What was needed …
A large multinational consulting firm with offices in 42 countries was seeking to develop business and leadership skills in its (primarily younger) high-potential client-facing employees. Because this organization is so large, most young and/or new employees identified themselves only with their specific business unit, and so did not recognize and capture revenue opportunities in other lines of business. The desired goal: these employees should have the leadership confidence and business perception to identify and actively pursue sales opportunities in this very large global firm, despite the artificial silos that were often created by internal hierarchy or organizational structure. Merge was invited to be part of the design team and the subsequent faculty team in the creation and delivery of this program.
What Merge did …
Over a period of several weeks, along with two members of the company’s Global Talent Management team (one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom), one company employee in Ireland, and one other external consultant in the United Kingdom, Merge conducted a needs analysis, established learning objectives, and designed the overall learning program. Eventually, “Building Broader Client Relationships” was created to be a combination of plenary (general) sessions and four concurrent breakout sessions over two days with focused and specific learning and networking objectives in mind. In addition to carrying general shared faculty responsibility for the entire program, Merge was also charged with the specific design and delivery responsibility for one of the four concurrent breakout sessions – “Building Your Confidence in Front of Clients”.
The program was piloted at one company location, and then after significant design and delivery changes as a result of the pilot, was rolled out to company locations worldwide over the next 2-1/2 years.
What were the results …
Over a period of three years, Merge facilitated 25 events in seven countries around the world, and delivered the two-day “Building Broader Client Relationships” to over 1,200 global employees. To accommodate geographical differences and distinctions amongst North and South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Australia, she adapted the program slightly in each country to be more relevant and meaningful to participants from those areas. As a direct bottom-line result of this substantial learning initiative, the company was able to realize a sizeable positive impact to revenues, and gather numerous anecdotal success stories demonstrating increased levels of confidence in client-facing employees who attended the program.