Management Team Effectiveness at CIM
About CIM
Founded in 1911, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) is the world's leading professional marketing body, setting the standards that shape the profession through education, qualifications and community. Its Global Professional Marketing Framework (GPMF) underpins everything from CPD to Chartered Marketer status, supporting marketers and organisations to work with consistency, confidence and credibility across 36 countries.
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The challenge
In 2023, CIM launched an ambitious seven-year strategy requiring a fundamental shift in how the organisation operated. The Senior Management Team (SMT), comprising Heads of Department responsible for driving the strategy’s most critical initiatives, was at the heart of this transformation.
The SMT, who had historically worked in siloed ways, were now expected to collaborate closely across strategic project groups. Yet the scale of change exposed significant tensions:
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Disagreements and misalignment were blocking decision-making and progress
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People felt there was no clear ownership of actions and outcomes
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Communication breakdowns were creating friction between departments
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The SMT felt under pressure and under the spotlight, but lacked clarity on how to meet expectations
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Engagement surveys showed that employees were focused on the exec team, with the SMT's significant contributions going unrecognised
The business risk was clear: without meaningful change in how the SMT worked together, CIM would be unable to achieve its strategic goals within the agreed timeframes. The first year of the strategy had already demonstrated that the status quo was unsustainable.
The risk if nothing changed was that we wouldn't be able to achieve our business goals in the timescales we'd set
— Sarah Lee-Boone, Director of Membership, People and Workplace, CIM
What Had Been Tried Before
CIM had invested in leadership programmes over previous years, which had provided useful foundations. However, the approach had been fragmented, with ad hoc coaching and standalone training but no unifying framework or shared objective pulling it together.
What was missing was a joined-up, programme-based approach that would bring the whole team into the same space, at the same time, working toward a common goal. Without that, individuals were developing in isolation rather than as a cohesive unit.
"The work with Esendia was the icing on the cake. It pulled all of that knowledge together and enabled people to really capitalise on what they'd learned before."
— Sarah Lee-Boone, Director of Membership, People and Workplace, CIM
Why Esendia
What set Esendia apart was a combination that is rare in the market: a coaching-first mentality grounded in rigorous diagnostic data. Where many providers jump straight to solutions, Esendia starts with insight. Where others focus on relationships in isolation, Esendia addresses both the human dynamics and the structural conditions that enable high performance. And where most interventions are too workshop-heavy and too event-based to create lasting change, Esendia’s blended approach embeds new behaviours through sustained practice over time.
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​Esendia treats the top team as a strategic leadership system, not simply a group that needs better relationships. That systemic lens, combined with the hard evidence that diagnostics provide, gave CIM’s data-driven executive team the confidence to invest. As Sarah Lee-Boone put it:
Esendia approaches this with a coaching first mentality, but backs that up with the hard data that organisations want to see, which so often is missing.
— Sarah Lee-Boone, Director of Membership, People and Workplace, CIM
The Programme
Esendia co-designed and co-delivered a structured team effectiveness programme alongside CIM’s internal team, with a genuine partnership approach threading through every stage. The programme was carefully blended by design: combining 1:1 coaching with cohort-based workshop work, in-person and virtual delivery, and individual and team development. This blending was intentional, engineered to maximise development impact and cost effectiveness and to create sustained behaviour change in an accelerated timeframe of just nine months. The engagement began with Esendia supporting Sarah in building the internal business case, structuring the problem, framing the evidence, and developing materials that spoke the language of CIM’s data-driven exec team, enabling confident sign-off from the outset. From there, the programme unfolded across four interconnected strands:
1. Discovery & Diagnostics
Esendia conducted in-depth discovery calls with all 12 SMT members, while Sarah Lee-Boone led the discovery conversations with the executive team. Rather than building a framework from scratch, the programme took CIM’s existing leadership behaviours as its foundation and enriched them further into a tailored set of behavioural indicators specifically aligned to CIM’s strategy and ways of working.
2. 360-Degree Feedback (Start and End)
A tailored 360° assessment was designed and deployed at the start of the programme using Esendia’s leadership development platform, measuring each SMT member against the enriched leadership behaviours. Supported by Insights personality profiles, this gave participants a structured view of how their behaviour was experienced by others and where development was most needed. A second 360 was conducted at the end of the programme using the same platform, providing a clean and directly comparable before-and-after picture of individual and collective growth.
3. Team Effectiveness Workshops
Two full-day in-person workshops were delivered by Esendia at CIM’s site, bringing the whole SMT together to work on collaboration, shared accountability and team dynamics. A midway check-in session, facilitated by Sarah Lee-Boone, proved to be a pivotal moment, enabling the team to recalibrate, challenge fixed assumptions, and start finding new, more flexible ways of working together.
4. Individual Coaching
All SMT members received individual one-to-one virtual coaching sessions, offering a confidential space to explore personal leadership challenges, build self-awareness and develop an authentic leadership style. Coaching was delivered by a blended team of Esendia and CIM in-house coaches, combining external independence with deep organisational knowledge.
The Results
These results were achieved within nine months, and were enabled from the outset by a strong diagnostic foundation: discovery calls with both the SMT and the executive team, a tailored 360° assessment, and Insights profiling, all working together to accelerate both individual and team development. The programme’s impact was then evaluated through three independent sources: a structured participant survey on completion of the coaching programme, 360° feedback data collected from colleagues, managers and the leaders themselves at the start and end of the engagement, and qualitative interviews with eight external stakeholders conducted by an independent evaluator. The power of this approach lies in triangulation: when three different data sources, using different methodologies and drawing on different respondent groups, all point in the same direction, confidence in the findings is substantially higher than any single source alone.
100%
of participants reported improved self-awareness
All
external stakeholders who were able to comment observed clear progress in cross-functional collaboration
360 Data
Relationship-building and conflict resolution across the organisation was the strongest behavioural gain, independently confirmed by leaders, managers and colleagues
Across all three sources, the picture was consistent. Every participant reported improved self-awareness and greater confidence in their contribution. Ninety per cent reported a stronger sense of personal ownership of organisational change, and 80% said the programme had strengthened trust and psychological safety within the team. The behavioural changes that were most visible to colleagues were also the most important: stronger relationships and conflict resolution across the organisation, greater willingness to think and act organisation-wide rather than within departmental boundaries, and a growing readiness to ask for help and admit limitations.
Crucially, these shifts were not just self-reported; they were independently observed by colleagues and external stakeholders, which is a critical test of whether development is genuine. Every external stakeholder who was able to comment reported clear, observable progress in cross-functional collaboration, describing departments working together more readily, stronger informal peer relationships, a more open culture within the team, and noticeably improved meeting structure with clearer agendas and stronger follow-through on actions.
The data also revealed an important and healthy pattern around self-awareness. Several leaders became more self-critical over the course of the programme, rating themselves lower at the end than at the start, while their colleagues rated them higher. Rather than a cause for concern, this is a well-recognised sign that coaching has genuinely landed: leaders who have grown are often the first to see how much further they can go. The one area where all three sources identified room for further development was collective decision-making and team identity. Individual development had been real and visible; converting that into coordinated, confident action as a team remained the work still to be done, providing a clear and exciting foundation for the next phase of the partnership.
Self-awareness is the first step of any of this. If people aren't self-aware, you can coach them till the cows come home. It's not going to make any difference.
— Sarah Lee-Boone, Director of Membership, People and Workplace, CIM
Impact Beyond the Original Scope
The programme’s impact extended well beyond team dynamics. Individual coaching sessions gave SMT members a rare space to address broader leadership challenges they would not otherwise have had the opportunity to explore, accelerating their personal development alongside the team work.
The programme also surfaced important insights about how different personality types engage with coaching. Recognising the differing needs of introverted and extroverted leaders, the team adapted their approach in real time, an example of the responsive, genuinely tailored nature of the engagement.
The Partnership
Sarah describes the relationship with Esendia not as a supplier engagement, but as a genuine long-term partnership, one she intends to continue as CIM progresses through its transformation. A defining characteristic of the working relationship was the way Esendia helped to frame the programme in language that resonated with CIM’s leadership.
The coaching-led approach could easily have been dismissed as too intangible by a data-driven executive team, but the structure, evidence base and project management that Esendia built around it meant it landed with credibility. As Sarah put it, the programme was “very coaching-led, but not fluffy”, a combination that proved essential for securing and sustaining senior buy-in. The team’s responsiveness also stood out: when it became clear that some participants needed more time to build trust before engaging fully with the coaching process, the approach was adjusted without hesitation, ensuring no one was left behind.
I certainly see it as a longer-term relationship that is going to be there supporting us through these changes. I don't think of it as a supplier relationship at all.
— Sarah Lee-Boone, Director of Membership, People and Workplace, CIM
If you want to see really meaningful change in leadership styles and how people manage and lead, this is probably the most effective way I've experienced to do it. People don't feel like it's training. They see it as something that's really valuable.
— Sarah Lee-Boone, Director of Membership, People and Workplace, CIM
What’s Next
The first phase of this programme has demonstrated what becomes possible when individual and team development are pursued together, with rigorous diagnostics, expert coaching and a genuine partnership at the centre. The results speak for themselves.
Now, CIM and Esendia are looking ahead to what comes next.
The next phase will deepen that work through peer coaching groups, bringing the SMT together in a structured, action-oriented format to tackle shared challenges and embed the collaborative behaviours that are already beginning to take root. The ambition is for the SMT to operate as a genuinely unified leadership layer, one that makes confident decisions, holds itself collectively accountable, and drives CIM’s seven-year strategy forward with clarity and purpose. The foundations are strong. The potential is clear. And the partnership to realise it is already in place.