The Challenge
When a large utility and energy company established a new engineering group to optimize a critical organizational capability, the mandate was clear — but the path wasn’t. The Engineering Leadership Team (ELT) had been built to think and operate strategically, yet from the start they struggled to lift their heads above the operational noise. Leaders were siloed, focused on delivering existing initiatives rather than shaping new ones, and looked upward for directives rather than generating vision of their own. They weren’t stuck because they lacked talent. No one had asked them to think higher.
Our Approach
Over five months, ImproVision partnered with the ELT and their leader to design and facilitate a series of structured meetings, workshops, and coaching engagements that progressively shifted how the team thought, collaborated, and led. Rather than positioning ImproVision as the driver of change, we worked alongside the client’s own leader — equipping him with coaching frameworks and meeting design support to model the strategic mindset the team needed to develop.
The engagement combined team building, facilitated strategy workshops, and ongoing change coaching to create the conditions for genuine transformation. We set clear expectations for the team to “think higher” — challenging them to move beyond functional silos, get curious about cross-functional impact, and take co-ownership of the group’s vision and direction.
The Results
The shift over five months was significant and observable. A team that had been swallowed by operational tasks and siloed in their thinking emerged as a cohesive leadership group capable of co-owning strategy, challenging each other constructively, and managing task conflict while preserving relationships. Together they identified key opportunities, set priorities, defined roles, and built a concrete change plan — the foundational work of a leadership team operating at the level the organization needed.
The impact resonated far beyond the engineering group. What began as a single ELT engagement grew into a multi-year strategic partnership spanning multiple divisions — including power delivery, capital projects, and customer service — a testament to the depth of transformation ImproVision’s approach made possible.
