The challenge
Five executives had just been given control of a roughly $1 billion fiscal mandate. Each had come up through one of four previously competitive branches of the agency — branches that had spent years working against one another for budget and influence. Now those old rivals were supposed to lead together.
They were also fully virtual — one executive in each U.S. time zone — and had never operated as a single unit. Trust was non-existent. Communication was poor. And the long-standing beliefs each leader carried about "the other branches" colored every interaction. On paper they were a team. In practice they were four old factions and a title.
The approach
A single offsite at a neutral resort would have papered over the problem. Instead, we designed a series of retreats — one in each executive's time zone. Meeting on each leader's home ground did something a neutral location never could: it dismantled the us-versus-them frame one branch at a time, and asked each executive to host, rather than defend.
Across the series we built trust in stages, established shared communication strategies the virtual team could actually sustain, and deliberately surfaced and diffused the legacy beliefs that kept the branches apart. The function was clear from the start: turn five rivals into one executive leadership team the entire Fiscal Branch could follow.
"On paper they were a team. The work was turning four old factions into one — branch by branch, time zone by time zone."
The result
The five became a genuine executive leadership team — aligned enough to set direction the rest of the Fiscal Branch could follow with confidence. Trust and communication, all but absent at the start, became the team's operating foundation rather than its liability.
The clearest proof was what the agency did next: it awarded us the contract to deliver the same work for the next two layers of the organization. The strongest endorsement isn't a quote — it's a client expanding the engagement.
Client identity and personnel anonymized at the organization's request. Engagement details shared with permission.