Unlocking strategic transformation through culture change
Related content
Client need
A leading global wholesale bank needed to increase its market competitiveness by re-defining and implementing a differentiated growth strategy. This required significant leadership alignment, increased collaboration across regions, products, and functions, and faster execution. To increase competitiveness, leadership needed to rewire old mindsets, lack of clarity and siloed ways of working that were limiting their edge in the market, and build a performance culture grounded in enterprise value, feedback, and accountability.
Solution
BTS partnered with the head of the bank and the leadership team to design and deliver a structured engagement through a series of leadership off-sites, strategy definition sessions, and high-performance team experiences across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas to rapidly align, commit to, and execute the new strategy.
The work focused on:
- Co-creating the wholesale bank’s must-win battles and driving their activation and translation to the country, product, and function level.
- Resetting performance culture through a growth mindset, "brave spaces," and a sharper competitive edge.
- Creating a blueprint for high-performing teaming, with a consistent approach and language across the organization.
- Systematically removing key silos by tangibly strengthening collaboration and co-creation across the organization.
Through a series of assessments, practical tools, and focused application, leaders created joint ownership and commitment to the organization’s strategy, a culture of constructive conflict, stronger stakeholder engagement, and enterprise thinking, while defining new operating principles, ways of working, and must-win battles to accelerate execution.
Results
The partnership engaged more than 320 senior leaders globally and helped align teams around shared priorities, new ways of working, and enterprise-wide collaboration.
Key outcomes included:
- Joint ownership of defined regional strategies and cross-functional workstreams across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas.
- Year-on-year improvement in the EMEA Leadership Team's High-Performing Team Assessment (HPTA) scores across every facet .
- Increased alignment between country, product, and functional leaders .
- Leadership team meetings were redesigned for greater focus on collaboration, co-creation, and feedback; "corridors of cooperation" were established to share best practice across WB regions .
- A shift from "safe spaces" to "brave spaces" that encouraged constructive challenge and accountability, driving breakthrough client solutions and competitive wins
Testimonial
"This group has never come together in one room to align on an EMEA set of priorities, tradeoffs, or commitments."
.webp)
Client need
A non-profit technology organization specializing in compliance and licensing for insurance professionals needed to make the shift to agile to achieve its growth plans. After attempting and failing to make the shift in the past, employees were left with a negative perception of agile, incomplete training, and a feeling of disconnectedness.
The organization partnered with Netmind, a BTS company, to implement a new multi-year strategic plan, geared towards its long-term vision for future growth and the evolution of IT.
The solution…
Leadership, change agents, and team members within the organization went through an Enterprise Transformation solution from which they gained the necessary understanding to transform the company culture and processes. They also worked to optimize departments by focusing on the core business.
They sought to achieve the following objectives:
- Increase organizational agility and ability to adapt to a changing environment
- Strengthen and refine the core business
- Adopt a more market-centric and customer-focused experience
- Strengthen the working relationship with the Board of Directors and parent company
How it works
In the Enterprise Transformation, leaders attended workshops on agile training practices, collaborative work sessions to establish baseline alignment, and experienced how to perform as an Agile team. Team members experienced ongoing assessments to evaluate progress and address immediate concerns.
Results
As a result, the organization has cross-functional, self-directed, vertically-aligned teams who are now reaping the benefits of agile. Additionally, the teams have the tools for continuous improvement, which include coaching and accountability touchpoints, all of which will help them achieve future strategic milestones.
Client need
Advancements in autonomous vehicle technology and the rise of the sharing economy have sparked unique, high-growth opportunities within the insurance sector. As rideshare services and last-mile delivery become more popular, the demand for commercial mobility insurance has surged. Recognizing this potential, a leading insurance provider—historically successful in personal insurance for homes and vehicles—identified a strategic opportunity to expand into the commercial mobility market.
However, this shift came with its own set of challenges. To pursue this new market successfully, the company needed leaders who could not only envision the future but also execute on a strategy that balanced this emerging opportunity with the existing demands of the business. Leaders needed to be prepared to make informed, strategic decisions, guide their teams through change, and maximize resources to drive growth on both fronts.
Solution
To bridge this gap, the organization turned to BTS. Having invested heavily in talent development, the client sought an innovative capstone experience to equip executives with the skills to navigate the complexities of commercial and personal mobility insurance. This experience would combine traditional learning with immersive, hands-on practice to prepare leaders to operate in a dual-focus business landscape.
BTS collaborated closely with the client’s key stakeholders to build on an existing custom business simulation tailored to the company’s unique challenges and growth goals. Through interviews and deep dives into the client’s strategy, BTS crafted realistic scenarios that mirrored the critical decisions leaders would encounter as they pursued this new strategic direction. The aim was to ensure leaders experienced the trade-offs, resource allocation challenges, and leadership decisions required to achieve success in both the traditional and commercial mobility sectors.
The result was a dynamic, three-day virtual capstone event, where executives from diverse geographies and functions came together to compete in teams, simulating the operations of a combined personal and commercial mobility insurance company. Each team faced real-time decision points—balancing the needs of the established personal insurance business with the growth demands of the commercial mobility segment.
Throughout the simulation, BTS facilitators, along with senior leaders from the client’s organization, guided teams through reflective debriefs, helping participants unpack the impact of their choices, understand their strategic missteps, and explore the lessons needed to adjust. This design offered leaders an active role in both learning and execution, helping them see how each decision could drive or hinder the company’s broader vision.
The experience allowed participants to connect their day-to-day responsibilities with the organization’s growth objectives in ways they had never seen before. Leaders could see firsthand how their decisions affected different areas of the business, revealing the immediate consequences of missteps or successes. Winning the simulation required not only protecting the existing business but also achieving substantial growth in the new commercial mobility space—driving home the importance of the company’s strategic pivot.
Results
This capstone simulation was hailed as the highlight of the company’s nine-month executive development program, providing leaders with a transformative experience that changed the way they viewed strategy, decision-making, and cross-functional alignment. Following the simulation, a survey of participants in the first cohort revealed the program’s profound impact:
- 79% of participants reported a deeper understanding and appreciation for crafting an effective strategy.
- 74% gained valuable insights into customer segmentation and its role in targeting diverse markets.
- 85% appreciated the interconnectivity of various business decisions, better understanding the ripple effects across the company.
- 79% recognized the power of diverse perspectives, noting that collaborating with peers from different backgrounds enriched their strategic thinking.
- 74% left with a broader understanding of the business and its complexities.
Testimonials
“Though intensive, this simulation was exactly what I needed. It helped me see how the entire business fits together. I feel more confident in making decisions that consider the bigger picture.” — Participant
“This experience brought to life the complexity and interdependency within our business. I now have a much stronger grasp on finance for insurance, and I feel more aligned with our CFO’s perspective on the company’s financial health.” — Participant
“We always hear that decisions impact the entire business, but seeing that impact in real time was eye-opening. The simulation taught me that failure can be a powerful learning tool. Leaders need to take calculated risks, learn from setbacks, and push forward. I feel more prepared to step out of my comfort zone.” — Participant
Through this immersive capstone, leaders not only understood the organization’s strategic shift—they practiced executing it. The company now has a team of executives ready to lead in the fast-evolving commercial mobility market, equipped with the insights and confidence to drive sustained growth and innovation.
Related content
Client need
A leading global wholesale bank needed to increase its market competitiveness by re-defining and implementing a differentiated growth strategy. This required significant leadership alignment, increased collaboration across regions, products, and functions, and faster execution. To increase competitiveness, leadership needed to rewire old mindsets, lack of clarity and siloed ways of working that were limiting their edge in the market, and build a performance culture grounded in enterprise value, feedback, and accountability.
Solution
BTS partnered with the head of the bank and the leadership team to design and deliver a structured engagement through a series of leadership off-sites, strategy definition sessions, and high-performance team experiences across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas to rapidly align, commit to, and execute the new strategy.
The work focused on:
- Co-creating the wholesale bank’s must-win battles and driving their activation and translation to the country, product, and function level.
- Resetting performance culture through a growth mindset, "brave spaces," and a sharper competitive edge.
- Creating a blueprint for high-performing teaming, with a consistent approach and language across the organization.
- Systematically removing key silos by tangibly strengthening collaboration and co-creation across the organization.
Through a series of assessments, practical tools, and focused application, leaders created joint ownership and commitment to the organization’s strategy, a culture of constructive conflict, stronger stakeholder engagement, and enterprise thinking, while defining new operating principles, ways of working, and must-win battles to accelerate execution.
Results
The partnership engaged more than 320 senior leaders globally and helped align teams around shared priorities, new ways of working, and enterprise-wide collaboration.
Key outcomes included:
- Joint ownership of defined regional strategies and cross-functional workstreams across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas.
- Year-on-year improvement in the EMEA Leadership Team's High-Performing Team Assessment (HPTA) scores across every facet .
- Increased alignment between country, product, and functional leaders .
- Leadership team meetings were redesigned for greater focus on collaboration, co-creation, and feedback; "corridors of cooperation" were established to share best practice across WB regions .
- A shift from "safe spaces" to "brave spaces" that encouraged constructive challenge and accountability, driving breakthrough client solutions and competitive wins
Testimonial
"This group has never come together in one room to align on an EMEA set of priorities, tradeoffs, or commitments."
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.