Matter Lead
We help current and future leaders become more effective. We facilitate Boards and leadership teams to function collaboratively.
Matter Lead focuses on two principal areas:
Occasionally, the formal meeting of the Board of Directors is insufficient for addressing longer-term strategic challenges and opportunities. The formality that can be appropriate to expedite regular Board business tends to stifle more creative, out-of-the-box thinking. We design and facilitate Board off-site sessions, with or without executive participation, to develop genuine insights and unexpected answers to frequently un-asked questions. This can call for integrating independent research and analysis to ensure that the Board is sufficiently challenged and that its discussions are robust and fact-based.
We are frequently asked to design and facilitate quick, one-day executive team meetings to solve pressing questions or to re-frame strategic challenges. We create the conditions for quick decisions and clear-headed discussion. We provide concise deliverables to speed the implementation once the leadership team returns to the office.
Services
Board Off-Sites
Occasional opportunities for Board members to get to know one another and their executive team in the shared pursuit of insightful answers to nagging strategic questions.
Executive Team Retreats
Quick problem-solving sessions on short notice for addressing pressing issues.
Clients & Case Studies
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An agency of the United Nations →
Our Role
The Office of the President had recently gone through a re-organization following the arrival of a new President and a new Vice President. The team needed a quick ‘time out’ to quickly re-assess roles and interactions withi...
← ReadAn agency of the United Nations
Our Role
The Office of the President had recently gone through a re-organization following the arrival of a new President and a new Vice President. The team needed a quick ‘time out’ to quickly re-assess roles and interactions within the team and between the office and the rest of the agency.
With only a few day’s notice, we designed a one-day retreat for the leadership team in which operational challenges were re-framed as product-delivery challenges in order to better define project lifecycles and individual and collective roles.
Quick wins from the session were implemented within a week and a longer follow-up session is being planned.
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A major Financial Services Company →
Every two years, the board, together with a dozen top executives, follow their quarterly board meeting with a two-day retreat to address underlying strategic issues. In early 2008, Matter designed and facilitated this session at which long-term...
← ReadA major Financial Services Company
Every two years, the board, together with a dozen top executives, follow their quarterly board meeting with a two-day retreat to address underlying strategic issues. In early 2008, Matter designed and facilitated this session at which long-term technological and competitive issues were discussed. This session was followed, six weeks later, by a large leader’s DesignShop (85 top executives for three days) to design the implementation plan for turning the board’s strategic direction into action.
In 2010, we were again asked to design and facilitate the board off-site, this time for 2½ days. During this off-site, the board refined eight major strategic initiatives that the executive team had been preparing for months. Based on the board consensus that emerged during this second off-site, we were asked to once again facilitate the 85 top executives through the development of a detailed action plan to implement the board’s decisions. This follow-up session was paired, one week later, with a two-day DesignShop for 25 key clients to understand the implications of the strategic new direction.
- Sogei