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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
An aviation services provider with over 200 fixed base operations (FBOs) across five continents recognized the need for a standardized approach to hiring, training, and assessing its general managers (GMs). Facing complex market dynamics like industry consolidation and rising customer expectations, the company found that GMs were now expected to act as mini-CEOs. They needed a diverse skill set to drive revenue, manage talent, ensure safety, and maintain customer satisfaction. However, without a clear development path, it was difficult to consistently prepare GMs for this demanding role.
Solution
The organization partnered with BTS to develop a comprehensive leadership framework that defined expectations and built the necessary capabilities for GMs to thrive. This solution included:
- The playbook: A foundational guide outlining:
- GM profile: Key capabilities and behaviors for GM success.
- GM pivotal moments: 11 critical scenarios requiring strong leadership.
- GM experience map: Experiences that aspiring, new, and seasoned GMs should seek to ensure they excel in the role.
- The assessment: A multifaceted tool designed to:
- Evaluate current GMs by identifying development areas aligned with the GM profile.
- Assess aspiring GMs to define what development is needed to prepare them for the role.
- Screen external candidates to determine their readiness for GM responsibilities.
The assessment comprises several components, including:
- Moments-based assessment: A simulated environment where candidates demonstrate decision-making in job-related scenarios.
- Mindset explorer assessment: Evaluates alignment with key leadership beliefs.
- 360-survey: Provides feedback on participants’ strengths and development areas.
- Work preferences assessment and panorama assessment: Explore work style preferences, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.
Results
The playbook and assessment have enabled the organization to identify and elevate high-potential leaders across its global locations. Since launching the program, numerous GMs have been promoted to leadership roles such as area director. The structured evaluation has empowered participants to uncover performance gaps and develop targeted growth plans. One GM, recently promoted to area director after following a personalized development plan, shared, “You are given the tools to succeed, and your future is in your hands. The assessments and the courses offered are outstanding and can be life-changing.”
Client need
To continue competing and winning in a complex industry, a multinational energy corporation recognized the need to change its ways of working. To achieve sustainable success for its Australian branch, the organization needed to shift from a project-focused operation to a unified business culture.
To make this transformation a reality, the organization identified a need for aligned enterprise mindsets, enabling leaders to internalize the new strategy and develop new leadership behaviors.
Solution
In service of this need, BTS and the organization co-created an immersive, in-person simulation experience. The experience projected a customized business portrait 30 years into the future, designed to:
- Guide leaders on optimization strategies.
- Foster relationship-building.
- Encourage personal development.
- Portray realistic, on-the-job challenges while coaching solutions.
The project team developed the program over three phases to ensure maximum effect, turning themes and objectives gathered from stakeholder interviews and pilot-test feedback into tangible, experiential materials and activities including:
Scenario-based roleplaying
- Cohorts compiled of leaders from diverse backgrounds and skillsets were provided with case study scenarios reflective of their real-life roles, tasked with developing effective strategies against common restraints like time, budget, client profiles, and geopolitics.
- Through this activity, players learned decision-making through collaboration and healthy competition, balancing short- and long-term goals in a simulated environment encouraging trial-and-error.
- Each simulation round was followed by debrief sessions, allowing teams to reflect on how their individual and group strategies affect business operations—a vital component for sustainable growth.
Behavioral guides
- Leaders were provided with helpful resources for navigating the company’s operation transition, promoting enterprise thinking through industry surprises like timeline alterations, decision-making under pressure, and prioritizing quality over targets.
- A Leadership Q&A event was held to address concerns, provide clarity, and reinforce the company’s vision and values to empower and engage leaders mid-journey.
Coaching sessions
- Amidst team leadership building, coaches offered individual, personalized guidance for participants following each simulation round.
- Presented opportunities for performance and lesson reflection, as well as goal-planning and application back on the job.
Results
The program’s ROI was measured by performance data, behavioral assessments, and participant feedback, with an NPS score of 80, surveyed across 500 leaders from 15 cohorts.
Post-journey, participating leaders credited the simulation for:
- Strengthened decision-making skills.
- Broadened business fluency.
- Heightened knowledge and resilience of industry complexities.
- Overall enjoyment of collaborative, game-like medium.
Testimonials
“Excellent fundamentals about impact across value chain of decision making and clearer understanding of levers used by management.”
“An excellent course, this really cemented in my mind the value chain and the necessity to consider all elements of this together. Shining a light on the complexity of the business and the many drivers, metrics, and desired outcomes needed to be balanced or traded-off was very enlightening.”
“Great job on asking people to represent other parts of value chain. This put all of us in a more uncomfortable place and we had to rely on each other.”
“Really enjoyable course that had a great balance of simulation, discussion, and humor. Sessions were well set up and managed.”
“The simulation reinforces the value of cross functional collaboration, which, along with specific insights into other areas of the business, I will continue to promote within my team.”
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 mindet
- 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.
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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