A leading FMCG company with 5,000+ employees faced challenges of slow decision-making, siloed structures, and bureaucratic inefficiencies. While frontline employees were engaged, leadership struggled with alignment and execution speed, limiting the company’s ability to respond swiftly to market shifts.

To drive agility, we needed to change their mindset that they always “REACT”. We redefined it as re-ACT. Autonomy, Collaboration and Transparency—core agile principles, iterated. Leadership embraced a shift from hierarchical control to adaptive decision-making, allowing teams to own their outcomes. Siloes were dismantled to enable cross-functional collaboration, ensuring faster information flow and joint problem-solving.

Our approach was iterative. On-ground conversations and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) helped identify key bottlenecks, while co-creation workshops ensured employees shaped the transformation. Agile practices were introduced, including:

• Daily standups to enhance responsiveness and coordination.
• Leadership coaching to embed agility in decision-making.
• Cross-functional value-stream teams to drive customer-centricity.

The impact was immediate. Within a week, a frontline salesperson flagged a competitor’s strategic shift during a standup. Instead of the traditional escalation process—where the field sales team informs their Area Lead, who then escalates to the Sales Head, who brings it up in an HOD monthly meeting, often leading to delayed action—the team acted within a couple of days, staying ahead of the competition.

To sustain momentum, leadership institutionalized regular retrospectives and open forums, reinforcing a culture of continuous learning and adaptation. By embedding agile principles, the company evolved into a fast, collaborative, and proactive organization where teams operate with autonomy, alignment, and shared purpose.

For nearly three decades, a well-established paint manufacturing company had struggled to keep pace with its competitors. Despite its longevity in the industry, it consistently underperformed.

The newly appointed CEO stepped in with a bold directive: “Grow fast and play aggressively.” However, rather than chasing rapid growth, the leadership team sought a more sustainable and inclusive approach.

Diagnosing the Challenge

In our initial discussions, the CEO identified both strengths and weaknesses within the organization. The company boasted a deeply experienced, long-tenured workforce—including a leadership team with rich domain expertise. Yet, over the years, a culture of complacency had taken root, keeping employees within their comfort zones.

One of the CEO’s key observations was the siloed nature of the company. Communication barriers were prevalent, decision-making remained rigidly top-down, and most leaders operated as taskmasters rather than enablers. This command-and-control culture stifled engagement starting right from the leadership level.

Determined to break this cycle, the CEO was eager to challenge the status quo and inject fresh perspectives to drive growth. Our assessment pointed to a core issue: a lack of ownership among leaders and employees, a challenge that demanded immediate attention.

Driving Change: Cultivating an Ownership Mindset

To kickstart this transformation, we designed a curated two-day workshop featuring our flagship program, “Ownership Culture Propeller.” Our goal? To demystify the often abstract concept of an ownership mindset and translate it into practical, relatable actions for leaders.

Beyond just training, we focused on real-world applications. Each leader developed a personal action plan, tailored to their team’s specific dynamics. Over the next 12 weeks, a structured series of coaching sessions—a mix of one-on-one and group formats—helped leaders move from inspiration to action and sustained practice.

Measurable Shifts and Leadership Buy-In

As feedback began rolling in, the impact was evident.

– Teams experienced greater clarity in roles and responsibilities.

– Rituals like stand-ups and retrospectives that were introduced to give a structure to their interaction and provide rhythm, helped boost participation and awareness of how individual contributions  are interconnected across the organization in creating value.

A standout moment? Even the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) saw firsthand how cross-functional stand-up meetings surfaced and solved complex problems more proactively. Collaboration replaced fragmentation, and leaders began to operate with a shared sense of purpose.

As the CEO shared in one of our conversation
“This shift is preparing us to work as a unified team, ready to tackle market challenges without falling into blame games.”

A SaaS company specializing in managing digital presence for enterprises in hospitality and automotive sectors faced a productivity paradox. Its five product teams were busy working on backlogs meticulously managed by product managers, but their efforts often fell short of delivering meaningful outcomes.

Product managers focused on keeping teams occupied, ensuring full backlogs, and tracking utilization metrics for each iteration. Teams, in turn, avoided saying “no” to work—even low-value tasks—because their reports needed to reflect constant busyness. Systemic issues and internal inefficiencies were left unresolved, as product managers did not prioritize them. The business struggled with poor adoption of capabilities, yet no one owned the problem, further deepening the divide between effort and impact.

As coaches, we worked closely with the leadership team to identify the root causes. We helped them see that the focus on activity and utilization metrics hindered the company’s ability to deliver real value. Together, we advocated for a shift toward an outcome-oriented approach.

Leadership responded by redefining success metrics for product managers, prioritizing the adoption of capabilities over keeping teams busy. Teams were empowered to evaluate their work critically, decline tasks with unclear or low value, and take ownership of long-overdue internal improvements. With a culture of safety and trust established, teams tackled inefficiencies that had previously been ignored.

The results were transformative. A shift in mindset—from valuing busyness to focusing on meaningful outcomes—sparked a chain reaction. Teams eliminated at least 10% of wasteful work each iteration, reclaimed capacity for valuable initiatives, and improved their agility. Product managers engaged more thoughtfully with their teams, leading to smoother releases and better alignment with business priorities. Most importantly, the renewed focus on outcomes drove measurable improvements in the adoption of capabilities, enhancing customer satisfaction and business success.

We partnered with a fast-growing FMCG company to enhance agility in their operations. During our initial “Listen phase,” we identified a critical issue: departmental silos were causing significant delays in the sense-analyse-respond loop, hampering the company’s ability to act swiftly.

The siloed structure meant that information flowed bottom-up within departments, was shared across teams, analyzed in isolation, and then cascaded back down for action—a process rife with delays. To address this, we introduced value stream-based teams with cross-functional representation and implemented structured meeting cadences. These changes dramatically improved the speed of information flow, strengthened stakeholder alignment, and paved the way for quicker decision-making.

The impact of this transformation was evident almost immediately. A frontline sales team noticed the competitor withdrawing their 100g product from the market—a signal that typically would have surfaced only during the monthly Area Sales Managers’ meeting. In the past, this delay would have triggered a slow response cycle involving analysis, strategy development, and eventual action.

However, the newly formed cross-functional team escalated this insight during their daily stand-up, bringing the information to the right people without delay. Recognizing the urgency, the team speculated that the competitor might reintroduce the product at a lower price or bundle it with another offering, potentially disrupting the market and jeopardizing their own market share for the coming month.

Faced with this imminent threat from a major multinational competitor, the brands and customer marketing teams quickly brainstormed counterstrategies. Acting swiftly, they revamped their trade push and relaunched their product with an enhanced offering. The proactive approach allowed the company to stay ahead of the competition, maintain market share, and avert a potentially significant disruption.

For the client, this was a transformative “A-ha” moment.

This remarkable success came early in their transformation journey, driven by a simple but powerful change: redesigning the cadence structure. Teams now felt empowered to share critical information directly and frequently with the right decision-makers. By eliminating the need to climb up and down the organisational hierarchy, they gained the agility to respond to threats in real-time.