Reimagining frontline leadership at scale in global manufacturing
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Client challenge
Wellstar Health System, one of Georgia’s largest healthcare systems, had already invested heavily in leadership development for senior leaders. But as the organization navigated rapid growth, a major acquisition, and the demands of a shifting healthcare landscape, it became clear that the greatest leadership challenges were happening at the front and midline.
“Some of the greatest leader challenges are really at the front and midline levels… we’ve invested heavily in leadership development, putting more emphasis on our front line and mid-level leadership in terms of outcomes, said Laura Dannels, Chief Talent Officer at the time.
We’re not an organization who believes in just investing in high performers… you’ve got to invest in your entire workforce.”
Wellstar partnered with Sounding Board to bring a more scalable, flexible coaching solution to leaders across the organization.
The solution
Partnering with Sounding Board, Wellstar designed a scalable, personalized coaching program to extend leadership development across the organization while maintaining the quality of one-on-one coaching.
A proprietary 360 assessment, aligned to Wellstar’s leadership behaviors, served as the foundation for each coaching engagement. This ensured development was directly tied to how leaders show up and lead in practice.
“We really wanted to ground the coaching to a framework that matters to our organization,” said Garry Gross, Executive Director of Leadership Development.
“Helping our leaders create an environment where our mission, vision, and values come to life was paramount.”
Program goals:
- Develop leadership capabilities aligned to Wellstar’s mission, vision, and values
- Deliver personalized, relevant development for leaders at all levels
- Strengthen the leadership bench and support succession planning
- Foster a culture of innovation, learning, and engagement
Program overview:
- Personalized, one-on-one coaching for leaders at all levels
- Capability development aligned to Wellstar’s values
- Serve with Compassion → Builds relationships
- Pursue Excellence → Drives results, leads teams, and plans strategically
- Honor Every Voice → Fosters inclusion and respect for differences
- Scalable delivery across frontline, mid-level, and clinical leaders
- Digital tools to track goals, capture insights, and measure progress
This approach made it possible to deliver consistent, high-quality coaching across roles and locations while keeping development relevant to each leader’s day-to-day work.
Results
As the program unfolded, Wellstar began to see a shift in how frontline and mid-level leaders showed up across the organization. Leaders in these critical roles had more consistent support navigating day-to-day challenges, and managers gained better visibility into how their teams were developing. Coaching became a more practical, embedded part of how Wellstar supports leaders in a complex healthcare environment.
Higher engagement and satisfaction
- 96% of participants said the coaching experience was worth the investment
- 99% said they could immediately apply what they learned to their day-to-day work
Measurable leadership growth
Participants reported double-digit growth across leadership capabilities including:
- Executive presence (+16%)
- Organizational collaboration (+14%)
- Strategic thinking (+13%)
- Time management and prioritization (+13%)
- Communication (+11%)
Stronger retention and mobility
- Coached leaders achieved a 90% one-year retention rate
- Retention for coached leaders was 31% higher than non-coached peers
- 3% of participants were promoted into new roles, exceeding organizational goals and industry benchmarks
Learn more about Wellstar’s leadership coaching journey with Sounding Board in this feature in Becker’s Hospital Review.
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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. - 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.”
Related content
Client need
A leading global life sciences company was operating at the forefront of scientific innovation, delivering therapies to millions of patients around the world.
The organization's strategy called for Medical to play an increasingly visible and influential role across the enterprise, not as a scientific function operating in parallel with the business, but as a core contributor to strategic decisions spanning pipeline priorities, governance forums, and commercial direction. The ability of medical leaders to operate at that level had become a strategic imperative.
These leaders were not generalists. Many had built careers in academic and research settings, developing deep expertise in science and medicine. In their roles, they operated at the intersection of R&D and commercial, translating scientific insights into strategy, influencing governance forums, and shaping both pipeline and brand decisions. These were among the most complex and high-stakes leadership roles in the organization.
As these leaders took on broader, enterprise-facing responsibilities, the nature of their work shifted. They were expected to work across functions, influence diverse stakeholders, and contribute to decisions that balanced patient, scientific, and commercial priorities in increasingly complex, cross-functional environments.
While highly capable, many had not yet had the opportunity to develop these enterprise leadership skills. With strong competition for talent, the organization recognized the need to accelerate development from within and ensure its leaders could operate as true enterprise contributors.
Solution
BTS partnered with the organization to design and deliver a four-month immersive leadership journey focused on building enterprise leadership capability in some of its most critical roles.
The program engaged 165 leaders across six cohorts, primarily senior leaders in medical affairs, market access, and health economics. Designing an experience that would genuinely resonate with this audience required more than adapting a traditional leadership curriculum. These leaders operated in highly specialized roles, navigating governance forums, balancing scientific and commercial trade-offs, and influencing cross-functional stakeholders without formal authority.
To reflect that complexity, BTS co-created the experience with senior stakeholders across the business, grounding the journey in the actual decisions, stakeholder dynamics, and enterprise challenges participants faced in their day-to-day work. That specificity was essential to making the experience credible, relevant, and immediately applicable.
The program focused on strengthening three capabilities critical to enterprise leadership:
- Enterprise mindset
- Influencing across the organization
- Communication and storytelling
To build these capabilities, the journey combined assessment, practice, and application through a set of integrated experiences:
Enterprise simulation and assessment (in-person)
The journey began with a simulation based on real governance forums and asset-level decisions. Leaders worked through role-based scenarios with assessor-coaches, navigating trade-offs and stakeholder dynamics in a realistic enterprise setting.
Each session included immediate feedback supported by:
- Simulation observations
- 360 executive presence assessment
- Personality insights assessment
This established clear, evidence-based development priorities tied directly to each leader's role and business context.
Experiential workshops (2 x 1.5 days)
Leaders then participated in two immersive workshops focused on decision-making and influence in cross-functional environments.
Using real business scenarios, participants practiced aligning stakeholders, navigating ambiguity, and communicating complex scientific insights with clarity and impact. The workshops emphasized active practice and real-time feedback.
Individual coaching (throughout the journey)
Each participant worked with a dedicated assessor-coach to translate insight into action.
Coaching centered on upcoming business decisions and stakeholder interactions, with manager involvement helping reinforce alignment with enterprise priorities and day-to-day application.
Peer learning and application (ongoing)
Leaders participated in small peer groups that met throughout the journey to reinforce learning and accountability.
These sessions created space to reflect, share experiences, and apply new approaches in real time, helping build consistency across the organization.
Across every element of the journey, the work remained grounded in real business challenges. Leaders built capability by practicing the same decisions, conversations, and trade-offs they faced every day.
Results
The program's success led to continued investment, with new cohorts of more than 200 critical role leaders now underway. Overall, the program strengthened how leaders think, decide, and influence, improving both decision quality and cross-functional execution.
Impact was assessed through:
- Post-program surveys
- End-of-journey evaluations
- 49 structured interviews with participants and their managers
Every manager interviewed reported sustained positive behavior change. The most significant shift was in how leaders approached decision-making. Participants engaged stakeholders earlier, clarified trade-offs more effectively, and showed up with greater confidence in governance discussions. As a result, decisions moved faster and with less friction.
The impact extended beyond the Medical function itself. Colleagues across commercial, R&D, and other functions began noticing a tangible difference. Medical leaders showed up differently in joint forums, communicating complex scientific trade-offs more clearly and building alignment more effectively across competing priorities. Conversations that once required multiple rounds of clarification increasingly moved to alignment more quickly.
Leaders consistently improved in several key areas:
- Earlier alignment before formal decision forums
- Greater confidence navigating ambiguity and enterprise trade-offs
- Stronger influence across cross-functional groups
- Clearer, more concise communication of complex scientific insights
Collectively, these shifts improved cross-functional decision-making and execution across the organization. Leaders were better able to prioritize enterprise value, align diverse perspectives, and ensure medical insights were clearly understood and acted upon.
The impact extended beyond individual participants. Leaders applied these approaches within their own teams, reinforcing more consistent ways of working across the organization and helping position Medical as a strategic enterprise partner rather than solely a scientific function.
Client challenge
Wellstar Health System, one of Georgia’s largest healthcare systems, had already invested heavily in leadership development for senior leaders. But as the organization navigated rapid growth, a major acquisition, and the demands of a shifting healthcare landscape, it became clear that the greatest leadership challenges were happening at the front and midline.
“Some of the greatest leader challenges are really at the front and midline levels… we’ve invested heavily in leadership development, putting more emphasis on our front line and mid-level leadership in terms of outcomes, said Laura Dannels, Chief Talent Officer at the time.
We’re not an organization who believes in just investing in high performers… you’ve got to invest in your entire workforce.”
Wellstar partnered with Sounding Board to bring a more scalable, flexible coaching solution to leaders across the organization.
The solution
Partnering with Sounding Board, Wellstar designed a scalable, personalized coaching program to extend leadership development across the organization while maintaining the quality of one-on-one coaching.
A proprietary 360 assessment, aligned to Wellstar’s leadership behaviors, served as the foundation for each coaching engagement. This ensured development was directly tied to how leaders show up and lead in practice.
“We really wanted to ground the coaching to a framework that matters to our organization,” said Garry Gross, Executive Director of Leadership Development.
“Helping our leaders create an environment where our mission, vision, and values come to life was paramount.”
Program goals:
- Develop leadership capabilities aligned to Wellstar’s mission, vision, and values
- Deliver personalized, relevant development for leaders at all levels
- Strengthen the leadership bench and support succession planning
- Foster a culture of innovation, learning, and engagement
Program overview:
- Personalized, one-on-one coaching for leaders at all levels
- Capability development aligned to Wellstar’s values
- Serve with Compassion → Builds relationships
- Pursue Excellence → Drives results, leads teams, and plans strategically
- Honor Every Voice → Fosters inclusion and respect for differences
- Scalable delivery across frontline, mid-level, and clinical leaders
- Digital tools to track goals, capture insights, and measure progress
This approach made it possible to deliver consistent, high-quality coaching across roles and locations while keeping development relevant to each leader’s day-to-day work.
Results
As the program unfolded, Wellstar began to see a shift in how frontline and mid-level leaders showed up across the organization. Leaders in these critical roles had more consistent support navigating day-to-day challenges, and managers gained better visibility into how their teams were developing. Coaching became a more practical, embedded part of how Wellstar supports leaders in a complex healthcare environment.
Higher engagement and satisfaction
- 96% of participants said the coaching experience was worth the investment
- 99% said they could immediately apply what they learned to their day-to-day work
Measurable leadership growth
Participants reported double-digit growth across leadership capabilities including:
- Executive presence (+16%)
- Organizational collaboration (+14%)
- Strategic thinking (+13%)
- Time management and prioritization (+13%)
- Communication (+11%)
Stronger retention and mobility
- Coached leaders achieved a 90% one-year retention rate
- Retention for coached leaders was 31% higher than non-coached peers
- 3% of participants were promoted into new roles, exceeding organizational goals and industry benchmarks
Learn more about Wellstar’s leadership coaching journey with Sounding Board in this feature in Becker’s Hospital Review.
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.