversations and a growing understanding of both Romanian and Heineken culture, it was clear we needed an approach blending energy, fun and interaction with respect, insight and self-reflection. Geert and his five colleagues were experienced leaders who’d worked for other well-known brands. They had done leadership development before, knew the subject and would have high expectations.
We used a combination of dialogue and data from the LeaderSpace High-Performing Teams Questionnaire to shape the intervention and our joint communications with the rest of Geert’s team. The centrepiece was a two-day retreat in a snow-covered forest, blended planned sessions with emergent discussion – an event that was so engaging that one night the team kept the work rolling until after midnight.
The team looked at its history and the impact of past events on the present, shared their views on each other as leaders, and built a collective definition of what ‘good to great’ actually meant for them, as a team, which meant committing to a single shared Sales ‘empire’ to replace the smaller ‘kingdoms’ they’d built by defaulting to silos.
We tackled the things that really got in the way of achieving that vision, including concerns that helping peers would cost them focus on their own work, or that asking colleagues for input might look like weakness. And we sat by the fire on a cold winter night in a forest full of bears, listening to each other’s stories – often with laughter in our eyes but sometimes with heavier hearts.
The impact we had
Heineken Romania’s work with LeaderSpace helped shift the team’s mind-set. They renamed and rebranded themselves around a core, shared identity, presenting themselves more effectively to the rest of the business and to the people they led.
‘The empire is getting better aligned by the day,’ Geert said, when we spoke five months later. ‘They have truly started acting as an empire in line with the vision we defined together, by sharing information with each other and challenging each other in a respectful manner, with the purpose to continually improve ourselves and deliver more as a team. I also see my team members driving their new insights and behaviours towards their own team members. This was one of the objectives set and I’m happy to see this is effectively materialising.’
‘The coaching with LeaderSpace also supported the further development of trust within my team, and this improved the strength of all team-members being open for more challenging interactions with each other. We are much more comfortable giving each other open and honest feedback, and the team members are receiving this with a constructive mind-set. The team is willing to step more easily out of the comfort zone, the area where improvements are being made.’
“Now, five months after the training, I feel comfortable to say that with the support of LeaderSpace we truly created a new dynamic to the team that resulted in a structural change. It’s a dynamic with more trust, more transparency and, most important, greater willingness to get out of the comfort zone.
It was a pleasure to work with Richard. He is a pleasant and knowledgeable team coach who was able to not only bring a good amount of team insights to the table, but was also able to open up deeper layers of the team dynamics that really helped us bring our team objective alive.”
