A 10-person Executive team in a high-growth technology company needed clearer ways of working as pressure, pace and cross-functional dependencies increased.

The situation

The team was operating across increasingly complex interfaces with Sales, Product, partners and customers, but lacked shared clarity around communication, decision ownership, collaboration and accountability.

There was plenty of language around high performance, but it hadn’t been translated into repeatable standards. The risk was that speed and autonomy would create siloed decisions, unclear ownership and unnecessary friction.

The work

Rhian designed and facilitated a structured intervention that shifted the conversation away from individual preferences and towards observable behaviours.

Rather than asking abstractly what communicating effectively, high performance, decisions-making and accountability looked like, the team worked from a much more practical question:

What would I actually see or hear if we were aligned on how we approached these things?

Small-group work allowed every voice to contribute before collective perspectives shaped the discussion. An anonymous pulse check surfaced levels of trust, clarity, confidence and energy, and the team developed clear standards around decision-making, accountability, communication, escalation and meeting discipline.

The outcome

The team agreed practical standards for balancing speed with cross-functional execution and functional priorities.

These included involving affected teams before decisions were finalised, maintaining one clear accountable owner, communicating rationale and downstream impact, raising blockers early and ending meetings with clear actions, owners and deadlines.

Each individual also made a personal behavioural commitment for the following three months.

“These standards have set the benchmark for how the team continue to work internally and collaborate with the wider business”

— Senior Exec, AI High Growth Technology