Tiger Teams Develops Strong Leaders
Background:
Celonis SE is a German data processing company that offers Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to improve business processes. It is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York, United States.
In 2021, Tiger Teams was asked to support the Nick Mitchell, Vice President & Country Manager UK&I.
The Situation:
Joining Celonis as its new VP UK&I during the Covid pandemic, Nick Mitchell inherited a team of around 40 people under pressure to rapidly scale the business in demanding conditions. Combining this urgent requirement to grow with a company restructure that lacked real leadership, Nick needed to create the right environment for his team to work more effectively and enable sustainable growth, with near immediate effect.
Nick didn’t want a generic offsite team-building programme; he needed something transformational that would help his team build trusted relationships with each other, rediscover how to solve business problems and feel more empowered to both lead and succeed. With prior experience of working with John at Tiger Teams, Nick felt strongly that his organisation would benefit hugely from this unique approach to creating high performance teams and developing leadership potential.
“Getting feedback from colleagues is vastly underrated. Leadership training often doesn’t include receiving truthful feedback from your peers on how your behaviour impacts them – but it’s so important. Tiger Teams offers some very powerful tools that tease out those often quite difficult conversations.” Nick Mitchell, VP UK&I, Celonis.
The Solution:
Over a two-year period, Celonis put 25 people through the Tiger Teams three-day experience. Advertising the opportunity across all functions in the UK business, Nick engaged with the different leadership teams for recommendations but also looked at those potential leaders who had been identified during the standard review process.
“It became an aspirational course to attend even after we had shared photos of us soaking wet after walking in the rain for 5 hours. It’s definitely not a holiday camp.” Nick Mitchell, VP UK&I, Celonis
The Impact:
Returning to the office environment, Nick observed that the attendees displayed a greater harmony than before, were more aware of their own behaviours and far better at managing daily pressures. Additionally, the strategic planning activities run by the Tiger Teams crew helped team members understand the benefit of creating, communicating and executing better plans, contributing to a reduction in people’s workloads and boosting productivity. 90% of those potential leaders that attended the Tiger Teams experience are now in leadership roles.