Since 2018, our Peers and Players team around the world has had the privilege of partnering with tech giant Cisco Systems to empower leaders within their organizational culture.
Headquartered in San Jose, California, Cisco has operations spanning the Americas, EMEA, and the Asia-Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC) regions. And Peers and Players has professional actor/coaches in all those regions, so we were a perfect fit to roll out organization wide standards, with an understanding of unique cultural norms. Providing the delicate balance of practice and useful coaching on how to be a more empathetic and impactful leader has had a profound impact on Cisco’s leadership development internationally.
In 2018, Cisco recognized the need to foster more open, authentic communication among its global workforce, especially focussing on current and aspiring leaders. They sought out our expertise in delivering Courageous Conversations and Rewards Conversations training programs. The goal was to empower employees at all levels to have the difficult discussions necessary for driving innovation, improving collaboration, and enhancing employee engagement.
Beginning with large in-person engagements at Cisco conferences, working with 400 employees in a single session, providing 100 of our USA based corporate actors and coaches, and then moving online during the pandemic – using Webex to deliver more intimate sessions for up to 32 participants, with 8 actors each session. Peers and Players has delivered literally hundreds of sessions, for thousands of Cisco employees worldwide, and is now pleased to be taking some of these sessions back to Cisco premises to deliver in-person sessions in San Jose and Bangalore.
Some of the programs we have delivered for Cisco have been Courageous conversations, Micro-Aggressions conversations, Rewards discussions, Post-lab intimate coaching sessions for 3 participants, video casting, specialised workshops for the Accelerate and other teams, and Conference presentations.
Over the course of our multi-year engagement, we’ve worked closely with Cisco’s leadership teams in each major region. Our actor/coaches and in-person facilitators have conducted interactive workshops that give participants the tools and confidence to lean into tough topics, and the skills to help their team members know that they are seen, felt and heard.
Whether it’s providing constructive feedback, addressing workplace conflicts, or providing space for team members to feel supported, Cisco employees now have a structured process for navigating these conversations productively, because they have practiced with professional actors who give them an unbiased experience of how to approach different personality types.
The impact has been remarkable. Cisco has seen a notable uptick in open communication, leading to enhanced happiness and productivity. Employees report feeling more empowered to give and receive feedback constructively, as well as how to support others to be transparent with their thoughts and feelings. Leaders have developed a stronger ability to have the courageous conversations needed to keep people motivated and keep the business moving forward, even amid challenging circumstances.
As Cisco continues to evolve and grow its global footprint, our ongoing partnership ensures their teams are equipped with the communication skills to collaborate effectively. It’s been incredibly rewarding to witness the personal and cultural transformation at one of the world’s technology pioneers. Our work together is a testament to the power of courageous dialogue in driving organizational success.
Reference: Virginie McGlaughlin,
Former Cisco HR Program Delivery Manager
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vpalmans/
“I’d love to share my experience with you regarding Peers & Players.
Lisa has been a fabulous partner – easy to work with and super flexible. I am the delivery program manager for our leadership training programs here at Cisco and started engaging with her for a Leader Learning Lab around Courageous Conversations back in 2018. We use the actors as both actor and coach in these 90-minute labs, to role-play challenging scenarios with our leaders and provide immediate feedback/coaching about the leader’s performance in the situation. This lab has been extremely popular with our leaders, we have even created a version for aspiring leaders.
In addition to offering the lab as a running program, we also do many private sessions of this lab with entire teams, often at offsites. Pre-pandemic, we did the lab for a large group of ~200 engineering directors and senior managers, and 50 actors in Vegas, as well as for ~300 Cisco leaders and 80+ actors at our RTP site. The actor coordination was flawless, Lisa trained them all and they were organized and ready to go for each of these big events.
The quality of the actors is spectacular, we often receive kudos about the program specifically calling out the actors by name. What our leaders love is how real the actors make the scenarios during the role-play. You just can’t get the same effect when role-playing with a co-worker. It also provides a safe zone for the leaders to try out techniques around tricky situations, and they love the coaching they receive.
We have offered 200 of these labs so far and they continue to be in demand. The actor model has actually proven to be so effective that we have shut down some of our other labs which were non-actor based and are looking to re-invent them using the actor model instead.
In addition to our labs, we’ve also leveraged the actors to record video scenarios for several different projects which turned out really well.
I hope this was useful, happy to answer any other questions you may have.”