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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
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.”
Client need
A leading international oil and gas company wanted to align its top 5,000 managers to its new leadership framework. The company wanted to ensure that its top 400 executives became “change leaders” by facilitating sessions for their people in the flow of work.
The solution
The organization partnered with BTS to create a solution that:
- Leveraged BTS’ Digital Cascade Tool to craft an interactive digital meeting-in-a-box.
- Allowed senior leaders to facilitate sessions themselves easily, locally, virtually and effectively in an engaging way far more impactful than merely distributing a PDF or presenting a slide deck.
- Included a discussion on the case for change, exploration of pivotal leadership moments, self-assessment on the framework, and commitment to actions to be implemented on-the-job.
- Enabled the client to cascade the framework and rapidly drive behavior change while also harnessing data to gain insights from the global deployment to 5,000 managers within six months.
Results
After a successful pilot phase, the organization expects to reach the top 5,000 leaders within 6 months.Based on the pilot results, participating leaders will enact tens of thousands of “go-dos,” actions tobe implemented on-the-job, in their daily work, to live the new culture.Following the early success, the company launched a similar initiative to cascade customer centricity to an even wider audience.
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Client need
A global fintech organization was navigating rapid growth amid increasing business and talent market volatility. As the company scaled, senior leadership recognized the need to strengthen leadership effectiveness and cultural alignment at the top of the organization.
The goals were to:
- Accelerate the effectiveness of critical C‑1/C‑2 leaders.
- Rebuild confidence and alignment around the company’s values.
- Gain deeper, actionable insights into the culture and leadership realities.
- Inform future senior‑talent decisions (selection, fit, succession).
The organization partnered with BTS to design a scalable approach that would both develop senior leaders in role while simultaneously generating insight to shape the future of the enterprise culture.
Solution
The result was a multi-year, integrated leadership partnership combining executive advisory and cohort-based simulations.
Together, BTS and the organization built a multi-year leadership partnership designed to accelerate senior leader performance while generating enterprise-wide insight.
The solution combined two core components:
- Executive advisory - targeted 1:1 engagements to shift behavior in real time
- Leadership simulations - cohort-based experiences to align leaders around operating principles and surface patterns at scale
By strengthening leaders in role while creating visibility into cross-organizational themes, the partnership supported both immediate performance and longer-term talent strategy.
Executive advisory
The work began with a six-month engagement for the top 7–8 senior leaders and expanded globally toC1/C2 roles critical to future success.
Each engagement:
- Followed a structured BTS advisory protocol
- Anchored development in the company’s values
- Focused on live enterprise challenges, stakeholder alignment, and decision-making
Because the work was grounded in real business priorities, impact was immediate. Themes across engagements provided leadership and HR with clear insight into strengths and friction points across the senior population.
Leadership simulations
Annual simulations reinforced enterprise priorities at scale.
These immersive experiences:
- Translated leadership expectations into applied decision-making
- Built a shared language across regions and functions
- Generated cultural and behavioral insight
Findings from both workstreams informed decisions related to selection, succession, and senior talent planning.
Results
During a period of growth and market pressure, the partnership strengthened critical leaders and clarified the future of the leadership bench.
Leader impact
Senior executives demonstrated stronger enterprise decision-making, clearer stakeholder alignment, and greater confidence navigating complexity. Leaders described the experience as one of the most valuable investments of their careers.
100% of participating leaders:
- Would recommend working with BTS
- Left with a clear development plan
- Valued their advisor as a thought partner on live business challenges
Cultural insight and talent strategy
As the work progressed, patterns emerged across leaders, revealing cultural strengths and previously unnamed friction points. HR and executive stakeholders gained across-organizational view of how leadership behaviors were shaping performance.
Expanding the work together
What began with a small senior cohort grew into
- Ongoing annual simulations
- Expanded advisory across global C1/C2 roles
- A pilot to scale coaching capacity and flexibility
Today, the work is embedded in how the organization strengthens and advances its senior leaders, a core component of its leadership strategy.
Testimonials
“My coach was instrumental in helping me to align with my manager on where and how to create more focus in my role. They held me accountable for results and follow-through. They helped me think through how to work the system with all of its’ big personalities and ever-changing dynamics.”
“My coach helped me to learn and claim my superpowers and stay focused on spending my time and energy in that space and to let others do that same thing.”
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.