Breaking Down Silos on an Executive Team

I received a call from a client requesting an introduction to a facilitator who could work with his senior executive team.  This client had been hired as the President of a financial organization that recently gone through a merger.  He very quickly saw there were some major problems with communication, trust and leadership.  He knew he had to address these issues with his leadership team if the company was going to be successful.  I spent an hour with him discussing what was happening and not happening that was causing him concern.  He had experienced a lot of his senior team operating in silos, very little trust, no sharing of information, and in some cases out and out anger.  He was planning a three day strategic planning session to set the vision for his team. The first day was to be a day of breaking down the silos, opening the doors for honest communication and start the process of rebuilding a powerful executive team.  This would set the foundation for the next two days of planning.
When I left his office I had a clear understanding of his objectives, outcomes and his vision for the future.  I also had good understanding that I needed to connect him with a very strong and experienced facilitator to support our client in meeting his goals.  I connected him to one of our most powerful facilitators in the Athena Alliance the next day and they proceeded to map out their strategy.
During the first day of the program the facilitator asked some extremely tough questions and conducted many challenging exercises. There was a lot of emotion and discussions got a little heated at times. By the end of the day, progress was made and the foundation was set for moving forward into the next two days of planning.  This team still had a lot of work to do and at the time of my last follow up they were definitely moving in the right direction.

Our client left me a voice message at the end of the first day telling me that he could have looked for weeks on the internet and never found a perfect facilitator as I had provided.  I also received a voice message from the facilitator telling me while the day was challenging, progress was made.