Strategic Influence with Unum
Client Story: Unum
Strategic Influence
Bridge created a custom-designed, experiential three-part leadership series, “Strategic Influence” to help the Employee Relations (ERC) Team at Unum build greater strategic capability using data and critical thinking tools.
Challenge
The pandemic pushed organizations to focus on building organizational agility in order to rapidly respond to changing environments. Unum, a Fortune 500 comprehensive financial insurance products company, had an aspiration to build greater strategic capability utilizing data and critical thinking tools across their Employee Relations (ERC) Team in order to be more responsive to strategic shifts and disruptions in the marketplace. The team also had an interest in enhancing digital collaboration skills across their customer base as well as with key HR advisors.
Solution
At Bridge Innovate, we believe that people learn best when they learn by doing. Because of that belief, we custom-designed an experiential three-part series called “Strategic Influence.” This series, with an emphasis on immediate application, focused on building business insights, creative problem-solving, and designing change culminating with a capstone teach-back session.
As prework, participants engaged in gathering data and empathy-based insights from their customers as well as identifying external trends across the Future of Work, Employee Relations Best Practices, and Technology Advances. The customer-centric data and external trends analysis was the catalyst for each collaborative virtual session held over three modules. After each module, the team was tasked with meeting with an HR business partner to share their learnings and to define an immediate application.
Result
The Unum Employee Relations Team sparked the mobilization of strategic influence skills to respond to external forces and implement internal changes. Now, other business areas are joining them in the series. Some results include:
Empathy insights and business data were analyzed to identify common patterns across eight business areas. ERC members collaborated with stakeholders to identify immediate applications.
Solutions were brainstormed for eight business challenges and prototypes were developed for eight top ideas to share with stakeholders for feedback.
Designs for two Change Plans were created for GlobalTech based on stakeholder analysis and utilizing change tactics from a proven change management theory backed by more than 20 years of research.
The Strategic Influence series culminated in a teach-back section where ERC Team members shared key learnings from the series with one another and presented a strategic agility approach for a specific challenge they faced.