NEED:

Jon Niermann, the President of EA Asia Pacific, was responsible for working with all country GMs and reporting back to HQ in the USA. As they are dealing with projects that span the region, the country leaders of EA need to maintain a clear focus. During the country managers meetings, there can be no room for politicking or personality clashes – the team simply needs to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as they can. Jon’s desire was to ensure that all meetings stayed focused on the real issues and effectively reached the goals set, so he engaged Tirian to work with this team each time they met to assist with facilitating team processes.

SOLUTION:

After initial consultations with both the President and HR Director, it was decided that a long-term strategy needed to be adapted. This involved the Tirian facilitator, in this case Director Andrew Grant, recommending a practical structure, providing guiding input, and facilitating group processes in executive team meetings to reach the desired business outcomes.

1. The first meeting kicked off with the opportunity for the team to discover more about themselves and their unique leadership styles. Tirian’s Dynamic Interaction program – which includes DISC behavior profiling – was used to help the team understand what strengths they bought to the meeting and what challenge areas they needed to be aware of. This helped to create a feeling of acceptance and trust, and the open environment established allowed the team to move forward more effectively.
2. The second meeting then focused on challenging the team on their group dynamics and communication. Being a virtual team based across several countries, they realised that the communication is even more difficult, and that it was important to establish specific ground rules and guidelines for communication. Tirian’s ‘On Thin ICE’ program was used to help the team discover the issues they faced at a team level.
3. For follow up meetings, as the team built up trust in themselves and their peers the Tirian facilitator was able to refer to the shared strategies and language established through effective ongoing business facilitation.

OUTCOMES ACHIEVED:

Any issues involving personalities were dealt with ensuring the team could focus on the important areas. The communication matrixes that were mapped provided clear goals regarding strategic direction and implementation, and a positive atmosphere was established for important meetings where very difficult issues had to be dealt with. Careful planning with the director of HR ensured that the key business meetings were defined and executed with minimal issues. Any issue that did arise was quickly addressed with the support of the Tirian facilitator, allowing the team to focus on the real needs.

“Before we worked with Tirian I was very reluctant and sceptical about using outside resources and consultants to help us with our business planning or team building. My past experience had left me underwhelmed with resource “expertise” and programs, so I looked at them largely as a waste of money and time.

This changed with my first experience with Andrew and team. Not only are they a pleasure to work with, but the profiling was a powerful and useful exercise to help a group of industry leaders I was working with understand each other’s thinking and decision-making process.

I then wanted to put my leadership team at EA through the process. It was very well received by the team as was a subsequent exercise on Antarctica. We’ve since worked with Andrew three times over the past year, and it’s been great to have this continuity as a team with him getting to know us and see us grow with our interaction over time. I’m sure we’ll continue to build our relationship with Tirian.”

Jon Niermann, President EA Asia Pacific