Stretching team strengths at BOC

Background

Effective team working is essential to the success of every organization. BOC, the UK and Ireland’s biggest industrial gases and engineering company partnered with Strengthscope^® to invest in executive and team coaching for its senior leadership teams, developing a unique approach to both which has delivered step change improvements in team functioning and individual leadership performance.

Our solution

We knew from survey data that BOC’s executives and their teams demonstrated many clear strengths, as well as some areas they wanted to improve on. We developed an approach in partnership with BOC that each team could adopt as its day to day way of working, where reliance on external support was minimized and each team could develop its strengths and productive habits to be sustainable in the long term. Our approach included the following:

Simultaneous team coaching (3 sessions + observation ‘check-ins’) and executive coaching (6 sessions) for the team leader
Team diagnostic at the outset of each project, including one-to-one conversations with each team member, Strengthscope^® and StrengthscopeTeam^™ profiling to identify individual and team strengths and performance risks

Outcome

Over the course of 16 months, eight leadership teams participated in this initiative at BOC resulting in an average 65% improvement in overall team performance.

INCREASE IN TEAM PERFORMANCE

"The biggest difference is the step change in performance, taking us from an already high performing team to one I consider a brilliant team.

This has been achieved through strong focus from the beginning on the purpose of investing in the team, structuring the intervention to accelerate greater self-awareness, knowledge of strengths and the need to ‘self-check’ them before they go into overdrive.

With this heightened awareness I now see more balanced leadership discussions, targeted challenge and greater leverage of team skills to drive greater performance for our business."

Participating Team Leader, BOC