Tip #18 - Servant Leadership Case Study

This Agile Leadership case study demonstrates how Servant Leadership enabled a new training product to be created in six months and in a form it could be scaled, cutting time to market from 18 months to 6 months.

One of our clients was building training courses which were managed under a strong command and control environment. The leaders had organizational authority and put aside customer and staff feedback, only to lose credibility and eventually resign.

After the resignation, a second attempt was tried using Servant Leadership principles to enable those closest to the situation to develop a new offering.

Here are the results and timelines

Month One

•  The problem and solution were defined by a group of Business Partners who were close to the customer and knew the training business.

Month Two:

• The product specialist created a brochure to gain customer feedback, validate the value proposition and started selling the product.
• After four weeks and several tweaks, an initial product outline was created.
• One sale was made.

Month Three:

• The Partners created the training product, and the first delivery occurred.
•  A two-question NPS survey was conducted that resulted in several changes to the course.
• A metric was added. The course needed an NPS of 80 or greater to ensure future sales.

Month Four:

• Three more customers agreed to attend the course.
• More course tweaks were made based on feedback.
• The product specialist attended course deliveries to gain customer feedback directly.

Month Five

• Four more customers agreed to take the Workshop, but it was determined the price was too low and needed to be increased.
• Plans started within the organization to make this new course a standard product.

Month Six

• Three more customers agreed to the course at a higher price.
• Product ready for the final finishes to be made into a commercial product for scaled delivery
• Revenue positive

Overall, a great outcome was enabled by Servant Leadership, who allowed those close to the customer to make decisions based on direct customer feedback.

However, this is also an excellent example of the failure of an Operational Value Stream because this new product is now stuck and will likely be cancelled as the organization’s usual time to market for a course is 18 months, so the internal systems don’t know how to adjust with this disruptive speed and scale it in the market.

Here is a link to all 52 Free Agile Leadership Course Snippets.