This month, MRG hit the road for a three-week stretch of engagements that kicked off in Rome with one of our newest clients. The event was the annual sales kick-off meeting of a large shared office space company with locations around the globe.
We were able to sit in on the first day’s session, led by the organization’s fascinating CEO. While we had been working hard to educate ourselves about them prior to the event, learning about them straight from their chief executive gave us an invaluable opportunity to ground ourselves in their culture, their challenges, and their plans for the future.
On day two, MRG’s President, Tricia Naddaff, hit the stage deliver LEA self-assessment results to more than 160 sales leaders, many of whom were first-time assessment takers. The goal for the session was to get this group of people thinking about their approach to the leadership role. We also wanted to help them begin to build their development plans based on the results of the LEA assessments they’d taken.
It was a BIG room, full of very eager people (and almost certainly some skeptics, too!). Tricia has a presence on stage that tends to draw people in immediately, and as she began to orient them in the LEA and help them understand their results, I quickly felt the room start to buzz and the energy start to rise. Since development is a personal journey, it was important to take frequent pauses so people could reflect on and discuss their own results in the context of what they were learning. With each discussion break, the room grew louder and more energized – as they day went on, it got harder and harder to pull people back to the presentation, since they were so eager to keep discussing their results! Pages were fluttering as people highlighted and annotated their reports. As I moved around the room I heard people marvel at how accurate their results felt, wondering if they would get similar results if they asked the people they lead, or their own leaders. (Not an uncommon reaction; it’s one of the reasons self-assessments so often lead to full 360s – curiosity gets piqued!)
We left feeling energized and eager to help our partners at the organization harness this energy and put it to work as they move their leaders forward. Soon they’ll be completing their own certifications and architecting the next phase of work with the LEA. We can’t wait to see where their dedication to development takes them.
