Scale global top to bottom leaders

Client need

As SAP faced major disruption and change, they needed to make a dramatic shift to keep up with the pace of innovation and the drastically changing shape of their industry and business.

In order to transform their organisation from a traditional on-premise software provider to the cloud company powered by their platform, they decided to partner with BTS.

The solution

Develop simple leadership development roadmaps to provide structure and guidance for all leaders and encompassing the end-to-end development needs of leaders at each level. Each road map consisted of four stages to ensure continuous learning and application:

Transition: Focuses on preparing leaders for their new role.

Build Experience: Ensures leaders are aligned on what ‘great’ leadership looks like at each respective level to execute the strategy.

Perform: Sets the standard for the types of activities that leaders should be participating in to maintain high performance and to teach others.

Build Excellence: Focuses on targeted skill building to ensure readiness for new responsibilities.

At every level our solution included Liz Wiseman’s ‘Multipliers’ philosophy.

The innovative design comprised of five types of development approaches.

Performance Support: Tools, assessments and manager conversations that support learning and performance.

Connections: Targeted connections that the people leaders needed to build relationships within in order to be successful, including peers and key influencers at every level in SAP.

Virtual Learning: Live and recorded webinars, eLearning, teleconferences, apps and games – any learning media.

In-person Learning: Live and in-person experiential discovery-based workshops, including simulations allowing for strategic alignment and practicing specific leadership behaviours and capabilities.

On-the-job Experiences: The pivotal work experiences that develop leaders: feedback, coaching, mentoring, teaching, and rotational and stretch assignments.

Results

• The top indicators of leadership effectiveness at SAP are Employee Engagement and Leadership Trust.
• Company-wide employee engagement is up 3.4% and €153M in Operating Income benefit (based on client estimate that 1% gain contributes €40-€50M to Operating Income).
• Leadership Trust is a unique client metric, patterned after NPS (Net Promotor Score), which asks employees “How likely are you to recommend your direct manager as a manager who you trust?” Over the course of this broader leadership initiative, the company-wide trust score increased from 28.5% to 52.5%.
• Outperformed the competition and exceeded targets in core/on-prem business as well as in SaaS growth rates.
• Stock price +77%