Developing healthcare leaders’ capabilities at scale

Client need

A large U.S.-based health insurance organization operating at the center of a complex national ecosystem had already made a serious investment in enterprise AI. Leadership was not experimenting at the edges. They were leaning in.

Capability and commitment existed across the organization, but unevenly. Some teams were already pushing boundaries. Others hadn't yet found their footing. Most of the gains had come in personal productivity. Valuable, but the core work itself had not yet fundamentally changed. The opportunity was to go deeper, to move from AI-assisted individuals to AI-reinvented workflows.

Across the health insurance landscape, pressure was intensifying. Medicaid and government program contracts were becoming more competitive. Decision cycles were faster and more analytics-driven. Clinical evidence was evolving rapidly. Regulatory scrutiny was high. Security risks were constant. AI was no longer a future conversation. It was a present expectation.

Inside the organization, world-class experts were still constrained by manual processes.

Specialized teams were synthesizing large volumes of complex, fast-moving information, working to keep pace with an environment where the inputs never stopped changing. The work required deep expertise and judgment, and it also demanded repetitive processing that consumed days when it needed to take hours.

Other teams faced pressure where speed and precision directly influenced competitive outcomes. Manual approaches were creating lag at exactly the moments when faster insight mattered most.

Across functions, the pattern was consistent. Highly trained professionals were spending valuable time on low-leverage tasks, stitching together data, transforming files, and correlating inputs that AI could handle.

Leadership understood that AI licenses alone would not create advantage. To compete in an increasingly analytics-driven insurance environment, expertise had to scale. Insight had to move faster. Teams needed to reinvent how core work happened.

Solution

BTS partnered with the organization to move from AI access to AI application.

Through a series of focused design sprints, intact teams worked on their highest-value workflows using our GROUNDING → EXPERIMENT → BUILD → AMPLIFY methodology. The structure was simple and disciplined. Set context. Experiment quickly. Build against real work. Create a path to scale.

Participants brought their actual work into the room. Analytical frameworks. Competitive and operational documents. Risk and intelligence inputs. Data pipelines.

No generic demos. No abstract hypotheticals.

The turning point came when AI began working on their actual content.

Research syntheses that previously took days began structuring themselves in minutes. Competitive analysis that once required manual review surfaced patterns instantly. Data transformation workflows streamlined in real time.

Skepticism shifted to possibility.

We positioned AI as augmentation, not replacement. In a sector defined by professional expertise and accountability, that framing was critical. The goal was to elevate expert judgment, not automate it away.

Some teams left with working prototypes. Others left with detailed blueprints aligned to enterprise privacy and security requirements. Another team took away a re-prioritized set of additional tools to incorporate into a HIPAA-compliant environment. Every team left with a redesigned workflow.

Results

In five days, more than 100 leaders advanced 30 priority use cases tied directly to operational performance and competitive growth.

Early outcomes included:

• Significant reduction in manual research synthesis and data preparation
• Faster, more structured competitive intelligence to support high-stakes decisions
• Clear implementation pathways aligned to security and regulatory constraints
• A scalable model for continued AI-enabled workflow reinvention

Just as important was the mindset shift.

Participants stopped viewing AI as a tool sitting outside their work and began treating it as embedded infrastructure for how work gets done.

“This showed immediate relevance to our work.”

“Now I understand what’s actually possible for my team.”

“We just accomplished in two hours what used to take us two months.”

In a U.S. health insurance market where insight, speed, and precision directly influence who wins and who grows, the organization moved decisively from AI access to AI advantage.

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Client need

A leading global aluminum manufacturer faced a pivotal challenge: how to create a unified, empowered workforce in a highly decentralized organization. Each business unit operated autonomously, making it difficult to align global learning with local needs. The company recognized the need for enterprise-wide development programs that supported its business and HR strategies while preserving local flexibility.

To meet this challenge, the organization launched a Corporate Learning University—a multi-year initiative to transform its approach to employee development. BTS collaborated with HR and L&D leaders to co-create a comprehensive portfolio of programs tailored to different roles and career stages across the enterprise.

Solution

The transformation began with a clear vision: align learning with strategic outcomes to unify and empower a decentralized workforce. BTS worked with the company to create an impact map linking business priorities—financial performance, safety, and employee engagement—to the behaviors and skills required at each level of the organization.

The map established three key learning objectives:

• Foster unity and collaboration across a decentralized structure.
• Strengthen business acumen to improve contribution and decision-making.
• Build a shared leadership identity aligned with company values.

Using these objectives as a foundation, BTS and the client designed programs for every stage of the employee journey.

For mid-level leaders, a nine-month Leadership Development Program combined two in-depth workshops with an online learning journey:

• Leading Self: Introduced Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers framework, enabling leaders to expand their teams’ capacity through role-plays and practical exercises.
• Leading the Business: A three-day custom business simulation where participants acted as CEOs, balancing profitability, safety, and customer satisfaction across simulated fiscal years.

The learning ecosystem expanded beyond mid-level management to include: Frontline leader training focused on operational excellence and people management.

Executive development sessions designed for senior leaders to strengthen strategic alignment and culture building.

By embedding strategy directly into every program, the company built a cohesive, enterprise-wide learning culture that reinforced leadership capability, collaboration, and business impact.

Results

The co-created programs delivered measurable, strategic outcomes across safety, engagement, and financial performance.

Key results included:

• Financial performance: Optimized production schedules and reduced inventory, improving cash flow.
• Operational efficiency: Empowered managers to focus on asset utilization and controllable budget items.
• Cultural transformation: Embedded the Multipliers framework to drive collaboration, daily CapEx reviews, and safety-oriented onboarding for new hires.
• Leadership excellence: Increased coaching and feedback frequency, improving communication and alignment across teams.

These initiatives not only elevated employee engagement but also positioned the company as an industry leader in workplace culture and performance.

By integrating business and HR strategy into a unified learning ecosystem, BTS helped the manufacturer achieve its vision of becoming the most exciting place to work and invest—demonstrating the power of tailored, results-driven leadership development.

Client need

The snack industry is undergoing a profound shift. Changing consumer preferences, increased focus on sustainability, and the dominance of digital engagement are transforming how brands operate. For a leading multinational snack company, incremental adjustments were no longer sufficient. They needed a bold, strategic transformation in how Revenue Growth Management (RGM) was deployed across the organization to stay competitive in this evolving landscape.

The company recognized that to grow sustainably, they needed to equip their teams with the skills to drive stronger insights and greater agility. It wasn’t just about optimizing operations—it was about empowering employees to make data-driven decisions that would:

• Manage a diverse product portfolio effectively
• Expand market share while driving net revenue and profitability
• Broaden their consumer base without compromising relationships with existing consumers

This upskilling initiative would align their workforce with both immediate market shifts and long-term growth objectives.

Solution

The organization partnered with BTS to design a comprehensive program aimed at building Revenue Growth Management competencies and aligning team members with the company's new RGM strategy and execution. This long-term investment focused on equipping employees at all levels with the skills needed to navigate a complex and competitive market.

The program consisted of three levels of courses, with each level tailored to the participants’ roles within the company. These levels ranged from foundational RGM concepts to specialized, hands-on learning experiences:

Level 1 and Level 2 courses included:

• A simulated university setting that immersed participants in interactive, high-fidelity storytelling and real-world business narratives.
• Two self-paced modules where leaders engaged with real-world shopper scenarios, reinforcing their understanding of smart pricing, price pack architecture, investment optimization and budget allocation by customer.
• Practical lessons on managing product portfolios and maximizing profitability, designed to connect employees' day-to-day roles with broader organizational objectives.

Level 3 advanced certification for senior leaders involved a deeper level of mastery through a two-day simulated experience:

• Participants completed pre-work, incorporating research data and strategic insights from the first two levels.
• Teams developed fictitious business plans in a controlled, risk-free environment, allowing them to apply new skills and test strategies in real time.
• Leaders built a strategic PPA to foster long-term RGM thinking.
• A final application assessment judged by a panel of facilitators, evaluating the participants' ability to drive desired business outcomes.

The Level 1 and 2 courses were delivered virtually via Workday, enabling the project team to track key metrics and engagement in real time. The Level 3 course was delivered in person at a global summit. To ensure maximum impact, local market leaders played an active role in tailoring communication and engagement plans, targeting regional business units effectively.

Results

The impact of the Level 1 and 2 programs were immediate and measurable. Just two weeks after completing their courses, participants were tested on their learning, and nearly all of them met or exceeded the certification threshold:

• 4,000 leaders completed the entry-level training by April 2024.
• 74% of participants earned their certification with a passing score of 80% or higher.
• The program achieved a 98.5% average pass rate, with the remaining 25% representing those still in the process of completing their certification.

Participants who completed the program reported:

• Greater confidence in applying their financial skills to optimize decision-making and support the company’s growth objectives.
• Enhanced ability to contribute to both organizational success and their own professional development.

The advanced-level training for executive leaders is currently underway, featuring a two-day simulated experience designed to further embed Revenue Growth Management capabilities at the highest levels of the organization. Through this upskilling initiative, the company is building a more agile, financially savvy workforce ready to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing industry and sustain long-term growth.

Client need

For a 175-year-old technology company, competitive advantage isn’t just built on technical innovation: it’s built on leaders who know how to get the best thinking from every person around them. That culture of drawing out ideas, developing people, and driving innovation through engaged teams had been a defining feature of the organization for generations. And it depended on having the right infrastructure to keep developing frontline leaders at scale.

In 2020, that infrastructure was disrupted. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the organization to pivot its in-person development to virtual almost overnight, risking the erosion of frontline leadership capability while simultaneously needing to navigate the broader shocks of the pandemic: supply chain volatility, shifting materials costs, and a workforce managing profound uncertainty.  

Stalling frontline leadership development meant risking productivity, employee engagement, talent retention, job performance, and downstream impacts on quality and operating margin, at a moment when the organization could least afford it.

The question now was how to reimagine frontline leader development to equip thousands of global leaders to continue supporting their teams through disruption, and to ensure the next generation of managers could help their people do their best work under any conditions.

Solution

The client partnered with BTS to reimagine frontline leader development from the ground up, equipping leaders globally with the practical skills, tools, and mindset shifts needed to support their teams in doing great, innovative work.

The partnership began in 2019, and over five years has reached over 1,600 frontline leaders capturing 700+ documented behavior change actions. In 2022, BTS collaborated with the organization to refresh the program to reflect their evolving strategy and develop a sharper focus on supporting a culture of continuous improvement and innovation with coaching and feedback.  

The blended program experience combined the following elements:

• Immersive leadership simulations: Scenario-based experiences placing leaders in realistic situations, surfacing Multiplier and Diminisher tendencies in real time and making the learning immediately personal and actionable

• Multipliers and Diminishers framework: A structured exploration of how leaders either amplify or diminish the intelligence of those around them, including specific “experiments” leaders could use to better understand their own leadership approaches

• Custom leadership frameworks: Including a structured, step-by-step process for having significant feedback conversations, a tool to understand and flex to communication preferences, and a coaching approach designed to help leaders guide team members toward their own solutions, building capability and long-term ownership.

• Structured application sessions — on-the-job practice components designed to bridge the gap between the program experience and day-to-day behavior, giving participants specific frameworks to apply immediately with their teams

• Peer networking and breakout groups — cohort-based learning that participants identified as a standout feature, both for deepening the learning and for building cross-functional relationships that extended beyond the program

• A commitment-capture platform integrated into the program to log participant actions and reinforce behavior change after the program ended; over 670 participant actions were captured across the program’s delivery

Throughout the program, leaders examined the impact of their own behaviors, recognizing where they were unintentionally diminishing their teams, and built new habits around challenging, creating space for mistakes and learning, listening, questioning, giving developmental feedback, and creating ownership. The feedback model gave participants a practical process for the positive and constructive conversations that actually change performance.

Results

More than 1,600 frontline leaders and individual contributors have participated in the program—the population closest to daily execution, quality, and operations. A recent impact study told a clear story about the effects of the program across participants:  

100% of participants reported actively applying what they learned. 59% reported producing significant, measurable business impact, with concrete evidence to describe it.

The results weren’t theoretical. One engineering leader restructured how his team developed project plans, creating space for debate and ownership instead of coming in with the answer. His team exceeded their quality target by 10 percentage points and accelerated the project timeline by +4 months.

One production leader used the feedback model to coach a struggling supervisor and cascade the process across his entire leadership layer. His unit reached #1 performance in its division, improving a key quality KPI by more than 18% year-over-year. A department head with over a decade in leadership set new production records after learning to flex his communication style and draw out quieter team members. And a development lab supervisor used the program to clarify her leadership identity, earn a promotion, and coach her direct report to one as well.

The study also confirmed that when managers actively supported participants post-program, the likelihood of significant business impact increased substantially, shaping the organization’s next phase of reinforcement and cohort follow-up.

For an organization whose competitive advantage rests on the innovation and intelligence of its people, the program gave its leaders something technical training rarely delivers: the confidence, the tools, and the self-awareness to make everyone around them better.

Testimonials

“The program gave me greater confidence to try new things as a leader. It helped me realize what I do and what I don’t do.”  - HR Leader

“The skills I learned in the training helped me be more efficient. It helped me do the right thing, right away.” - Production Manager

“Feedback is very important to create a positive environment; and how to [give] feedback is a specific skill I learned from this training and how to share constructive feedback.” - Production Leader

Client need

A large U.S.-based health insurance organization operating at the center of a complex national ecosystem had already made a serious investment in enterprise AI. Leadership was not experimenting at the edges. They were leaning in.

Capability and commitment existed across the organization, but unevenly. Some teams were already pushing boundaries. Others hadn't yet found their footing. Most of the gains had come in personal productivity. Valuable, but the core work itself had not yet fundamentally changed. The opportunity was to go deeper, to move from AI-assisted individuals to AI-reinvented workflows.

Across the health insurance landscape, pressure was intensifying. Medicaid and government program contracts were becoming more competitive. Decision cycles were faster and more analytics-driven. Clinical evidence was evolving rapidly. Regulatory scrutiny was high. Security risks were constant. AI was no longer a future conversation. It was a present expectation.

Inside the organization, world-class experts were still constrained by manual processes.

Specialized teams were synthesizing large volumes of complex, fast-moving information, working to keep pace with an environment where the inputs never stopped changing. The work required deep expertise and judgment, and it also demanded repetitive processing that consumed days when it needed to take hours.

Other teams faced pressure where speed and precision directly influenced competitive outcomes. Manual approaches were creating lag at exactly the moments when faster insight mattered most.

Across functions, the pattern was consistent. Highly trained professionals were spending valuable time on low-leverage tasks, stitching together data, transforming files, and correlating inputs that AI could handle.

Leadership understood that AI licenses alone would not create advantage. To compete in an increasingly analytics-driven insurance environment, expertise had to scale. Insight had to move faster. Teams needed to reinvent how core work happened.

Solution

BTS partnered with the organization to move from AI access to AI application.

Through a series of focused design sprints, intact teams worked on their highest-value workflows using our GROUNDING → EXPERIMENT → BUILD → AMPLIFY methodology. The structure was simple and disciplined. Set context. Experiment quickly. Build against real work. Create a path to scale.

Participants brought their actual work into the room. Analytical frameworks. Competitive and operational documents. Risk and intelligence inputs. Data pipelines.

No generic demos. No abstract hypotheticals.

The turning point came when AI began working on their actual content.

Research syntheses that previously took days began structuring themselves in minutes. Competitive analysis that once required manual review surfaced patterns instantly. Data transformation workflows streamlined in real time.

Skepticism shifted to possibility.

We positioned AI as augmentation, not replacement. In a sector defined by professional expertise and accountability, that framing was critical. The goal was to elevate expert judgment, not automate it away.

Some teams left with working prototypes. Others left with detailed blueprints aligned to enterprise privacy and security requirements. Another team took away a re-prioritized set of additional tools to incorporate into a HIPAA-compliant environment. Every team left with a redesigned workflow.

Results

In five days, more than 100 leaders advanced 30 priority use cases tied directly to operational performance and competitive growth.

Early outcomes included:

• Significant reduction in manual research synthesis and data preparation
• Faster, more structured competitive intelligence to support high-stakes decisions
• Clear implementation pathways aligned to security and regulatory constraints
• A scalable model for continued AI-enabled workflow reinvention

Just as important was the mindset shift.

Participants stopped viewing AI as a tool sitting outside their work and began treating it as embedded infrastructure for how work gets done.

“This showed immediate relevance to our work.”

“Now I understand what’s actually possible for my team.”

“We just accomplished in two hours what used to take us two months.”

In a U.S. health insurance market where insight, speed, and precision directly influence who wins and who grows, the organization moved decisively from AI access to AI advantage.

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Client need

Safety in the transportation industry has often been treated as a set of rules to follow and boxes to check. But one Spanish railway organization saw an opportunity to redefine safety as something far greater, a core value embedded into the culture of their company at every level.

This bold vision demanded more than compliance. It required a cultural transformation to challenge outdated behaviors, inspire teams, and empower leaders to embrace and model a safety-first mindset. For years, the organization had been working to foster a culture that prioritized protection over profit, setting new behavioral standards across the industry.

To accelerate this shift, the organization partnered with BTS to design a leadership development program that dismantled old practices and equipped leaders with the tools, insights, and behaviors needed to bring their vision to life.

• Deconstruct existing mindsets to enable cohesive change.
• Identify barriers preventing progress.
• Equip leaders with practical behavioral knowledge and tools.

Solution

BTS partnered with the organization to design a leadership journey that would reshape not just processes but perspectives, fostering a workplace where physical and psychological safety were paramount. Over eight months, the project team conducted interviews with leaders and focus groups to uncover critical behavioral insights and tailor the program to the organization’s unique needs.

Participants explored essential themes, including:

• Embedding safety into daily decision-making.
• Cultivating greater awareness of safety risks.
• Understanding the influence of their leadership on safety outcomes.
• Leading by example to set a cultural standard.
• Building trust, commitment, and open communication within their teams.

The program unfolded in three distinct phases to drive lasting behavioral change:

1. Workshop preparation
   Participants began with a self-assessment to uncover personal “safety blind spots” and mind traps. This phase, delivered through a custom online platform, helped leaders reflect on their current practices and prepare for the transformational journey ahead.

3. Safety workshop
   The one-day, immersive workshop was designed to spark deep conversations about safety culture, challenge ingrained mindsets, and equip participants with actionable strategies for change. Leaders engaged in real-world scenarios to explore the implications of their decisions and practice new behaviors. The day concluded with collaborative debrief sessions, leaving participants with practical tools to implement their insights immediately.
4. Implementation in action
   To sustain momentum, the post-workshop phase extended over six months, offering six targeted activities. These activities reinforced key lessons, encouraged team collaboration, and provided ongoing support for integrating safety-first behaviors into daily routines.

The leadership program was delivered to 1500 participants over 66 workshops in seven locations across Spain.

Results

To measure results, the project team created a resource map evaluating progress.  

Average completion rate of Activities One–Three: 57 percent. (One: 78.21%; Two: 53. 01%; Three: 40.57%)

A post-workshop survey was sent to participants, reporting on the following metrics:

• Average satisfaction — 4.7/5.
• Trainer’s evaluation — 4.9/5.
• NPS — 82 percent.
• “Saw improvement in safety alignment” — 93 percent.
• “Integrated safety tools in daily roles” — 82 percent.
• “Identified new initiatives for improving safety” — 77 percent.
• “Mitigated team/peer mind traps” — 93 percent.
• “More aware of risk in daily roles” — 98 percent.
• “Identified a normalized risk to work on” — 92 percent.

Testimonials

• “Many of the methodologies and tools not only help to improve safety but can also be used to improve operational or organizational processes.”

• “It has put us in front of the mirror of how we are today in terms of safety culture, opening our eyes to our development areas. Very participative and practical.”

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