A high-talent team that had stopped trusting each other rebuilt genuine collaboration — and transformed its collective output.
A senior team in a professional services firm was, individually, exceptional. The partners were recognised experts in their fields, held in high regard by clients, and commercially successful in their own right.
As a leadership team, however, they had fractured. Decision-making had become territorial. Information sharing had diminished. Disagreements that should have been resolved in the room were being escalated, re-litigated, or simply avoided. The Managing Partner described the dynamic as 'a group of high performers who happen to work in the same building.'
Two recent partnership disputes had created residual distrust at the top of the organisation that was now filtering down into the wider team. If it was not addressed, the firm risked losing people and clients who were already sensing the dysfunction.
SEN-Session facilitated a five-month team transformation process with the eight-person partnership group. The work began with individual conversations — off-the-record sessions with each partner to understand their experience of the team, their own behaviour within it, and their genuine aspirations for what the team could become.
This intelligence informed a series of facilitated team sessions designed to surface the unspoken dynamics, name them without blame, and begin the work of building new patterns of relating. The sessions were uncomfortable at points — by design, and with consent.
Alongside the group work, two specific partnership tensions were worked through in a structured mediation format — not to assign fault, but to reach a shared account of what had happened and agree new terms of working.
Within five months, collaboration scores — measured through a structured team diagnostic — had improved by 51%. Escalated conflicts fell by 60% in the six months following the programme, compared to the six months prior.
More qualitatively, the Managing Partner described a different quality of conversation in leadership meetings: more honest, more generative, and less guarded. Partners were sharing information voluntarily that previously would have been held.
Two partners who had been actively considering leaving the firm chose to stay. Both cited the team change as a deciding factor.
Every transformation begins with a single, honest conversation. Let's explore where you are — and where you're capable of going.