Ewing Change Consulting Success Stories

Case Study 2: Organizational Alignment

The Client: CEO and Senior Team of Health Sciences Centre
The Goal: Turning conflict into coordination

The background: Mergers create mayhem, as the Chief Executive Officer of a major health sciences centre found out. The CEO, of what had just become one of Canada’s largest health organizations, needed to quickly form a strong leadership team to tackle funding and rationalization challenges. And he needed to put an organizational change management plan into action.

The senior leaders he inherited, however, were from three different hospitals, with disparate cultures and viewpoints and strong personalities. Conflict, suspicions and gossip were rampant, preventing the team from working well together and creating organizational alignment.

How do you turn conflict into collaboration? That’s what Esther Ewing was tasked to do.

The solution: Drawing on her organizational change management experience, Ewing administered 360 feedback assessments so that all of the senior team members, and the CEO, had an understanding of their individual strengths and weaknesses, where they were effective with each other and where they could improve. Then, Ewing brought the senior leaders together, face-to-face, to participate in a conflict resolution process. Ewing helped them identify the issues that were barriers to team work and discuss what they expected or wanted from each other. Participants were assured that the process was safe and highly confidential, so they could participate with confidence. The process helped these senior leaders learn to interact in a more respectful way and to bring disagreements to each other, knowing they would be heard.

The senior team members then created personal action plans under the umbrella of the new organizational alignment and worked hard to improve their communications. They worked on reducing resistance to each other and recognized that they themselves had been sending mixed messages to their staff. They held each other and their staff accountable for that new, unified approach so it could spread throughout the organization. The CEO was briefed on the best ways to support his executive team members and how to further support their action plans.

The result: The senior management team adopted a new way of working together. They took a more respectful and unified approach to consciously and fairly see if they could work out their conflicts. They began to join together to tackle the challenges they had been handed by the CEO and the government, and reached a new level of mutual confidence.

Success Stories

Case Study 1: Coaching Executive Leadership
The Client: CIO of a Canadian Bank
The Goal: Middle managers finding their footing

Case Study 2: Organizational Alignment
The Client: CEO and Senior Team of Health Sciences Centre
The Goal: Turning conflict into coordination

Case Study 3: Merger Process Change
The Client: Chief Risk Officer, Global Insurance Company
The Goal: A global infrastructure for risk-adjusted decisions

Case Study 4: Change Management Strategy
The Client: CEO and Senior Team, Construction and Mining Equipment Company
The Goal: Rebuilding the Refurbishers

Case Study 5: Employee Effectiveness through Cultural Change
The Client: VP Human Resources, Resort and Real Estate Developer
The Goal: Boosting employee effectiveness in a culturally-sensitive environment

Case Study 6: Using Assessments in Coaching
The Client: Senior Treasury Manager, International Manufacturer
The Goal: Solving Director’s Dilemma – ‘Fix’ the manager or fire him?